The invention of the typewriter may be much older than you imagine. On 7 January 1714, Queen Anne, who was already very ill and would die a few months later, going down in history as the first sovereign of the kingdom of Great Britain, granted a patent to a young English engineer: his name was Henry Mill, he was 27 years old and in his life he would have dealt with plumbing. But that patent, number 395, was about writing. Indeed, as the title states, to “a way to impress writing on parchment”.
Unfortunately, there are no models or drawings of that invention and it is not even known if Mill really made it the first typewriter or if it remained only a project. Enthusiasts have gone in search of every possible clue and the only thing left is the description that Mill himself gives in the patent application. A fairly accurate description of how a typewriter works: “An artificial machine or method for the impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another, as in writing, whereby all writings whatsoever may be engrossed in paper or parchment so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print”. Insomma una macchina per scrivere con una qualità non distinguibile dalla stampa. E ancora: “That the said machine or method may be of great use in settlements and public records, the impression being deeper and more lasting than any other writing, and not to be erased or counterfeited without manifest discovery”.
And therefore a machine (or a method, on this Mill leaves both roads open), which could have been particularly useful in public documents and where there was a risk of counterfeiting.
Given the lack of a prototype and even of drawings (which perhaps have been lost) some historians have argued that starting the history of the typewriter with Mill in 1714 it is only a “british wishful thinking”, that is a British wish to claim paternity. And yet it is a fact that the first typewritten letters of which anything is known were written in Italy almost a century after Mill’s intuition. But this, as they say, is another story.
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