The world’s first typewriter goes to public sale in Köln (Germany) on 22 March 2025. Simply 35 Malling Hansen Writing Balls stay, 30 are in museums and the battle for one of many few remaining specimens can be price watching as a result of as the availability diminishes the value goes up.
Although the Sholes & Gliddon (Remington No.1) turned the Mannequin T of the typewriter age, there was one notable instance of prior artwork which started manufacture on a really humble, “handcrafted” scale in Germany.
Whereas a Sholes & Gliddon is lately considered the cornerstone of any typewriter fanatic’s assortment, the unique and fairly magnificent Malling Hansen Writing Ball is now all however unattainable.
For starters, solely 35 are identified to have survived, and the esteem with which the mannequin is held is greatest illustrated by 30 of the 35 already being in museums.
That leaves 5 which have escaped seize by the ever vigilant museums of the world. Museums often haven’t any cash, however they’ve employees blessed with historic perspective, and so they typically get forward of the sport, earlier than the collector cash arrives.
On this case, museums have been properly forward of the sport, however it’s unlikely that the remaining 5 will find yourself in museums now, as a result of collectors lately are higher knowledgeable and have much more discretionary pocket cash than a publicly-funded museum might ever hope for in trying to doc society’s path to right here.
Almost the entire Writing Balls to have reached public public sale have come from Auction Team Breker, a “technical antiques” public sale home in Köln (Germany) that simply held its a hundredth science & know-how historical past sale. Congratulations to them – historic sci-tech artifacts are simply turning into appreciated by the mainstream at public sale and Breker has been flying the flag for our technological heritage for for much longer than it has paid.
This Malling-Hansen exclusivity is partly as a result of Auction Team Breker has been the middle of the European public sale commerce for historic artifacts from science, know-how, workplace automation and mechanical music perpetually, however primarily as a result of Ewe Breker, who began all of it, is the pinnacle of the Malling Hansen Society, giving fellow lovers confidence the machine’s subsequent custodian can be a kindred spirit.
Throughout the final 23 years of New Atlas, we have recurrently reported on Auktion Workforce Breker providing the cream of the tech historical past crop at public sale, promoting objects reminiscent of a number of Apple-1 specimens, extra Enigma machines than anybody else, automata, astrolabes, and it is the one place the place you may recurrently discover one in every of Thomas de Colmar’s unique Arithmometers. Among the objects Breker brings to market simply must be seen to be believed – reminiscent of this entirely mechanical jukebox.
A quick research of the machine and its contemporaries means that the Writing Ball had all of the hallmarks of success – it was designed with the person interface foremost in thoughts, as the unique intent was to create a machine with which individuals not blessed with speech, and/or listening to and/or sight, might talk shortly with those that did not perceive signal language.
Reverend Rasmus Malling-Hansen was the Director of the Institute for the deaf and mute in Copenhagen, and when he realized that his college students had been capable of phonetically spell with their fingers quicker than they might write by hand, he started work on a machine that might allow his flock to “converse with their fingers.”
The “writing ball” was his reply, and contemplating there was no prior work upon which to construct, it’s a monument to ingenuity and dogged perseverance. As Sir Isaac Newton humbly acknowledged, his work was constructed on the shoulders of giants. Malling-Hansen did all of it whereas doing his day job, and he conceived this machine from scratch – there was nothing prefer it upon which to base the design.
The depth to which the great reverend went in guaranteeing design choices is outstanding – he thought of separating vowels for conceptual reminiscence, and placing the commonest letter pairings collectively and making it straightforward to make use of in so some ways, even to the purpose of the tactile metallic keys for these with out sight. The hands-on-sphere interface is designed so you do not transfer your palms however to press the keys.
In some ways, this machine is being judged as a typewriter when it’s certainly far more. It seems to have been conceived extra as a translator for the vision-, voice- and/or sight-impaired to have the ability to talk quicker and he achieved his aim commendably.
It was additionally obtained to nice fanfare, being the star of two world gala’s: the 1873 World’s Truthful in Vienna, and the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris. In 1881, German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche bought a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, turning into the product’s most well-known person. The International Rasmus Malling-Hansen Society gives essentially the most full repository of data on this attractive technological landmark.
By comparability, the in the end profitable Sholes & Gliddon had some evident faults: it typed solely capital letters (higher case) and also you could not see what you had been writing. Even at this time, lovers consult with all typewriters previous to the 1891 Williams Typewriter as “blind writers.”
The Writing Ball’s hand-built manufacturing in the end made it far too costly for the frequent man, and the Sholes and Glidden Typewriter was extra inexpensive and have become the primary commercially profitable typewriter.
You probably have bother visualising how an organization functioned previous to computer systems, networks and cellphones, puzzle for a second how corporations functioned previous to the typewriter.
Simply 150 years in the past, in the event you wished to report one thing, there was no various to writing it down with a pen and ink.
Older readers of this text might have realized to write down in such a means (responsible yer honor) – dipping the nib of a pen into an inkwell, and scratching out the phrases, hoping to have ample ink to finish a phrase, with out choosing up an excessive amount of ink and smudging your masterpiece. Writing concerned the continuous use of blotting paper to take away extra ink. Simply 150 years in the past, we had been nonetheless rising from info’s darkish ages.
