The original Remington typewriter, prototype of all modern typewriters, made its public debut in 1874. Hardly anyone noticed. “The advent of the first writing machine was not announced in cable dispatches and newspaper headlines,” The New York Times recalled later. “It slipped into existence quietly, timidly, unobtrusively, with an indifferent world to face.” In fact, the typewriter was so completely ignored it was nearly abandoned as a failure by its promoters, who had already faced a long succession of preproduction frustrations.

Yet a few years later the machine was being widely described as preordained. One observer wrote, “There were so many advantages that this ‘innovation’ was from the first as bound to come as was the steam engine when James Watt watched the tea kettle in his mother’s kitchen.” The typewriter had had to be invented, and once invented, it had had to be a success. As one journalist put it, “The world needed it. It had always needed it, but it had never known its need.”

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