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TYNEMOUTH—TYPEWRITER
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TYNEMOUTH, a municipal, county and parliamentary borough of Northumberland, England, including the townships of Chirton, Cullercoats, North Shields, Preston and Tynemouth. Pop. (1891), 46,588; (1901), 51,366. North Shields, Tynemouth and Cullercoats are successive stations on a branch of the North-Eastern railway. Tynemouth lies on the north bank of the Tyne, on a picturesque promontory, 8½ m. E. of Newcastle. North Shields (q.v.) adjoins it on the W.; Chirton is to the W. again, and Preston to the N. of North Shields, while Cullercoats is on the coast 1¼ m. N.N.W. of Tynemouth. Tynemouth is the principal watering-place on this part of the coast, and here and at Cullercoats are numerous private residences. On the point of the promontory there is a small battery called the Spanish battery, and near it is a monument to Lord Collingwood. Within the grounds, to which the gateway of the old castle gives entrance, are the ruins of the ancient priory of St Mary and St Oswin the principal remains being those of the church, which was a magnificent example of Early English work engrafted upon Norman. The priory and castle serve as the headquarters of the Tyne Submarine Engineers. The municipal buildings are in North Shields, which is also an important seaport. The coast is rocky and dangerous, but a fine pier protects the harbour (see North Shields). The municipal borough is under a mayor, 6 aldermen and 18 councillors. Area, 4372 acres.

Tynemouth is supposed to have been a Roman station, from the discovery of Roman remains there, but its early history centres round the priory, supposed to have been founded by Edwin, king of Northumbria, between 617 and 633, and rebuilt by king Oswald in 634. In 651 it became famous as the burial place of Oswin, king of Deira, afterwards patron saint of the priory. After the conquest Malcolm, king of Scotland, and Edward his son, who had been defeated and killed at Alnwick, were buried there. Earl Waltheof gave Tynemouth to the monks of Jarrow, and it became a cell to the church of Durham, but later, owing to a quarrel with the bishop, Robert de Mowbray granted it to the abbey of St Albans in Hertfordshire. The priory was probably fortified in Saxon times, and was strengthened by Robert de Mowbray so that it was able to sustain a siege of two months by William Rufus. After the Dissolution the fortifications were repaired by Henry VIII. In 1642 it was garrisoned for the king by the earl of Newcastle, but surrendered to parliament in 1644. It was converted into barracks at the end of the 18th century. Owing to their close proximity to Newcastle and to the ascendancy which the burgesses of that town had gained over the river Tyne, Tynemouth and North Shields did not become important until the 19th century; the privileges which they held before that time are contained in charters to the prior and convent, and include freedom from toll, &c., granted by King John in 1203–1204. In 1292 there were disputes between the citizens of Newcastle and the prior, who had built a quay at North Shields, but was obliged by act of parliament to destroy l't. Edward IV. in 1463 confirmed the previous charters of the monks, and at the same time gave them and their tenants licence to buy necessaries from ships in the “ port and river of Tyne,” and to load ships with coal and salt “ without hindrance from the men of Newcastle.” After the Napoleonic wars the trade of North Shields rapidly increased. The borough was incorporated in 1849, and has returned one member to parliament since 1832. In 1279 the prior claimed a market at Tynemouth, but was not allowed to hold it; and in 1304 a fair, which had been granted to him in the preceding year, was withdrawn on the petition of the burgesses of Newcastle. A market and two fairs on the last Friday in April and the first Friday in November were established in 1802 by the duke of Northumberland. In the 17th century the chief industries were the salt and coal trades. The former, which has entirely disappeared, was the more important, and in 1635 the salt-makers of North and South Shields received an incorporation charter.

See Vutorio County History, Northumberland; W. S. Gibson, The History of the Monastery founded at Tynemouth in the Diocese of Durham (1846–1847).


TYPEWRITER, a writing machine which produces characters resembling those of ordinary letterpress; the term is also applied to the operator who works such machines.

In 1714 a British patent was granted to Henry Mill, who claimed that he had brought his invention to perfection at great pains and expense, for “ An Artihcial Machine or Method for the Impressing or Transcribing Letters, Singly or Progressively one after another as in Writing, whereby all Writing whatever may be Engrossed. in Paper or Parchment so Neat and Exact as not to be distinguished from Print ”; but beyond the title the patent gives no indication of the nature or construction of the machine. In America a patent for a “ typographer ” was obtained by William A. Burt in 1829, but the records of it were destroyed by a fire at Washington in 1836. The “ typographic machine or pen” patented by X. Progrin, of Marseilles, in 1833, was on the type-bar principle, and at the York meeting of the British Association in 1844 a Mr Littledale showed an apparatus for the use of the blind, by which the impression of a type selected from a series contained in a slide could be embossed on a sheet of paper. In the “ chirographer, " for which American patents were granted to Charles Thurber in 1843 and 1845, a horizontal wheel carried in its periphery a series of rods each bearing a letter, the wheel being rotated till the required type was over the printing point. The Great Exhibition of 1851 contained a machine patented by Pierre Foucault, of Paris, in 1849, in which a series of rods with type at their ends could be pushed down to emboss paper at the printing point to which they were arranged radially; and there was in addition the “ typo graph ” of William Hughes, which was also intended for embossing, though it was subsequently modified to give an impression through carbon paper. Between 1847 and 1856 Alfred E. Beach in America, and between 1855 and 1860 Sir Charles Wheatstone in England, constructed several typewriters, and in 1857 Dr S. W. Francis, of New York, made one with a pianoforte keyboard and type bars arranged in a circle. In 1866 John Pratt, an American living in London, patented a machine having 36 types mounted in three rows on a type wheel, the rotation of which brought the required character opposite the printing point, when the paper with a carbon sheet intervening was pressed against it by a hammer worked by the keys. Two years later an American patent was taken out by C. L. Sholes and C. Glidden, and in 1875, after effecting various improvements, they finally placed the manufacture of their machines in the hands of Messrs E. Remington & Sons, gun makers, of Ilion, New York. The Remington machines worked on the type-bar principle, but at first each of the 44 bars carried only a single character, so that the writing was in capitals only. But in 1878 type-bars with two types were introduced, so that a machine with 40 keys, two being change-case keys, could print 76 characters, with both capital and small letters.

The great majority of modern typewriters are worked from a keyboard; the few that are not, known as index machines, will be disregarded here, for although they are much less expensive in first cost than the others, they scarcely come into competition as practical instruments, on account of their slowness. Keyboard machines fall into two classes, according as the types which make the impressions are (o) carried at the end of levers or type-bars which strike the paper when the keys are depressed, or (b) are arranged round the circumference of a Wheel, or segment, which is rotated by the action of the keys until the corresponding type is brought opposite the printing point. The former of these arrangements is the more common. Another point of difference is in the inking device; in some cases, the type is inked by means of an)ink-pad before being brought down on the paper to make the impression, but more frequently an inked ribbon is drawn along by the action of the machine between the type-face and the paper. Sometimes this ribbon is inked in two colours, enabling the operator, by bringing the appropriate portion opposite the type-face, to write, say, in black and red at will. A third basis of classification may be found in the arrangement of the keyboard. In some machines there is one key for each character, in others each key does duty