Thai typewriter

Typewriters with the capability to print the Thai script were first developed in 1891 by Edwin Hunter McFarland, based on double-keyboard Smith Premier models.

They became widely popular, especially for government use, though their production was discontinued in 1915 and newer shift-based layouts were subsequently developed by Edwin's brother George B. McFarland.

The typewriters soon became indispensable in government affairs and found heavy use, just as centralizing reforms were being implemented to modernize the country's administration through the expanding bureaucracy.

In 1897, George established a Smith Premier dealership on Charoen Krung Road (on the corner of Unakan Intersection in the area now known as Wang Burapha), and the business flourished, importing and selling thousands of units over the next few years alone.

[4][1] During this time, the Smith Premier brand had been acquired by the Remington Typewriter Company, who in 1915 discontinued the production of double-keyboard models, which were unsuited for touch typing.

He established a typing school, offering three months of free training for each typewriter bought, and the shift system gained traction among users, eventually replacing the older Smith Premiers.

The dead keys for above- and below-line vowels and tone marks also had to be typed before their corresponding consonants, in reversal of the usual writing order.

He proposed a new keyboard layout based on a statistical model, which distributed load mainly to the stronger fingers, near the home row, and more evenly between the two hands.

Although Thai typewriter technology continued to evolve following world trends, their use rapidly declined toward the end of the 20th century, as they became supplanted by personal computers with word-processing capabilities.

Most importers (manufacturing facilities were never established in the country, despite Olympia's Thai distributor having briefly considered doing so) either pivoted to other areas of business or ceased operating altogether.

A few other symbols that were left out of the original typewriter layouts remain mostly unused and unrepresented on today's computer keyboards, despite having been reintroduced into standard Thai character sets, including Unicode.