Blickensderfer No. 5
A 1909 Blickensderfer No. 5 on Blickensderfer’s own DHIATENSOR keyboard rather than QWERTY. It is a genuinely different machine rather than a variation on the standard theme, and it has fewer parts than almost anything else of its period.
| Manufacturer | Blickensderfer |
|---|---|
| Model | no. 5 |
| Year | 1909 |
| Serial No. | 133130 |
| Size | Portable |
| Drive | Manual |
| Color | Black |
| Pitch | 10 |
| Layout | DHIATENSOR |
No typebars
Instead of a basket of typebars, the Blickensderfer carries every character on a single cylindrical typewheel, which rotates and tilts to present the right one to the platen. It’s the same principle IBM would reach for six decades later with the Selectric’s typeball, arrived at in the 1890s.
It doesn’t use a ribbon either — it inks from a roller. Between that and the typewheel, the whole machine has far fewer moving parts than a contemporary typebar portable, which is most of why these were light enough to be genuinely portable when nothing else was.
The DHIATENSOR keyboard
The keyboard is the other departure. DHIATENSOR puts the most frequently used letters on the bottom row, on the argument that this is where the fingers rest — a rival efficiency claim to QWERTY, made decades before Dvorak.
The typewheel
A worn or cracked typewheel is the usual reason a Blickensderfer sits unused. They’re consumable parts, machine-specific, and no longer made — which is what made a printable replacement worth designing. The type element project includes a parametric OpenSCAD typewheel, printed in resin, dimensioned from this machine.
Type specimen
Gallery
Condition
Also in the collection
A Blickensderfer No. 8, serial 135255, from the same year — same mechanism, also DHIATENSOR, with a work list of its own.