Earliest applications: 1873 through 1875

by Mark Adams on June 8, 2021

Image from a business listing for Porter’s National Telegraph College in late 1873. Note the gentleman operating a Sholes & Glidden Type Writer in the bottom left corner.

Contents

Copies made

People employed the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer for business applications as early as 1873, the year the machine was introduced. Porter’s National Telegraph College advertised copying services in February that year, one month before the machine would be manufactured under contract by E. Remington & Sons. These early advertisements emphasize the typewriter as a copying device, though news reports and sales literature also envisioned it as a writing machine.

This blog posting chronicles advertisements for typewriting services, not the machine itself, and continues work begun here – The Early Typists (January 3, 2019), which includes advertisements dating from 1876, a period when such work was quite common.

Ads from 1873

Chicago Tribune, February 10, 1873 –

Porter’s National Telegraph College placed the following advertisement in The Representative Business Houses of Chicago, a listings directory, which was published sometime in the latter half of 1873. The engraving on page 66 was shared with Western Electric Manufacturing Co., which advertised its services on page 72 (not page 74 as indicated by the directory under the engraving).

The engraving:

Listing for Western Electric Manufacturing Company, agents for the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer.

Ads from 1874

The St. Louis Republican, November 1, 1874 –

Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester), September 24, 1874 –

Ads from 1875

The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 31, 1875 –

Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), April 19, 1875 –

The Indianapolis News, June 16, 1875 –

New York Daily Herald, August 6, 1875 –

The Indianapolis News, October 28, 1875 –

Soon, employers were seeking both men and women as typists. There may well be earlier instances, but these advertisements are the earliest I’ve found seeking women as typists.

The Indianapolis News, November 20, 1875 –