Ford Typewriter Ford Typewriter The Ford typewriter was an early prototype typewriter introduced in 1895 by Eugene A. Ford, who later became chief development engineer at IBM (no relation to Henry Ford who founded the Ford Motor Company). It was a commercial failure and only a few were manufactured. Unlike many competing typewriters of this time, it was a forward-striking machine, meaning the hammer struck forward against the paper which was held against the platen roller, instead of up from underneath. This allowed the typist to see the text as it was typed, which was not possible in most other typewriters of
Typewriter but unverified explanation for the QWERTY arrangement is that it was designed to reduce the likelihood of internal clashing of typebars by placing commonly used combinations of letters farther from each other inside the machine. Another story is that the QWERTY layout allowed early typewriter salesmen to impress their customers by being able to easily type out the example word "typewriter" without having learned the full keyboard layout , because "typewriter" can be spelled purely on the top row of the keyboard. However, there is no evidence to support these claims. A number of radically different layouts such as Dvorak