Giuseppe Ravizza, a prolific typewriter inventor, was born in

Novara Novara (, Novarese: ) is the capital city of the province of Novara in the Piedmont region in northwest Italy, to the west of Milan. With 101,916 inhabitants (on 1 January 2021), it is the second most populous city in Piedmont after Turin. It i ...

, 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 The Sholes and Glidden typewriter (also known as the Remington No. 1) was the first commercially successful typewriter. Principally designed by the American inventor Christopher Latham Sholes, it was developed with the assistance of fello ...

. In 1868, the American Christopher Latham Sholes (1819-1890) patented, on behalf of Remington, a typewriter that was based on principles similar to those of the Ravizza machine. The ' could type upper or lower case too, a feature not present in the Remington machine.

References

* * 1811 births 1885 deaths 19th-century Italian inventors {{Italy-engineer-stub