1882 Mark Twain asserts, in 1905, in his essay ‘The First Typing Machine’, that the first such writer/typewriter was none other than Mark Twain:
I will now claim – until dispossessed – that I was the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature. That book must have been The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
As Darren Wershler-Henry points out in his ‘fragmented history of typewriting’, The Iron Whim, this may be what Huck Finn would call a bit of a ‘stretcher’. The evidence of the literary remains indicates that it was not Sawyer (1876) but the much later Life on the Mississippi (1883). This later date puts Twain in second place, some months behind another famous name.
‘Hurrah! The machine has arrived at my house’, wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in a postcard to his sister on 11 February 1882. For the sum of 375 marks the philosopher had acquired a Hansen ‘writing ball’, or ‘Schreibkugel’. Hansen was a Swedish pastor and teacher of deaf-mutes. He intended his invention as an aid for these unfortunates, not German philosophers. Nietzsche wrestled with his new device for the following few weeks. One sample of his typewriting survives (in German):
THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME: MADE OF IRON
YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS.
PATIENCE AND TACT ARE REQUIRED IN ABUNDANCE,
AS WELL AS FINE FINGERS, TO USE US.
Thus typed Zarathustra. He did not have fingers sufficiently fine, or the necessary patience and tact, Nietzsche eventually decided. Malling Hausen, in his study of the episode, Nietzsche’s Writing Ball, records that on 24 March 1882 the experiment ended. Nietzsche’s fingers could not stand it.
There is speculation that – disappointing as the experience with the writing ball was – it had an influence on the ‘telegraphic’ or ‘fragmentary’ style of Nietzsche’s later philosophical writing. No effect on Twain’s fiction has ever been discerned.