Talk:Typewriter

History

Even in the hands of its inventor, this machine was slower than handwriting. Burt and his promoter John D. Sheldon never found a buyer for the patent, so the invention was never commercially produced. Because the typographer used a dial, rather than keys, to select each character, it was called an "index typewriter" rather than a "keyboard typewriter". Index typewriters of that era resemble the squeeze-style embosser from the 1960s more than they resemble the modern keyboard typewriter.^{[citation needed]}

• Giuseppe Ravizza, a prolific typewriter inventor, born in Italy in 1811 (died 1885), spent nearly 40 years of his life obsessively grappling with the complexities of inventing a usable writing machine. He called his invention Cembalo scrivano o "macchina da scrivere a tasti" because of its piano-type keys and keyboard. The story of the 16 models he produced between 1847 and the early 1880s is described in The Writing Machine and illustrated from Ravizza's 1855 patent, which bears similarities to the later upstroke design of the Sholes and Glidden typewriter.^{[citation needed]}

From 1829 to 1870, many printing or typing machines were patented by inventors in Europe and America, but none went into commercial production.^{[citation needed]}

It was an advanced machine that let the user see the writing as it was typed.^{[citation needed]}

• 1884 - Hammond "Ideal" typewriter with case, by Hammond Typewriter Company Limited, United States, Despite an unusual, curved keyboard (see picture in citation), the Hammond became popular due to its superior print quality and an interchangeable typeface. Invented by James Hammond of Boston, Massachusetts in 1880, commercially released in 1884. The type is carried on a pair of interchangeable rotating sectors, one controlled by each half of the keyboard. A small hammer pushes the paper against the ribbon and type sector to print each character. The mechanism was later adapted to give a straight QWERTY keyboard and proportional spacing.^{[citation needed]}

Hansen Writing Ball

Malling-Hansen used a solenoid escapement to return the carriage on some of his models which makes him a candidate for the title of inventor of the first "electric" typewriter.^{[citation needed]}

According to the book Hvem er skrivekuglens opfinder? (English: Who is the inventor of the Writing Ball?), written by Malling-Hansen's daughter, Johanne Agerskov, in 1865, Malling-Hansen made a porcelain model of the keyboard of his writing ball and experimented with different placements of the letters to achieve the fastest writing speed. Malling-Hansen placed the letters on short pistons that went directly through the ball and down to the paper. This, together with the placement of the letters so that the fastest writing fingers struck the most frequently used letters, made the Hansen Writing Ball the first typewriter to produce text substantially faster than a person could write by hand.^{[citation needed]}

Index typewriter

The index typewriter uses a pointer or stylus to choose a letter from an index. The pointer is mechanically linked so that the letter chosen could then be printed, most often by the activation of a lever.^{[citation needed]}

Although pushed out of the market in most of the world by keyboard machines, successful Japanese and Chinese typewriters are of the index type albeit with a very much larger index and number of type elements.^{[citation needed]}

Standardization

By about 1910, the "manual" or "mechanical" typewriter had reached a somewhat

fabric), making a printed mark on the paper wrapped around a cylindrical platen

.

Typewriters for languages written

right-to-left operate in the opposite direction.^{[citation needed}

]

Frontstriking

In most of the early typewriters, the typebars struck upward against the paper, pressed against the bottom of the platen, so the typist could not see the text as it was typed. What was typed was not visible until a carriage return caused it to scroll into view. The difficulty with any other arrangement was ensuring the typebars fell back into place reliably when the key was released. This was eventually achieved with various ingenious mechanical designs and so-called "visible typewriters" which used frontstriking, in which the typebars struck forward against the front side of the platen, became standard.

