Giuseppe Ravizza Giuseppe Ravizza Giuseppe Ravizza, a prolific typewriter inventor, was born in Novara, Italy in 1811 (died 1885), and spent nearly 40 years of his life obsessively grappling with the complexities of inventing a usable writing machine. He called his invention "" because of its piano-type keys and keyboard. The story of the 16 models he produced between 1847 and the early 1880s is described in "The Writing Machine" and illustrated from Ravizza’s 1855 patent, which bears similarities to the later upstroke design of the Sholes and Glidden typewriter. In 1868, the American Christopher Latham Sholes (1819-1890) patented, on behalf of
Christopher Benson distant kinswoman of the writer Nancy Mitford and her sisters), on 27 July 1826. He predeceased his wife by approximately five years when he died on 25 March 1868 at Ross on Wye. Christopher Benson Christopher Benson (16 January 1788 - 25 March 1868) was a Cambridge educated theologian who achieved prominence on account of his abilities as a preacher and lecturer. In 1820 he was chosen as the first Hulsean Lecturer. Later he was one of the first to apply the term "Tractarians" to John Keble, Edward Pusey and other pioneers of what came to be known as the