Rasmus Malling-Hansen

Hans Rasmus Malling -Hansen Johann ( born September 5, 1835 in Hunseby; † September 27, 1890 in Copenhagen) was a pastor and head of the royal Dovstummeinstitut Copenhagen.

During his work with the deaf, the young pastor Malling -Hansen made ​​the determination that you could play 12 phonetic symbols in a second with the " finger language", while could be linked with the ordinary font only 4 According characters per second on paper. Therefore had be possible to construct a machine with which you could take advantage of the speed of as many fingers for writing ... (see Eberwein, Nietzsche's writing ball, p.18).

Malling -Hansen developed in 1865 Skrivekugle ( writing ball, writing ball or Sphère écrivante ), the first mass-produced typewriter in the world. It consisted of 54 concentric rods and keys printed capital letters, numbers and punctuation marks on a cylindrical clamped sheet of paper. The most prominent customer of Malling -Hansen was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.