However, older "nonvisible" models continued in production to as late as 1915.^{[citation needed]}

Shift key

A significant innovation was the shift key, introduced with the Remington No. 2 in 1878. This key physically "shifted" either the basket of typebars, in which case the typewriter is described as "basket shift", or the paper-holding carriage, in which case the typewriter is described as "carriage shift". Either mechanism caused a different portion of the typebar to come in contact with the ribbon/platen. The result is that each typebar could type two different characters, cutting the number of keys and typebars in half (and simplifying the internal mechanisms considerably). The obvious use for this was to allow letter keys to type both upper and lower case, but normally the number keys were also duplexed, allowing access to special symbols such as percent, %, and ampersand, &.

Before the shift key, typewriters had to have a separate key and typebar for upper-case letters; in essence, the typewriter had two keyboards, one above the other. With the shift key, manufacturing costs (and therefore purchase price) were greatly reduced, and typist operation was simplified; both factors contributed greatly to mass adoption of the technology. Certain models, such as the Barlet, had a double shift so that each key performed three functions. These little three-row machines were portable and could be used by journalists.^{[citation needed]}

However, because the shift key required more force to push (its mechanism was moving a much larger mass than other keys), and was operated by the little finger (normally the weakest finger on the hand), it was difficult to hold the shift down for more than two or three consecutive strokes. The "shift lock" key (the precursor to the modern

caps lock) allowed the shift operation to be maintained indefinitely.^{[citation needed}

]

Tab key

To facilitate typewriter use in business settings, a tab (tabulator) key was added in the late nineteenth century. Before using the key, the operator had to set mechanical "tab stops", pre-designated locations to which the carriage would advance when the tab key was pressed. This facilitated the typing of columns of numbers, freeing the operator from the need to manually position the carriage. The first models had one tab stop and one tab key; later ones allowed as many stops as desired, and sometimes had multiple tab keys, each of which moved the carriage a different number of spaces ahead of the decimal point (the tab stop), to facilitate the typing of columns with numbers of different length ($1.00, $10.00, $100.00, etc.)

Dead keys

Main article:

Dead keys

Languages such as French, Spanish, and German required

dead keys. Diacritics such as ´ (acute accent) would be assigned to a dead key, which did not move the platen forward, permitting another character to be imprinted at the same location; thus a single dead key such as the acute accent could be combined with a,e,i,o and u to produce á,é,í,ó and ú, reducing the number of sorts needed from 5 to 1. The typebars of "normal" characters struck a rod as they moved the metal character desired toward the ribbon and platen, and each rod depression moved the platen forward the width of one character. Dead keys had a typebar shaped so as not to strike the rod.^{[citation needed}

]

The tilde character, ~, never seen in isolation in metal typesetting, became a separate character in ASCII as a result of its use on dead keys for Spanish and Portuguese (see Tilde#Role of mechanical typewriters).^{[citation needed]}

Character sizes

Further information: Point (typography) and Pitch (typewriter)

In English-speaking countries, ordinary typewriters printing fixed-width characters were standardized to print six horizontal lines per vertical inch, and had either of two variants of character width, one called pica for ten characters per horizontal inch and the other elite, for twelve. This differed from the use of these terms in printing, where pica is a linear unit (approximately 1⁄6 of an inch) used for any measurement, the most common one being the height of a type face.^{[citation needed]}

Some typewriters were designed to print extra-large type (commonly double height, double width) for labelling purposes. Classification numbers on books in libraries could be done this way.^{[citation needed]}

"Noiseless" designs

In the early part of the 20th century, a typewriter was marketed under the name Noiseless and advertised as "silent". It was developed by Wellington Parker Kidder and the first model was marketed by the Noiseless Typewriter Company in 1917. An agreement with Remington in 1924 saw production transferred to Remington, and a further agreement in 1929 allowed Underwood to produce it as well.^{[citation needed]}

In a conventional typewriter the typebar reaches the end of its travel simply by striking the ribbon and paper. A "noiseless" typewriter has a complex lever mechanism that decelerates the typebar mechanically before pressing it against the ribbon and paper in an attempt to dampen the noise.^{[citation needed]} It may have reduced the high-frequency content of the sound, rendering it more of a "clunk" than a "clack" and arguably less intrusive, but such advertising claims as "A machine that can be operated a few feet away from your desk – And not be heard" were not true.^{[citation needed]}

Electric designs

Although electric typewriters would not achieve widespread popularity until nearly a century later, the basic groundwork for the electric typewriter was laid by the

Universal Stock Ticker, invented by Thomas Edison

in 1870. This device remotely printed letters and numbers on a stream of paper tape from input generated by a specially designed typewriter at the other end of a telegraph line.

