CHAPTER I.

FIFTY YEARS OLD The manufacture of the first practical writing machines began at Ilion, Herkimer County, New York, in the autumn of 1873. This anniversary year 1923 is a fitting time to review the remarkable history of this great invention, and every phase of the incalculable service which it has rendered to the modern world. Fifty years old! What will be the thoughts of the average reader when he is reminded of the actual age of the writing machine? The typewriter has made itself such an essential factor in modern life, it has become so necessary to all human activities, that the present-day world could hardly be conceived without it. It is hard to name any other article of commerce which has played a more commanding role in the shaping of human destiny. It has freed the world from pen slavery and, in doing so, it has saved a volume of time and labor which is simply incalculable. Its time-saving service has facilitated and rendered possible the enormous growth of modern business. The idea which it embodied has directly inspired many subsequent inventions in the same field, all of which have helped to lighten the burden of the world's numberless tasks. In its broad influence on human society, the typewriter has been equally revolutionary, for it was the writing machine which first opened to women the doors of business life. It has radically changed our modern system of education in many of its most important phases. It has helped to knit the whole world closer together. Its influence has been felt in the shaping of language and even of human thought. The most amazing fact of all is that these stupendous changes are so recent that they belong to our own times. One need not be very old to recollect when the typewriter first began to be a factor in business life. The man in his fifties distinctly remembers it all. There are even some now living who were identified with the first typewriter when its manufacture began fifty years ago in the little Mohawk Valley town of Ilion, New York. Such results, all within so short a period, indicate the speed with which our old world has traveled during the past generation--a striking contrast to the leisurely pace of former ages. The story of the typewriter is really the latest phase of another and greater story--that of writing itself. Anyone, however, who attempted to write this greater story would soon discover that he had undertaken to write the whole history of civilization. The advance of man from primitive savagery to his present stage of efficiency and enlightenment has been a slow process, but each stage of this process through the ages has been marked, as if by milestones, by some improvement in his means and capacity for recording his thoughts in visible and understandable form. The earliest attempts at word picturing by savages, the Cuneiform inscriptions of Babylonia, the hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt, the clay tablets and stone monuments of antiquity, the papyrus of Egypt, the wax tablets and stylus of the Romans, the parchment manuscripts of the Middle Ages, the development of the art of paper manufacture, the invention of the art of printing, and even the comparatively modern invention of steel pens, are all successive steps in this evolution. Looking back from our vantage ground of today over this record it is easy for us to see the writing machine as the outcome. The art of recording thought was always destined to remain imperfect until some means had been found to do it, which, in the very speed of the process, would be adequate for all human requirements. Even the ancients felt this need; of this fact the history of shorthand is sufficient proof. But never, until the nineteenth century, did men's thoughts turn seriously to machinery as a possible solution. The invention of printing has been described as the most important single advance in the history of civilization, and it seems to us of today exactly the kind of invention which should have suggested the idea of a writing machine. But fate decreed otherwise, and more than four centuries were destined to elapse after Gutenberg had begun to use movable types before the advent of the typewriter. It is interesting to note, however, that when the typewriter finally did appear, its influence on the printing art was almost immediate, many improvements in typesetting devices having been directly suggested and inspired by the writing machine. We have spoken of shorthand, an art so intimately allied with typewriting that they are known today as the "twin arts." The story of the typewriter cannot be adequately told if this other art is left out of the picture. Unlike the writing machine, the beginnings of shorthand date back to antiquity. Some have believed that Xenophon wrote stenographic notes of the lectures of Socrates, but it is at least established that the learned slave Marcus Tullius Tiro, freed by Cicero and made his secretary, developed a system which soon came into widespread use. Few high school boys and girls today, who struggle with the orations of Cicero, know that it was the art of Tiro which preserved these classics for us. The "Notae Tironianae" (notes of Tiro) consisted of some 5,000 signs for words, and it is doubtful if stenography would today be so popular a profession had one to burden his memory with an equal list. But the ancients were more patient than we, and, once mastered, these notes proved swift and practical. Busy Rome found much use for its stenographers. Atticus, a famous Roman book lover, trained a great force of slaves in the art for the sole purpose of transcribing, and thus become a real publisher ages before the days of printing. Five manuscript readers were allotted to each one hundred stenographers, and these took down the spoken words. And the cost to the thrifty Atticus was one pound of grain and a small allowance of wine per slave. Even Rome's greatest men, the Emperor Titus among them, did not scorn to master Tiro's notes. In a later age the sermons of the church fathers, the great Origen, Chrysostom, St. Augustine and others, were noted down in shorthand; so also in the fifteenth century were the sermons of Savonarola. Roger Williams wrote shorthand; so did Samuel Pepys, the author of the famous diary. Among later celebrities who mastered the art was Charles Dickens, who, in his early days, used the Gurney system in reporting speeches in the House of Commons. Ultimately, however, the modern principle of "phonography" came into possession of the field. This system, evolved through the labors of Isaac Pitman and others, used characters to represent the spoken sound of words instead of their spellings, and was such an obvious improvement that, in its various forms, it has become practically universal. Here we encounter a singular fact. After a history covering ages, the great improvement in shorthand, which finally perfected the art, was delayed by destiny until the very eve of the invention of the typewriter. Its coming, just at this time, seems, in the light of later events, almost prophetic. For it is obvious that shorthand, even as perfected by phonography, would have been restricted, without the typewriter, to a limited field of usefulness. As a time saver, shorthand is clearly a half measure, and, so long as the art of transcribing notes in long hand could be done only at pen-writing speed, the swiftest shorthand writer could render only a partial time-saving service. In the days before typewriting, it would have required more than one stenographic secretary to free the busy executive from the bondage of the pen. He would have needed a complete retinue of them, to whom he would dictate in rotation, which is exactly what the great Julius Caesar is said to have done. But the Caesars of history are few, and equally few are the notables of the past, in any field of effort, who had the means or the inspiration to provide themselves with a whole battery of stenographers. In this fact we find one outstanding distinction of the typewriter as a labor saver--it perfected the process which shorthand had begun--it completely emancipated the executive. When we talk of "labor saving" we usually think in terms of manual labor. But when the typewriter freed the executive from pen slavery it did more than save mere hand labor. It saved and conserved the very highest quality of brain labor. True, the busy man of affairs works as hard today as he ever did, but the typewriter has made his labor more productive. It has relieved him of the old pen drudgery, so that the greater part of his time may now be devoted to creative tasks. It is common to speak of the higher efficiency of the present-day business man, as though men themselves had grown bigger in our own times. Perhaps they have. But let us not fail to credit a part of this growth to the emancipation achieved through the stenographer and the writing machine. The typewriter, like every great advance in human progress, came in the fullness of its own time. Looking back over the past, we can now see why it came when it did, and why it could not have come before. In the days when commerce was smaller, when writing tasks were fewer, when the ability to write or even to read was limited, when life itself was simpler, the world could get along after its own fashion without the writing machine. As education grew, as business grew, as the means for transportation grew, as all human activities grew, so the need grew, and it grew much faster than any real consciousness of the need, which seems always to be the way with our poor humanity. It is this fact which explains the struggle and frequently the tragedy in the early history of so many great inventions. They do not come in response to a demand, but in recognition of a need, and this recognition, in its early phases, is usually confined to the few. These few are the real pioneers of progress, and it is through their labors and struggles, often unappreciated and unrewarded, that humanity advances in all the civilized and useful arts. It was even so with the writing machine!