The Sholes-Glidden Typewriter (left) with a close up of the manufacturing label (right).Ī quick look in the Museum’s accession registers showed that the Sholes-Glidden was donated in 1904 and was the first typewriter to be acquired by the Museum. Recently, while exploring the typewriter collections at the National Museums Collection Centre in Edinburgh, I took the opportunity to take a closer look at the crown jewel in the Museum’s typewriter collection: a Sholes-Glidden Typewriter from 1875. Yet the early sale of the Sholes-Glidden in Glasgow and Edinburgh signalled the start of a rapid expansion in the Scottish typewriter trade that continued well into the next century. By the late 1870s, Remington began exporting a few hundred of its typewriters across the Atlantic, with the Sholes-Glidden achieving limited success in the Scottish market. Remington and Sons bought the rights to the invention and the following year the typewriter was put into commercial production. In 1873, American gun and sewing machine manufacturers E. Soule and Carlos Glidden in the late 1860s and early 1870s. This new machine was the Sholes-Glidden Typewriter, developed by Christopher Latham Sholes, Samuel W. “As agent for this invention… I have supplied several professional and mercantile gentlemen in Glasgow and neighbourhood with it.” With a sly bit of advertising for his own business Dougall continued: “I think it right, if you will give me the privilege of your columns, to point out that the type writer has been for some time in use in Glasgow.” Dougall of Glasgow wrote into the Herald to correct the Reverend’s presumption that he was the only user of the typewriter in Scotland. You had a description from The Times the other day of the new machine called the type writer, used for writing with instead of the pen…Īs the one I am using may, for all I know be the only one in our part of the country yet, it occurs to me that many of your readers, might like to know how it is found to work in ordinary hands.”įour days later, J.D. On, Reverend Macrae of Gourock in the West of Scotland wrote to the editor of Glasgow Herald stating that:
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