Daisy Wheel Printers
History
The original daisy wheel was designed by General Electric and patented in 1942. A company named Diablo, which was later purchased by Xerox made the daisy wheel printer popular in the 1960’s. They could print up to 80 characters per second, which was significant for the time.

How They Worked
Daisy wheel printers were similar in design to many electrical typewriter mechanisms. The cartridge of a daisy wheel printer contained a plastic cartridge that contained plastic spokes. Each of the spokes of the wheel had a printable character on it.

A daisy wheel printer would rotate the plastic wheel and once the character you selected was facing the paper a hammer would impact the spoke, causing it to leave an ink imprint on the page.

Why They Were Popular
Quality daisy wheel printers were popular in their day because they printed crisp text documents. In fact they were often referred to as letter-quality printers in the 1980’s.

Daisy wheel-prinert were also popular because they allowed users to change the font, by changing out the wheel. While this may not seem like much by today’s standard it was impressive at the time.

Why They Disappeared
Daisy wheel printers were very noisy. There loudness was often compared to the booming of firecrackers. The noise was made by the hammers striking the spokes to form characters on paper. This loudness made these printers impractical in many settings.

In addition, daisy wheel printers were extremely slow. In fact their print speed was measured in characters per minute, rather than pagers per minute as most printers are today. In addition, these printers were limited to printing text only. They did not have the ability to print graphics.

As thermal printers improved in quality the daisy printer became less popular. And when the inkjet and laser printers were introduced in the 1980’s even the cheapest daisy wheel printers became obsolete.

Today daisy wheels are not used in printers. In fact, they are rarely sold at all. You can occasionally buy a discount daisy wheel printer or a used daisy wheel printer from stores that feature antique or discontinued machinery, but they are no longer manufactured by most of the large printing companies today.