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PRATT, John, journalist, and inventor of the typewriter, was born in Unionville, S. C., Apr. 14, 1831. His father was a judge for over thirty years in South Carolina, and his grandfather, on his mother's side, was a judge under the life system then in vogue. The son was educated in his native state, was graduated from Cokesbury college in 1849, and for some years was a journalist and lawyer in the Soulh. He married, at the age of twenty-one, Julia R. Porter, a daughter of Judge Benjamin F. Porter, of Alabama. In 1864 Mr. Pratt and his wife went to England, where they remained for several years, he devoting his time to the invention of a mechanism which he designated the “Ptérotype.” It proved to be the first working typewriter that ever secured a sale. In 1867 his machine was exhibited before the Society of Arts in London, the Society of Engineers and the Royal Society of Great Britain. A paper read by the inventor before the Society of Arts was printed in the journal issued by that body. Provisional protection to the invention was granted by the British government in February, 1864. Letters Patent No. 3,163 were granted on Dec. 1, 1866. Mr. Pratt claimed four operations as requisite to the accomplishment of his purpose: That it was necessary to bring any one of a number of types at the will of the operator, and in arbitrary succession, to a common point; to form a colored or other legible character at that common point; to feed the paper across the common point so as to make proper intervals between the letters and words; to prepare a device for bringing the paper readily and speedily back to its starting point, with an interval between the lines. His invention received editorial mention and description in several of the English journals, and it was one of these descriptions that attracted the attention of Sholes & Glidden, of Milwaukee, in 1867, and laid the foundation by them of the Remington typewriter, which has met with such remarkable success, together with its scores of followers. On returning to the United States in 1868, Mr. Pratt secured letters patent in August of that year (see U. S. Let. Pat., No. 81,000). There is preserved as a curiosity, among the treasures of the patent office, a typewritten letter from him which accompanied his model. The spacing, alignment, etc., it is claimed, have never been excelled. He has since been actively identified with typewriting inventions, and a patent was granted as recently as the latter part of 1891. The second patent granted Mr. Pratt by the United States (Nov. 14, 1882) was sold to the Hammond Company. It embraced Ihe axial movement of the type-wheel, thus rendering available several rows of type, and upper and lower case letters. Mr. Pratt was the inventor of a machine in which a type-wheel was moved by key-levers; also in which a connected solid body, that is, a type-plate or type wheel, was moved by key-levers. He was the first man to make and sell typewriters, having sold several in London in 1867. Among his purchasers were Sir Charles Wheatstone and Dr. Bence Jones, the author of a “Life of Faraday.” He was the first to use compound motion, and thus utilize several rows of type on plate or wheel; the first to apply escapement to feed motion and trip-hammer action in a wheel or plate machine. He has, since 1886, been a resident of Brooklyn, and is still engaged in inventive studies. If Sholes can be called the “father of the typewriter,” Pratt may justly be called the grandfather.

Attribution

• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: The National Cyclopædia of American Biography. Vol. 3. New York: J. T. White & Company. 1893. p. 315.