Typographer

n 1714, the British patent office issued a patent to English engineer Henry Mill for a typewriter; however, he never built it. This first record of an initial attempt gave Mills time (14 years) to develop a model or at least a description of his "artificial machine"; however, the secret of how to make such a machine, if there ever was one, died with him. There is no record that it ever existed. There hasn't even been found a trace of any drawings or specifications.
Christopher Latham Sholes is given credit for inventing the first "practical" typewriter. He was in fact the fifty-second person or possibly the 112th to reinvent a "type-writing" machine – which he called a type-writer. Some of the "type-writing" machines invented between Burt's 1829 patented machine and Sholes' 1867 type-writer are "The Projean Machine" (1833), "The Thurber Machine" (1843), "The Foucault Machine" (1843), "O. T. Eddy's machine" (1850), "The Fairbanks machine" (1850), "J. M. Jones' machine" (1850), "William Hughes' machine" (1851), John M. Jones "mechanical Typographer" (1852), "Thomas' typograph" (1854), "The Beach typewriter" (1856), "The Francis Typewriter" (1857), "The Hansen Machine" (1865), "The Livermore Printing Device" (1863), "Peeler Writing Machine" (1866), and "The Sholes and Glidden Typewriter" (1867) invented by three men (C. Latham Sholes, Samuel W. Soule, Carlos Glidden). Thomas Edison is even given credit for an electrified version in 1872.
The Board of Electors at the National Shorthand Association of Detroit recognized Burt as a leader among typewriter inventors and one that ensured world-wide recognition of priority of American inventors in the typewriter field. French authors Henri Dupont and C. Senechal described Burt's typographer in great detail in their 1906 book Les machines a écrire: historique, avantages, descriptions et traité complet de dactylographie ou art d'écrire a la machine.