Daisy Wheel Printer Detail and Pictures

Tuesday, May 28, 2013 By Unknown

Information Of Daisy Wheel Printer 2

A type of printer that produces letter-quality type. A daisy-wheel printer works on the same principle as a ball-head typewriter. The daisy wheel is a disk made of plastic or metal on which characters stand out in relief along the outer edge. To print a character, the printer rotates the disk until the desired letter is facing the paper. Then a hammer strikes the disk, forcing the character to hit an ink ribbon, leaving an impression of the character on the paper. You can change the daisy wheel to print different fonts.

Daisy-wheel printers cannot print graphics , and in general they are noisy and slow, printing from 10 to about 75 characters per second. As the price of laser and ink-jet printers has declined, and the quality of dot-matrix printers has improved, daisy-wheel printers have become obsolete.

Information Of Daisy Wheel Printer 2

Typewriter History

The Reverend Kaley of Carey

and his Daisywheel Typewriter

John Andrew Kaley

On this day in 1883, the Reverend John Andrew Kaley, of Carey, Ohio, applied for a US patent for a “type-writing machine” using a daisywheel.

A modern daisywheel typewriter

In his specifications, Kaley described his daisywheel thus: “The types are arranged upon the outer ends of arms radiating from a common centre, and as a whole in the general shape of a concave disk of metal. [The typeslugs comprise] alphabets of small and capital letters, and numerals and punctuation and other marks, arranged in concentric circles at the outer ends of the arms, said arms being springs. The types may be of rubber cemented to the metal, or they may be of other material and otherwise attached to the arms, or may be one with the arms …

“By thus arranging the type-disk, a number of disks containing a variety of type may be readily employed on any one machine.”

Kaley's daisywheel

A more modern daisywheel

John Andrew Kaley was born, one of 12 children, in Union County, Pennsylvania, on March 31, 1845. His family moved to Carey, Ohio, when he was still a child. Three days before his 19th birthday, on March 28, 1864, Kaley enlisted in the Union Army’s Signals Corps. He served in the Civil War for two years, later writing of the experience, “There I learned the use and handling of myself. While in camp I made my way through Ray's Arithmetic, a feat performed by perhaps no other soldier of the war.”

After the war, Kaley taught school for a few years then entered the Lutheran Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio. On graduation he took up a three-year Theological Seminary course in New England, first at Andover, Massachusetts (later part of Harvard), and the last year at Yale. He graduated in 1875.

Kaley then preached for three years in New England before travelling through Europe, Egypt, Sinai and Palestine. On his return to Carey, he applied for a patent for his typewriter invention. In the late 1880s, while living in Carson City, Michigan, he patented a “privy [toilet] seat”.

Kaley served Vermilion’s First Congregational Church from 1895 to 1904, then a church in Little Valley, New York, before returning to Ohio and serving various parishes in the state, retiring from pastoral duties in 1908. He settled in Elyria, Lorain County, Ohio, where he continued some preaching on Cleveland radio. He died in Elyria, aged 93, on December 13, 1938.

Lowell, 100 years after Kaley

Kaley continued to dabble in inventing into the early 1930s, patenting a paring machine and a shoe stretcher.

Kaley’s typewriter patent, issued in May 1885, was referenced a century later by Herman H.Lowell for his “spoked multiple-wheel printer”. Others to reference it were Ta Cheng Ku and Donald J.Stiles of IBM for a cup-shaped printer and Robert E.Boyden for a single element flexible type drum, both in 1976 (both came under the category of “thimble printers”). In 1987 Roy J.Lahr referenced Kaley’s splitable keyboard.

Martin Howard Collection

The first typewriter to go into production using a daisywheel was the Victor, which was invented by Arthur Irving Jacobs, of Hartford, Connecticut (1858-1918) in 1888. Jacobs also invented the drill chuck.

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