Sixty years later, László Bíró’s ballpoint pen hit the market (1931).
It’s therefore not shocking that the typewriter was one in every of historical past’s “killer apps.”
Consider the typewriter business as a prequel to the pc business set one century prior. It knowledgeable the evolution of the pc business and was an necessary milestone on the street to the technological life we lead at this time.
As soon as the typewriter hit the market, it was universally adopted, fueling relentless unprecedented demand from a target market with the cash to pay for it – enterprise – catalyzing a wave of start-ups, competitors, innovation and speedy technological progress.
The primary mass-produced typewriters started to roll out within the mid-1870s. The Mannequin T of the typewriter age was the Sholes & Glidden, which entered the market on 1 July 1874. A swift uptake noticed them develop into commonplace by the mid-Eighteen Eighties. Each firm on this planet embraced the potential of the typewriter for correspondence and report preserving. The freer movement of data that the typewriter facilitated drove large societal and business change.
The market turned so giant that it entrained humanity and the QWERTY keyboard format it gave us now stands as essentially the most ubiquitous machine-user interface of all time.
The QWERTY keyboard was devised in 1866 for the forthcoming Sholes & Glidden “Type-Writer” and first mass-produced in 1874 when Eliphalet Remington diversified from his core armaments and ammunition manufacturing enterprise and bought the rights.
The QWERTY format turned the worldwide de facto commonplace for Latin-script pc keyboards despite the fact that it was created to separate frequent letter pairings in order that the typebars wouldn’t be coming in at near-parallel angles on consecutive keystrokes as typically, and therefore much less prone to jam if the person typed too quick. The affect of the Scholes & Glidden is clear to at the present time, and lots of the readers of this text have a relic from technological antiquity proper in entrance of them.
Williams typewriters solved the issue of not having the ability to see what the person had already written, presenting this beforehand unavailable and demanding info between opposing followers of carriage bars which struck the paper through a “grasshopper mechanism” which Williams had perfected. It was a chic resolution to an engineering drawback and it fully reworked the person expertise.
To start with although, the Malling Hansen Writing Ball was the one sport on the town for a short while, and like most typewriters of notice, it too had a well-known person – German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche.
That was one other issue we seen when trying again by public sale historical past. No matter provenance, there is just one first, and it trumps provenance.
The newest instance of the Writing Ball to return to public sale fetched US$200,000 in 2021, making it the second Most worthy typewriter ever offered at public sale, behind solely Cormac McCarthy’s Lettera 32 Olivetti moveable.
The American novelist, playwright and screenwriter purchased the Olivetti in 1963 for $50 and used it to sort every part he wrote for 40 years (he estimated he’d typed 5 million phrases on it), successful a Pulitzer and a Nationwide Guide Award alongside the best way.
As typically occurs at auctions the place the proceeds go to charity, the bidding bought loopy, and an unidentified American collector paid $254,500, against a high estimate of $20,000. The proceeds of the sale had been donated to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific analysis organisation. That additionally disqualifies it by our guidelines of not counting charity auctions – they are a great factor however individuals do not act rationally at charity auctions and the outcomes must be excluded from any information used to make monetary choices.
That implies that the 1867 Malling-Hansen “Writing Ball” sold by Auction Team Breker on 25 September 2021 for €170,000 ($199,750) is the most costly typewriter in historical past, nudging out Ernest Hemingway’s $162,500 1926 Underwood Customary Moveable, which produced The Fifth Column, To Have and Have Not, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is also the machine he would have carried onto the seashores of Normandy when he landed with the Allied forces on D-Day as a warfare correspondent.
His first try and land on Omaha Seashore was aborted when Hemingway was shut sufficient to see what he was lacking. He later wrote on this machine, “the primary, second, third, fourth and fifth waves of touchdown troops lay the place that they had fallen, trying like so many closely laden bundles on the flat pebbly stretch between the ocean and first cowl.” This typewriter noticed so much, as Hemingway spent his life following bother round.
This identical Hemingway typewriter apparently went inside a whisker of turning into essentially the most priceless of all time when Angelina Jolie put an $11,000 deposit on it at a $250,000 sale worth, then modified her thoughts. It was apparently going to be a marriage current for her then forthcoming marriage to Brad Pitt.
Nominal equal second (but in addition disqualified – one other charity public sale) at the same $162,500 auction price was Playboy creator Hugh Hefner’s Underwood Standard Portable which he utilized in faculty and in placing collectively the primary copy of the journal that might launch an empire and alter societal requirements perpetually.
Third place goes to the Williams No. 6 typewriter used by Mark Twain, which fetched $106,250 in 2024. If you cannot afford a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, take a look at his Williams typewriter, probably the most wonderful mechanical units ever conceived. John Newton Williams who designed the machine would later design, construct and fly the world’s first co-axial helicopter.
On the different finish of the size, typewriters will do your bidding it doesn’t matter what they price.
In closing, the specimen of the Malling-Hansen Writing Ball going to public sale is one in every of 5 in personal palms, and it already holds the world report.
The exquisitely stunning Malling-Hansen Writing Ball which at the moment holds the report, did so with none identified historical past – it did so with out Ernest Hemingway or Mark Twain in its provenance.
That is why we’ll be watching when the hammer comes down.
Supply: Auktion Team Breker
