Henry Mill of England patented a typewriter in 1714. The firm of Sholes, Glidden & Soulé developed a practical machine in the U. S. in 1867, and typewriters began to be marketed by Remington in 1874. First U. S. patent on a writing-machine, however, was issued in 1829 to a remarkable man named William Austin Burt. On this device, in March 1830, Inventor Burt whacked out the first letter typewritten in the U.S. Last week the Smithsonian Institution proudly announced that it had acquired and would shortly display this message.
Inventor Burt's machine, made entirely of wood, was destroyed in the Patent Office fire of 1836. It was a ponderous gadget with the type carried on a circular frame operated by a lever. That Burt could write faster with his machine than by hand is highly improbable. Yet it had a feature that was lacking in some commercial machines for many years: separate sets of capital and lower-case letters, with a shift mechanism for changing from one to the other.
Descended from a family of early Massachusetts settlers, William Austin Burt was a surveyor, mechanic and millwright. He lived on a farm near Detroit when he put together his writing-machine, which he called "The Typographer." Noticing that local magnetism frequently disturbed surveying compasses, he invented a sun-compass, was awarded a medal and $20 in gold by the Franklin Institute. Burt returned from a trip to England in a windjammer to see how well its navigator maintained his course, was thus spurred to invent an equatorial sextant. One of two members of Michigan's early Territorial Legislative Council and later a State Legislator, he was a prime mover in the Sault Sainte Marie Canal project, was generally called "Judge" before he died in 1858.
William Austin Burt's first typewritten letter, whose orthographic vagaries the Smithsonian charitably ascribes to the weaknesses of the machine as well as to the inventor's weakness in spelling, was written from New York City to his wife in Michigan:
"Dear Companion: