By: Anuradha
Music heals the soul. No matter how bad is your day, when you hear pleasing music, it will soothe your soul and calm your raging emotions down. For ages, many techniques were used to create music, to write music notations and when typewriters were introduced for this purpose back in the 1950s, it was a hit among many people. One of the most popular music typewriters that ever existed was Keaton Music Typewriter which was patented in 1936. The specialty of this typewriter was that it was produced to hammer out musical notations, not letters or numbers.
The original patent was given for a 14-key typewriter which was updated to 33 keys and improved in the 1953 patent. When it was marketed in the 1950s was valued for $255 (about $2,415 in today’s money). Keaton wanted to create something that would print characters precisely on staff and indicate exactly where the next character would be printed and ended up with a circular keyboard which has given this distinct look to the typewriter.
Image credits: Mass1m01973
Image credits: Etsy
He wrote, “One keyboard is adapted to type one class of music characters such as bar lines and ledger lines, which, when repeated, always appear in the same relative spaced positions with respect to the [staff] lines… and a second keyboard adapted to type another class of musical characters, such as the notes, rest signs and sharp and flat signs etc., which may, when repeated, appear in various spaced positions with respect to the [staff] lines”.
Image credits: Etsy
Image credits: musicprintinghistory
Users of this device can control where the notes and characters fall on the page with the help of the curved meter on the left which was called Scale Shift handle and scale shift indicator. The typewriter is instructed on how much to adjust, printing 1/24 of an inch in either direction by moving the handle up or down a notch. Moving one notch up or down will cause the character to fall one musical step either way.
Image credits: musicprintinghistory
Image credits: musicprintinghistory
The end result of the machine was publishable and it made the task of making copies much easier. It is questionable whether the machine had a huge demand in the days it was made as there were some people who still preferred to do their compositions in written form. However, the machine was once the dream purchase of many music lovers and even today in some rare auctions, these machines can be found selling around $6,000 -$12,000.
Image credits: musicprintinghistory
Image credits: liveauctioneers
The below video will show you how does the machine works: