Mesa Typewriter Exchange: A Sense of Place For More Than 60 Years
Second-generation owner Bill Wahl was back 'in-the-news' on CBS Sunday Morning.
Almanac: The first commercially-successful typewriter
On March 1, 1873, the Remington company started making the first commercially-successful typewriter, marketed as the Sholes and Glidden (or Remington No. 1) typewriter. Remington's first typewriter with a "QWERTY" keyboard.Beth Komisarek/Smithsonian's National Museum of American HistoryUnlike other attempts at a typing machine, this one used the now-familiar "QWERTY" keyboard, designed to keep the most frequently-used letters from jamming up. Even so, it could only type in UPPER CASE. Other typewriter makers also struggled with the upper- and lower-case conundrum. When our Bill Geist visited the Mesa Typewriter Exchange in Mesa, Arizona back in 2012, owner Bill Wahl had a case in point: Wahl: "This is a Caligraph. This is a very interesting machine. There's no shift key. So, you had your lower case keys, you had your upper case keys. And this machine also has an upstrike. … You could not see what you were typing as you were typing on this machine." Geist: "Bad idea!"
From 2012: A typewriter renaissanceOver time, the shift key became standard – a CAPITAL improvement, you might say.