Early electric models

James Fields Smathers of Kansas City invented what is considered the first practical power-operated typewriter in 1914. In 1920, after returning from Army service, he produced a successful model and in 1923 turned it over to the Northeast Electric Company of Rochester for development. Northeast was interested in finding new markets for their electric motors and developed Smathers's design so that it could be marketed to typewriter manufacturers, and from 1925 Remington Electric typewriters were produced powered by Northeast's motors.^{[citation needed]}

After some 2,500 electric typewriters had been produced, Northeast asked Remington for a firm contract for the next batch. However, Remington was engaged in merger talks, which would eventually result in the creation of Remington Rand and no executives were willing to commit to a firm order. Northeast instead decided to enter the typewriter business for itself, and in 1929 produced the first Electromatic Typewriter.^{[citation needed]}

...in 1935. By 1958 IBM was deriving 8% of its revenue from the sale of electric typewriters.^{[citation needed]}

Electrical typewriter designs removed the direct mechanical connection between the keys and the element that struck the paper. Not to be confused with later electronic typewriters, electric typewriters contained only a single electrical component — the motor. Where the keystroke had previously moved a typebar directly, now it engaged mechanical linkages that directed mechanical power from the motor into the typebar.^{[citation needed]}

The proportional spacing feature became a staple of the

IBM Executive series typewriters.^{[citation needed}

]

IBM Selectric

IBM and Remington Rand electric typewriters were the leading models until IBM introduced the

IBM Selectric typewriter in 1961, which replaced the typebars with a spherical element (or typeball) slightly smaller than a golf ball, with reverse-image letters molded into its surface. The Selectric used a system of latches, metal tapes, and pulleys are driven by an electric motor to rotate the ball into the correct position and then strike it against the ribbon and platen. The typeball moved laterally in front of the paper, instead of the previous designs using a platen-carrying carriage moving the paper across a stationary print position.^{[citation needed}

]

The typeball design had many advantages, especially the elimination of "jams" (when more than one key was struck at once and the typebars became entangled) and in the ability to change the typeball, allowing multiple fonts to be used in a single document.^[citation needed]

IBM also gained an advantage by marketing more heavily to schools than did Remington, with the idea that students who learned to type on a Selectric would later choose IBM typewriters over the competition in the workplace as businesses replaced their old manual models.^{[citation needed]} By the 1970s, IBM had succeeded in establishing the Selectric as the de facto standard typewriter in mid- to high-end office environments, replacing the raucous "clack" of older typebar machines with the quieter sound of gyrating typeballs.^{[citation needed]}

...proportional spacing was not provided with the Selectric typewriter or its successors the Selectric II and Selectric III.^{[citation needed]}

The only fully electromechanical Selectric Typewriter with fully proportional spacing and which used a Selectric type element was the expensive

typesetting machine rather than a typewriter. Composer typeballs physically resembled those of the Selectric typewriter but were not interchangeable.^{[citation needed}

]

In addition to its electronic successors, the

Magnetic Tape Selectric Composer (MT/SC), the Mag Card Selectric Composer, and the Electronic Selectric Composer, IBM also made electronic typewriters with proportional spacing using the Selectric element that were considered typewriters or word processors instead of typesetting machines.^{[citation needed}

]

The first of these was the relatively obscure Mag Card Executive, which used 88-character elements. Later, some of the same typestyles used for it were used on the 96-character elements used on the IBM Electronic Typewriter 50 and the later models 65 and 85.^[citation needed]

