Quick and efficient written communication became essential in the mid-nineteenth century as the pace of business activity increased. Many attempts to mechanize writing are recorded in the patents of that period, although few went into production. Pinpointing one single inventor is, therefore, difficult but the "chirographer" or printing machine, patented in 1843 by Charles Thurber (1803-1886), was the first to be produced and sold commercially.
A wide variety of writing machines were designed in the early- to mid-nineteenth century, including Pellegrino Turri's 1808 machine to enable blind people to write, William Austin Burt's "typographer" of 1829, and the Hansen writing ball of 1864, which was probably the first typewriter that made it possible to write faster than by hand. The first commercially successful typewriter was developed by newspaper editor Christopher Scholes and others in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1867. The patent was later taken up by Remingtons, a well-established sewing-machine company,
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