A very special museum walk: Away with ink and pen!

The Tyrolean town of Wattens is best known for the Swarovski glittering stone empire that is based there, but is in crisis. Since 2002, Wattens has also had a small but fine typewriter museum, whose 600 collector’s items were donated to the community by master office machine mechanic Jörg Thien.

The literary scholar and media theorist Friedrich Kittler once described the phonograph, cinema and typewriter as “the three original technical media”. The year 1714 is considered to be the year the original medium of the typewriter was invented: the English waterworks engineer Henry Mill received a patent for “a machine or an artificial process for being able to print or write letters, one at a time or one after the other, as in normal writing.” At the end of the 18th century, Giuseppe Ravizza constructed a “harpsichord scrivano” for the blind with a two-row keyboard in alphabetical order.

The first known document produced with a typewriter was created by the Italian Pellegrino Turri in 1808. In 1821, Karl von Drais (1785–1851) built a machine called a “writing clavier” for his blind father, which probably embossed letters into a strip of paper and already had a keyboard.

While working at a school for the deaf and mute, the young Danish pastor Rasmus Malling-Hansen (1835–1890) discovered that using finger language one could reproduce twelve phonetic symbols in one second, while using ordinary writing only four phonetic symbols could be reproduced on paper per second . It therefore had to be possible to construct a machine with which the speed of as many fingers as possible could be used for writing.

In 1865, Malling-Hansen developed the “Skrivekugle” (writing ball), the first mass-produced typewriter in the world. It consisted of 54 concentric key bars and printed capital letters, numbers and punctuation marks on a cylindrically clamped sheet of paper. Malling-Hansen’s most prominent client was Friedrich Nietzsche. The philosopher typed in 1882: »WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME: MADE OF IRON AND YET EASY TO TWIST, PARTICULARLY WHEN TRAVELING. YOU MUST HAVE A LOT OF PATIENCE AND TACT AND FINE FINGERS TO USE US.«

As early as 1864, the South Tyrolean carpenter and carpenter Peter Mitterhofer (1822–1893) presented a typewriter made of wood and christened it “Model Vienna”. A copy can be seen in the museum. By the end of the decade, Mitterhofer constructed further models that are considered prototypes of the type lever typewriter. He had two of these models examined at the imperial court in Vienna – but the responsible commission found that the devices were “not suitable for the purpose that the inventor had in mind.”

The court finally acquired Mitterhofer’s fifth model; it was given as a gift from the emperor to the model collection of the Vienna Polytechnic Institute. However, he was denied adequate recognition of his inventions. The disappointed inventor commented on the emergence of the typewriter in the USA in verse: “Typewriters legally have their origins in Meran; a carpenter invented them there in 1864.”

Christopher Latham Sholes and Carlos Glidden received the patent for their typewriter on June 23, 1868 in the USA. The weapons manufacturer Remington Arms quickly recognized the enormous potential that the typewriter as a medium had. He had the device mass-produced starting in 1876, and soon with the QWERTY keyboard that is still used in many countries today. Remington advertised its machines with the writer Mark Twain, who purchased a typewriter in 1874 and was the first author to deliver a typewritten book manuscript to his publisher, “Life on the Mississippi.” In the museum, next to a Remington typewriter, it is mistakenly stated that he had his work “Tom Sawyer« typed on a Remington.

In the writing rooms of the pre-industrial era, people worked with utmost concentration but quietly. After the typewriter began its triumph, male copyists were replaced by female typists. There was an infernal clatter in modern offices. Every night, according to Friedrich Kittler, the feature film continuum had to patch up wounds that a machine inflicted on secretaries every day. On May 26, 1929, typists wrote about this in a letter to the editor of the “Frankfurter Zeitung”: “If we stenographers read little, some read nothing at all, do you know why? Because we are far too tired and rushed in the evening, because the clattering of the typewriter that we have to listen to for eight hours can still be heard in our ears all evening long, because every word we hear or read continues to resonate with us for hours his letters dismantled. That’s why we can’t spend our evenings other than going to the cinema or going for a walk with our inevitable friend.«

Typewriters were initially heavy devices. The first smaller and lighter models can be seen in the museum, such as a Perkeo from 1913 or an Adler from 1912. The Dresden company Seidel & Naumann had already brought the Erika No. 1 onto the market in 1910. You could take it anywhere in a suitcase. Erika was to have a great career in the GDR; she became the most produced typewriter in the republic. “Away with pen and ink, everyone writes with Erika!” advertised the German advertising and advertising company. In total, more than eight million copies rolled off the assembly line between 1910 and 1991.

Industrial mass production of typewriters only began in Germany after a comprehensive overview of the typewriters on the market was presented at the first typewriter exhibition in Berlin in 1899. The American George Blickensderfer, who came from the Palatinate, anticipated later developments with his type wheel machine in 1893. In 1902, the Blickensderfer Electric, the first electric typewriter, appeared in the USA. It was decades ahead of the competition, but was unable to assert itself on the market. The Mercedes Elektra from Mercedes Bureau-maschinen-AG, Berlin, was the first powerful European-made typewriter with an electric type lever drive in 1921. The Stettin manufacturer Stoewer met the aesthetic expectations of the time from 1907 to 1909 with its typewriter model No. 4 in an Art Nouveau design.

A Remington from 1899 on display in the museum already had the at symbol @, which is now familiar from the computer world. As a commercial symbol it was called “Commercial a”. Price information such as “5 apples @ 10p” gives rise to the meaning: “Five apples at 10 pence each”. The SS runes could be typed on an Italian Olivetti from the 1940s. Typewriters with the SS rune were also supplied by the Continental, Ideal, Rheinmetall, Groma, Olympia, Kappel and Triumph factories.

Hou Kun Chow invented the first mechanical Chinese typewriter with 4000 characters in 1916. After some practice, more characters per hour were possible with this machine than with a writing brush. There are over 60 different versions of the Chinese typewriter known. A model with 2500 characters can be seen in Wattens.

In addition to the typewriters, the typewriter museum also exhibits machines specially developed for accounting, telex devices and a “Musicwriter” on which notes can be typed. Children’s and mini typewriters as well as Tipp-Ex, ball heads and other utensils complete the collection, which is worth seeing. Admission is free, and the tour through the museum room and the depot is informative and entertaining at the same time.