By 1970, as offset printing began to replace letterpress printing, the Composer would be adapted as the output unit for a typesetting system. The system included a computer-driven input station to capture the key strokes on magnetic tape and insert the operator's format commands, and a Composer unit to read the tape and produce the formatted text for photo reproduction.^{[citation needed]}

Advantages:

• reasonably fast, jam-free, and reliable
• relatively quiet, and more importantly, free of major vibrations
• could produce high quality lower- and upper-case output, compared to competitors such as Teletype machines
• could be activated by a short, low-force mechanical action, allowing easier interfacing to electronic controls
• did not require the movement of a heavy "type basket" to shift between lower- and upper-case, allowing higher speed without heavy impacts
• did not require the platen roller assembly to move from side to side (a problem with continuous-feed paper used for automated printing)^{[citation needed]}

The IBM 2741 terminal was a popular example of a Selectric-based computer terminal, and similar mechanisms were employed as the console devices for many IBM System/360 computers. These mechanisms used "ruggedized" designs compared to those in standard office typewriters.^{[citation needed]}

Later electric models

...including fabric, film, erasing, and two-color versions. At about the same time, the advent of

photocopying meant that carbon copies, correction fluid and erasers were less and less necessary; only the original need be typed, and photocopies made from it.^{[citation needed}

]

Typewriter/printer hybrids

Towards the end of the commercial popularity of typewriters in the 1970s, a number of hybrid designs combining features of

thermal transfer technologies used in thermal label printers had become technically feasible for typewriters.^{[citation needed}

]

technological disruption posed by word processors

left these improvements with only a short-term low-end market. To extend the life of these products, many examples were provided with communication ports to connect them to computers as printers.

Electronic typewriters

In 1981,

Xerox Corporation, who by then had bought Diablo Systems, introduced a line of electronic typewriters incorporating this technology (the Memorywriter product line). For a time, these products were quite successful as their daisy-wheel mechanism was much simpler and cheaper than either typebar or Selectric mechanisms, and their electronic memory and display allowed the user to easily see errors and correct them before they were actually printed. One problem with the plastic daisy wheel was that they were not always durable. To solve this problem, more durable metal daisy wheels were made available (but at a slightly higher price).^{[citation needed}

]

These and similar electronic typewriters were in essence dedicated

RAM and optional cartridge, magnetic card or diskette external memory-storage devices for storing text and even document formats. Text could be entered a line or paragraph at a time and edited using the display and built-in software tools before being committed to paper.^{[citation needed}

]

Decline

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The 1970s and early 1980s were a time of transition for typewriters and word processors. At one point in time, most small-business offices would be completely "old-style", while large corporations and government departments would already be "new-style"; other offices would have a mixture.^[citation needed] The pace of change was so rapid that it was common for clerical staff to have to learn several new systems, one after the other, in just a few years.

Due to falling sales, IBM sold its typewriter division in 1991 to the newly formed Lexmark, completely exiting from a market it once dominated.^{[citation needed]}

Correction technologies

Accuracy was prized as much as speed. Indeed, typing speeds, as scored in proficiency tests and typewriting speed competitions, included a deduction of ten words for every mistake. Corrections were, of course, necessary, and many methods were developed.^{[citation needed]}

In practice, several methods would often be combined. For example, if six extra copies of a letter were needed, the fluid-corrected original would be photocopied, but only for the two recipients getting a c.c.; the other four copies, the less-important file copies that stayed in various departments at the office, would be cheaper, hand-erased, less-distinct bond paper copies or even "flimsies" of different colors (tissue papers interleaved with black carbon paper) that were all typed as a "carbon pack" at the same time as the original.^{[citation needed]}

In informal applications such as personal letters where low priority was placed on the appearance of the document, or conversely in highly formal applications in which it was important that any corrections be obvious, the backspace key could be used to back up over the error and then overstrike it with hyphens, slashes, Xs, or the like.^{[citation needed]}

