Blickensderfer typewriter
The design also enabled the typist to see the typed work, at a time when most typewriters were understrike machines that concealed the writing.
[a] When Blickensderfer unveiled his small Model 5, its compactness and novel features attracted huge crowds and many orders.
The Blickensderfer typewriters were initially manufactured in a rented factory on Garden Street in Stamford, Connecticut.
By 1896, due to strong foreign demand in particular for his machines, Blickensderfer opened a new and modern factory on Atlantic Street in Stamford.
Each new Model 5 came in a simple wooden carrying case with an extra typewheel, a dozen ink rolls and a tool kit.
The keyboards and type wheels were available for numerous languages, including French, Spanish, German and Polish.
Some machines, called the Oriental, were adapted so the carriage moved from left to right, to accommodate Hebrew and Arabic languages.
After several unsuccessful years under different ownership, the Remington Typewriter Company acquired the assets, including tools, parts, drawings and intellectual rights, from the bankrupt L.R.
Remington attempted to introduce a modified Blickensderfer 5 called the Rem-Blick to the market, but by the end of 1928 the model was discontinued.
The QWERTY keyboard introduced on the Sholes & Glidden typewriter in 1874 was designed for purely mechanical reasons and the chances of the keys striking each other and jamming was more limited with this configuration.
[2] The first widely successful production model was the Blickensderfer 5, introduced at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
The aluminium version also appeared as the Blickensderfer Featherweight, which was an improved Model 6 with a backspace mechanism and the ink arm support was modified to an attractive curved folding design.
The biggest and most obvious difference was the wraparound space bar, which gave the machine a more solid and distinctive look.
Blickensderfer also improved the paper scale, added black composite carriage knobs at both ends of the palten, added adjustable margin stops and a bell mechanism designed to be struck by a clapper attached to the inker arm indicating when the carriage was approaching the end of the typed line.
It had all the familiar characteristics of the manual models, plus a QWERTY or a DHIATENSOR keyboard and all the advantages of later electric typewriters, including a light key touch, even typing, and automatic carriage return and line spacing.
The machine was powered by an Emerson electric motor mounted on the rear and switched on by turning a Yale key on the side.
[3] The motor ran on 104 Volt 60 Hz AC electric current,[4] which was not yet widely standard at the time.
Although a technological and engineering success, it was a commercial failure as at the time many homes and businesses were not wired for electricity.
The central component was the use of the cylindrical shaped interchangeable type element which he initially patented on July 15, 1890.
The DHIATENSOR layout is shown below (with alphanumeric characters only): Blickensderfer analyzed the English language and proposed a unique and more efficient keyboard based on his research.
