Mitterhofer Typewriter Claim Upsets US Historian

The 1864 Mitterhofer machine was on show in the exhibition "Mountains, People and the Economy of the Ostmark" in 1939.

Today the 200th anniversary of the birth of early typewriter inventor Peter Mitterhofer is being marked in his home town of Parcines in the Tyrol. In August 1925 US newspapers ran a story from Innsbruck saying a memorial tablet had been unveiled at Mitterhoffer’s home. The story claimed Mitterhofer was THE inventor of the typewriter, and went on to state that Carlos Glidden had seen Mitterhofer’s machine at the Imperial Polytechnic Institute at Vienna and given the idea to Latham Sholes and Samuel Soulé. That is to say, the Sholes & Glidden was a COPY of Mitterhofer’s machine. This caused huge indignation in America. In October 1925, US newspaper stories headed “Exposes attempt to discredit famous American inventor” explaimed how Colonel John Wright Vrooman (1844-1929), president of the Herkimer County Historical Association, had proved that Glidden had never been outside the US and had never heard of Mitterhofer. Vrooman had “defeated a foreign attempt to take the honor [of inventing the typewriter] from America.”

Ninety-seven years on, however, Mitterhofer's Wikipedia entry still says, "Technical details of his developments were patented by Sholes and Glidden in the US in 1868 independently of Mitterhofer as an in-house development and created the basis for the series production of the first usable typewriters ... Professor Rudolf Granichstaedten-Czerva, who published a biography of Peter Mitterhofer in 1924, [said] Mitterhofer experienced the success of the typewriters manufactured in the US by Sholes, but without having any part in it. On August 27, 1893, he died bitter. On his tombstone is the saying: 'The others who learned from him were allowed to reap the fruits of his talent'. It was probably the great similarity of Mitterhofer's models with the models produced in America by the Remington company that prompted the Innsbruck professor to write the saying on the tombstone." All of which, of course, is utter nonsense.