Typewriter erasers

The traditional erasing method involved the use of a special typewriter

hard rubber that contained an abrasive material. Some were thin, flat disks, pink or gray, approximately 2 inches (51 mm) in diameter by 1⁄8 inch (3.2 mm) thick, with a brush attached from the center, while others looked like pink pencils, with a sharpenable eraser at the "lead" end and a stiff nylon brush at the other end. Either way, these tools made possible erasure of individual typed letters. Business letters were typed on heavyweight, high-rag-content bond paper, not merely to provide a luxurious appearance, but also to stand up to erasure.^{[citation needed}

]

Typewriter eraser brushes were necessary for clearing eraser crumbs and paper dust, and using the brush properly was an important element of typewriting skill; if erasure detritus fell into the typewriter, a small buildup could cause the typebars to jam in their narrow supporting grooves.^[citation needed]

Eraser shield

Erasing a set of

carbon copies

was particularly difficult, and called for the use of a device called an eraser shield (a thin stainless-steel rectangle about 2 by 3 inches (51 by 76 mm) with several tiny holes in it) to prevent the pressure of erasing on the upper copies from producing carbon smudges on the lower copies. To correct copies, typists had to go from carbon copy to carbon copy, trying not to get their fingers dirty as they leafed through the carbon papers, and moving and repositioning the eraser shield and eraser for each copy.

Erasable bond

Paper companies produced a special form of typewriter paper called erasable bond (for example, Eaton's Corrasable Bond). This incorporated a thin layer of material that prevented ink from penetrating and was relatively soft and easy to remove from the page. An ordinary soft pencil eraser could quickly produce perfect erasures on this kind of paper. However, the same characteristics that made the paper erasable made the characters subject to smudging due to ordinary friction and deliberate alteration after the fact, making it unacceptable for business correspondence, contracts, or any archival use.^{[citation needed]}

Correction fluid

In the 1950s and 1960s,

photocopying the corrected page, but this was possible only with high quality photocopiers.^{[citation needed}

]

Dry correction

Dry correction products (such as correction paper) under brand names such as "Ko-Rec-Type" were introduced in the 1970s and functioned like white carbon paper. A strip of the product was placed over the letters needing correction, and the incorrect letters were retyped, causing the black character to be overstruck with a white overcoat. Similar material was soon incorporated in carbon-film electric typewriter ribbons; like the traditional two-color black-and-red inked ribbon common on manual typewriters, a black and white correcting ribbon became commonplace on electric typewriters. But the black or white coating could be partly rubbed off with handling, so such corrections were generally not acceptable in legal documents.^{[citation needed]}

The pinnacle of this kind of technology was the IBM Electronic Typewriter series. These machines, and similar products from other manufacturers, used a separate correction ribbon and a character memory. With a single keystroke, the typewriter was capable of automatically backspacing and then overstriking the previous characters with minimal marring of the paper. White cover-up ribbons were used with fabric ink ribbons, or an alternate premium design featured plastic lift-off correction ribbons which were used with carbon film typing ribbons. This latter technology actually lifted the carbon film forming a typed letter, leaving nothing more than a flattened depression in the surface of the paper, with the advantage that no color matching of the paper was needed.^{[citation needed]}

Legacy

Keyboard layouts

QWERTY

The QWERTY layout of keys has become the

QZERTY and the German QWERTZ layouts.^{[citation needed}

]

Other layouts

Many non-Latin alphabets have keyboard layouts that have nothing to do with QWERTY. The Russian layout, for instance, puts the common trigrams ыва, про, and ить on adjacent keys so that they can be typed by rolling the fingers. The Greek layout, on the other hand, is a variant of QWERTY.^[citation needed] Typewriters were also made for

laser printers in the 1980s.^{[citation needed}

]

Typewriter conventions

Double hyphens are also typical in Western comics lettering despite historically being done by hand.^{[citation needed]}

These characters were omitted to simplify design and reduce manufacturing and maintenance costs; they were chosen specifically because they were "redundant" and could be recreated using other keys.^{[citation needed]}

Terminology

Some terminology from the typewriter age has survived into the personal computer era. Examples include:

