Who created the first typewriter?

No single person or nation can be credited with the invention of the typewriter. As with the light bulb, automobile, telephone, and telegraph, a number of people contributed insights and inventions that eventually resulted in commercially successful instruments. In fact, historians have estimated that some form of typewriter was invented 52 times as tinkerers tried to come up with a workable design.[1]

In 1714, Henry Mill obtained a patent in Britain for a machine that, from the patent, appears to have been similar to a typewriter, but nothing further is known.[2] Other early developers of typewriting machines include Pellegrino Turri, who also invented carbon paper. Many of these early machines, including Turri’s, were developed to enable the blind to write.

In 1829, William Austin Burt patented a machine called the “Typographer.” Like many other early machines, it is sometimes listed as the “first typewriter”; the Science Museum (London) describes it merely as “the first writing mechanism whose invention was documented,” but even that claim may be excessive, since Turri’s machine is well known.[3] Even in the hands of its inventor, it was slower than handwriting. Burt and his promoter John D. Sheldon never found a buyer for the patent, and it was never commercially produced. Because it used a dial to select each character rather than keys, it was called an “index typewriter” rather than a “keyboard typewriter,” if it is to be considered a typewriter at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter