Letter, Sherman Booth to Mary and Lillian Booth, Chicago, IL, 1870 This extraordinary letter was written in 1870 by the abolitionist Sherman Booth (1812-1904). Booth moved to Milwaukee in 1848 as the editor of the Milwaukee Freeman, an abolitionist newspaper. In 1867 Booth moved to Chicago with his third wife, Augusta Smith, who he refers to in the letter. While there, James Densmore--the main financial backer of the early typewriter enterprise--appears to have delivered an early typewriter prototype to Booth, on which he wrote this letter, four years before the final version of the typewriter went on sale to the public.
There is a telling typo near the end of the letter that helps us understand what sort of machine Booth was using. Early prototypes had piano keyboards, with the letters A-M from left to right on the black keys, and the letters N-Z right to left on the white keys. When Booth mis-spells "wife" as "whfe," he makes an error that would be unlikely on a QWERTY keyboard, where H and I are on different rows and separated by one key. But on the early prototypes with piano keyboards, H and I would have been on adjacent black keys, and so much easier to mistake.
The link below shows the surviving keyboard of an early prototype held by the Milwaukee Public Museum, which likely resembles the one that Booth would have used. Only its keyboard and lower frame survive; the mechanism for imprinting letters was removed and perhaps repurposed for subsequent prototypes.
Booth also notes that he had written a similar letter on an even earlier prototype eighteen months earlier, which would have been on a very early prototype. This letter is lost, but could tell us a great deal about the capabilities of the earliest prototypes. How Booth and Densmore came to know each other at this period is not known, but Densmore spent the late 1860s and early 1870s putting machines in the hands of many testers, so he may have sought out Booth as journalist and editor likely to be interested in new writing techniques.