• backspace (BS) – a keystroke that moved the cursor backwards one position (on a physical platen, this is the exact opposite of the space key), for the purpose of overtyping a character. This could be for combining characters (e.g. an apostrophe, backspace, and period make an exclamation point—a character missing on some early typewriters), or for correction such as with the correcting tape that developed later.^{[citation needed]}
• carriage return (CR) – return to the first column of text and, in some systems, switch to the next line.^{[citation needed]}
• cursor – a marker used to indicate where the next character will be printed. The cursor, however, was originally a term to describe the clear slider on a slide rule.^{[citation needed}
  ]
• offset lithography.^{[citation needed}
  ]
• diacritical marks with letters they modified (e.g. è can be generated by first pressing ` and then e). The dead key feature was often implemented mechanically by having the typist press and hold the space bar while typing the characters to be superimposed.^{[citation needed}
  ]
• cursor to the next on-screen line of text in a word processor document.^{[citation needed}
  ]
• MIT space-cadet keyboard.^{[citation needed}
  ]
• tab
  (HT), shortened from "horizontal tab" or "tabulator stop" – caused the print position to advance horizontally to the next pre-set "tab stop". This was used for typing lists and tables with vertical columns of numbers or words. The related term "vertical tab" (VT) never came into widespread use.
• teletypewriter – used in Unix-like operating systems to designate a given "terminal".^{[citation needed}
  ]

In the above list, the two-letter codes in parentheses are abbreviations for the ASCII characters derived from typewriter usage.^{[citation needed]}

Others

• Writer Zack Helm and director Mark Forster explored the potential mechanics of the "Soft Typewriter" philosophy in the movie Stranger than Fiction, in which the very act of typing up her handwritten notes gives a fiction writer the power to kill or otherwise manipulate her main character in real life.^{[citation needed]}
• Ernest Hemingway used to write his books standing up in front of a Royal typewriter suitably placed on a tall bookshelf. This typewriter, still on its bookshelf, is kept in Finca Vigía, Hemingway's Havana house (now a museum), where he lived until 1960, the year before his death.^{[citation needed]}
• In [J. R. R. Tolkien]'s foreword to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien stated that "the whole story ... had to be typed, and re-typed: by me; the cost of professional typing by the ten-fingered was beyond my means."^{[citation needed]}
• [Jack Kerouac]'s rapid work earned the famous rebuke from Truman Capote, "That's not writing, it's typing."^{[citation needed]}
• Tom Robbins waxed philosophical about the Remington SL3, a typewriter that he bought to write Still Life with Woodpecker. He eventually did away with it because he thought it was too complicated and inhuman for the writing of poetry.^{[citation needed]}
• After completing the novel Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen is said to have flung his typewriter into the Aegean Sea.^{[citation needed]}

Late users

• David McCullough bought a second-hand Royal typewriter in 1965 and used it to compose every book he has published.^{[citation needed]}
• Hunter S. Thompson kept a typewriter in his kitchen and is believed to have written his "Hey, Rube!" column for ESPN.com on a typewriter. He used a typewriter until his suicide in 2005.^{[citation needed]}
• manifesto as well as his letters on a manual typewriter.^{[citation needed}
  ]
• David Sedaris used a typewriter to write his essay collections through Me Talk Pretty One Day at least.^{[citation needed]}

