The Hansen Writing Ball is one of the most finely crafted and impressive of the early typewriters. These early machines were manufactured in small lots, and would gradually be swept away by the mass produced Sholes-Glidden machine which E. Remington and Sons started to make in 1873.

Like most of the early 19th century typewriters the Hansen ball did not let the user see the paper, as it was being written on. This did not matter much at first, since the Hansen was designed originally to be used by the blind like so many of those other machines. Unlike these other typewriters the Hansen ball was a combination of stunning design and ergonomic innovations.

Conceived in Denmark by the Reverend Malling Hansen, in 1865, it entered production in 1870 and was known there as the skrivekugel. Its main distinctive feature was that all its 52 keys were arrayed on a large brass half-sphere, as if the machine were a giant metal pin cushion. The first models typed on a flat sheet of paper placed on a complicated mechanical structure, moving under the half sphere. Later models typed on a curved sheet of paper resting on a simpler structure. This made for a simpler and more compact machine.

Mark Twain and Friedrich Nietzsche (who called it a schreibkugel) were two of the famous users of the Hansen Ball. It was exhibited in the Paris exhibition or Exposition Universelle (1878). All through the 1870s it won several awards.

More or less intact Hansen balls have fetched hundreds of thousands of Euros in auctions.

External links

• Wonderful pictures in The Virtual typewriter Museum