Hansen Writing Ball
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The Hansen Writing Ball is one of the most finely crafted and impressive of the early typewriters. These early machines were manufactured in small lots, and would gradually be swept away by the mass produced Sholes-Glidden machine which E. Remington and Sons started to make in 1873.
Like most of the early 19th century typewriters, the Hansen Ball did not allow the paper to be seen as it passed through the device. The Hansen was designed originally to be used by deaf mute students. It was desirable as a machine that might "give a voice" to those who did not otherwise have one. Later it was of course employed by the unsighted, like many other early typewriters. Unlike those others, however, the Hansen ball was a combination of stunning design and ergonomic innovations.[The Virtual Typewriter Museum] (The preceding link can be followed and a search done at the museum for the full history of the Hansen Writing Ball.)
Invented in Denmark by the Reverend Rasmus Hans Malling Johan Hansen, in 1865, it entered production in 1870 and was known there as the skrivekugel. Its distinctive feature was an arrangement of 52 keys on a large brass hemisphere, causing the machine to resemble a giant pin cushion. The first models typed on a flat sheet of paper, which was placed on a flat mechanical paper-frame. This moved the paper along as the Ball typed upon it, and the design was so ingenious that few errors were possible. Rev. Hansen improved on his design, and created a semi-cylindrical frame to hold one sheet of paper. The improvement also included an electromagnetic escapement for the Ball, thus making the Rev. Hansen's machine the first electric typewriter. All this improvement made for a simpler and more compact writing apparatus.
Friedrich Nietzsche (who called it a schreibkugel) was the most famous user of the Hansen Ball. It was exhibited in the Paris exhibition or Exposition Universelle (1878). All through the 1870s it won several awards.
More or less intact Hansen balls have fetched hundreds of thousands of Euros in auctions. Few remain in existence today, which is an unfortunate blow to modern writing technology. The use of the Hansen Writing Ball for the unsighted, the autistic, and others would be a most welcome addition to the modern technological repertoire.
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