Typewriters in popular culture

In music

• The composer Pablo Sorozábal includes in a scene of his zarzuela La eterna canción (1945) a typewriter, accompanied by an orchestra and vocal soloists: the scene is in a police station, where a policeman is deposing witnesses, and is singing while he types the report.^{[citation needed]}
• Frank Loesser's music for the stage (1961) and screen (1967) musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying employs the typewriter as a percussion instrument in the song "A Secretary is Not a Toy".^{[citation needed]}
• The clacking of typewriter keys can be heard at the beginning of Dolly Parton's song "9 to 5". Parton has said in interviews that when writing the song, to mimic the typing keys sound, she would run her acrylic fingernails back and forth against each other.^{[citation needed]}
• The song "Embassy Lament" from the 1986 musical Chess mimics the sound of typing in the bridge.^{[citation needed]}
• A typewriter provides the percussive backing for Stereo Total's "Dactylo Rock", the first song from their 1995 debut album Oh Ah!.
• A suite of songs entitled "Green Typewriters" is on The Olivia Tremor Control's album
  Dusk At Cubist Castle (1996), and the sounds of typewriters can be heard in a few of the sections.^{[citation needed}
  ]
• Barrel of a Gun" features a typewriter as percussion.^{[citation needed}
  ]
• American singer-songwriter Marian Call accompanies herself on a typewriter on "Nerd Anthem" (c. 1998)^{[citation needed]}
• American musician Beck's 2005 music video for "Black Tambourine" features typewriter characters to animate Beck's moving and playing guitar.^{[citation needed]}
• The title track of Heernt's 2006 album Locked in a Basement prominently features the typewriter as a percussion instrument.^{[citation needed]}
• [The Boston Typewriter Orchestra (BTO)] consists of a half-dozen performers who use typewriters as percussive musical instruments, under the slogan, "The revolution will be typewritten".^{[citation needed]}
• Lead singer and songwriter Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam types many of the band's lyrics on vintage typewriters.^{[citation needed]}
• French musician and composer Yann Tiersen makes use of a typewriter as an instrument in some of his compositions.^{[citation needed]}
• The Swedish band Wintergatan uses a typewriter as a percussion instrument in several of its pieces.^{[citation needed]}

Other

• In the film
  The History of the Typewriter recited by Michael Winslow, voice sound effect performer Michael Winslow recreates the sounds of 32 typewriters from history.^{[citation needed}
  ]
• The word "typewriter" is often cited as the longest English word that can be typed using only one row of keys of a QWERTY keyboard. This is untrue, since "
  rupturewort" (a kind of flowering plant) has 11 letters, while "typewriter" has only 10. Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary defines "uropyoureter" (12 letters).^{[citation needed}
  ]
• A sentence which uses every letter of the alphabet (a
  A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" can be used to check typewriters quickly.^{[citation needed}
  ]
• The early Resident Evil video games use a typewriter as the save feature, and use one ink ribbon per save.^{[citation needed]}
• The opening title sequence of Murder, She Wrote prominently features Jessica Fletcher touch-typing a manuscript with a 1940s Royal KMM Manual Typewriter. Although in one episode Fletcher rejects a character's offer to sell her a computer to replace the old Royal (which he calls a "dinosaur"), towards the series' end, she too begins using a computer and word-processing typewriter.^{[citation needed]}
• In
  Altare della Patria, the national monument to King Victor Emmanuel II, used to be nicknamed "the typewriter" (la macchina per scrivere in Italian) because of its strange shape and popular dislike toward it.^{[citation needed}
  ]
• In the 2015 animated film The Peanuts Movie, the character of Snoopy comes across a typewriter in a dumpster and uses it to write a story about his battle with the Red Baron, though he eventually ends up throwing it at Lucy after she insults his story.^{[citation needed]}
• In the 2007 animated film Ratatouille, Anton Ego, a harshly discriminating food critic, writes his reviews on a typewriter, which resembles a human skull in appearance.^{[citation needed]}

Forensic examination

In some situations, an ink or correction ribbon may also be examined.^{[citation needed]}

Because of the tolerances of the mechanical parts, slight variation in the alignment of the letters and their uneven wear, each typewriter has an individual "signature" or "fingerprint", which may permit a typewritten document to be traced back to the typewriter on which it was produced. For devices utilizing replaceable components, such as a typeball element, any association may be restricted to a specific element, rather than to the typewriter as a whole.^{[citation needed]}

The ribbon can be read, although only if it has not been typed over more than once. This is not as easy as reading text from a page as the ribbon does not include spaces, but can be done, giving every typewriter a "memory".^{[citation needed]}