The Literary Piano

THE TYPEWRITER AND THE MEN WHO MADE IT (149 pp.)--Richard N. Current --University of Illinois Press ($3.50).

THE WONDERFUL WRITING MACHINE (236 pp.)--Bruce Bliven Jr.-- Random House ($3.95).

When the steel pen was replacing the quill around 1800 A.D., the world thought it had chipped and scratched its way to some kind of penman's peak. But steel pens could be pushed no faster than 30 words a minute. By 1867, no less than 51 men had tried and failed to invent a machine that would write faster. The 52nd, Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee, succeeded. And in its own way, the typewriter started as big a revolution as the mass-produced Ford.

Among other things, it created a whole new white-collar class, largely ruined penmanship, made correspondence vastly easier (though not necessarily better), inaugurated the age of carbon copies and their useless proliferation in innumerable filing cabinets, handed writers an alarmingly facile weapon of self-expression. Anybody who wants to know almost anything concerning the typewriter, can find it in Historian Richard N. Current's The Typewriter and the Men Who Made It and Journalist Bruce Bliven Jr.'s The Wonderful Writing Machine. Current's book is a detailed history of the typewriter's origins. Bliven's book is a livelier but less meaty study, bringing the story of the writing machine up to date with the latest electric model.

A Pretty Tune. The typewriter's future was obscure in its infancy. Not even Inventor Sholes had faith in it. But Promoter James Densmore. like Sholes a former newspaperman, believed in it "from the topmost corner of my hat to the bottommost head of the nails of my boot heels." He wanted to play Sholes' "literary piano" to the tune of a million dollars.

For six years while waiting for the right tune. Promoter Densmore went into debt, slept in a garret, wore shabby clothes and often lived on apples and soda crackers. During that time, he prodded Sholes into turning out machine after machine. When Densmore got a new model, he gave it to a compliant friend with precise instructions: "Give it a good thrashing. Find out its weak spots . . . Sholes is sick of experimenting, but I am going [to] make the thing work or pound the hell out of it."

In 1873, Densmore was satisfied that at last he had a marketable product, and made a deal with E. Remington & Sons, manufacturers of guns and sewing machines, to produce his writing machine. Densmore hoped his typewriter would "become as important in the literary world as the sewing machine is in the stitchetary world," and Remington obliged, at least in respect to looks. The first Remington resembled a sewing machine right down to its treadle.

A Pioneering Author. One of its first buyers was Mark Twain. "I believe it will print faster than I can write," he typed. "It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don't muss things or scatter ink blots around." But sales were not helped by people who mistook typed letters for printed circulars, nor by those who indignantly protested that letters did not have to be printed for them, they "could read writin'!" Nonetheless, by the time Promoter Densmore died in 1889. he had built an estate worth about half a million dollars on the writing machine. Unfortunately, Inventor Sholes sold his rights before the profits poured in.

Today, 80 years after the first Remington appeared, the typewriter has become inescapable. A U.S. battleship, notes Reporter Bliven, requires 55 typewriters on board as it meets the enemy, and when the army advances, there are "more [typewriters] within 4.000 yards of the front lines than medium and light artillery pieces combined." In typewriter ribbons and carbons alone, the volume of business in the U.S. is almost $50 million. Not even Promoter Densmore had ever imagined that the "literary piano" would make music like that.

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