Civil War typewriters.

[major bill]

On this date in 1829 William Austin Burt received a patent for his "typographer", a forerunner of the typewriter. So how common were typewriters during the Civil War? I take it the Army only used them at higher Headquarters and not in the field.

 

[A. Roy]

Interesting -- I gather there were many efforts to create a writing machine over the centuries. Even if there were feasible machines available, I guess market adoption would have been slow, based on cost and natural human resistance to a new idea.

My first major history project focused on the period between the 1890s and the 1920s (a biography focused on ethnologist Natalie Curtis Burlin). Many of the primary sources were typewritten. Now doing Civil-War-era research, I'm finding primary sources to be more of a challenge because of the need to transcribe handwritten documents.

This is supposed to be a drawing of Burt demonstrating a version of his typographer:

(Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1921; via Wikimedia Commons)

Roy B.