Technology through Time
Manual Typewriters |
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Henry Mill took out the first patent on a writing machine in 1714. The patent title read, in part: “an artificial machine or method for the impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another, as in writing.” No plans of Mill’s invention exist. It took nearly 200 more years before the typewriter gained widespread success. But when typewriters took off, they really took off, forever changing how we work, communicate, and create.
First modern typewriter
The Sholes-Glidden typewriter, invented by Christopher Latham Sholes and manufactured by Remington in 1874, is widely acknowledged as the first modern typewriter. Other brands and models quickly followed. These early typewriters, however, typed on the underside of the platen (the rubber cylinder) and therefore, were called “blind writers.” Early typewriters utilized a variety of designs to try to get around this among other mechanical problems. These solutions were admirable in their creativity and many of the resulting machines hardly resemble typewriters.
By the mid 1890’s, the Underwood #5 along with similar Remington typewriters became the best-selling models. These typewriters were the archetypes that most typewriters of the teens, 20’s, and 30’s came to follow. These machines were in offices and homes across American and their effect was profound. The typewriter continued to improve over the years, but stayed mainly the same. While the electric typewriter may have spelled manual typewriters’ end (which in turn were made obsolete by personal computers) they have recently become much sought after collectors’ items and still sit on the desks of writers who prefer the sound and feel (and romantic inconvenience) of a manual typewriter.
MonDak Heritage Center collection
The Heritage Center’s collection contains a wide variety of typewriters, most of them were common to their times. Unlike some of the earliest typewriters, all of these machines look like typewriters. That’s why they are in our collection: people, whether in offices or in homes, used them and they worked well. The Oliver and Blickensderfer typewriters, despite their unique appearances, were common machines in the time before the Underwood #5 style came to rule.
These machines are neither cherished antiques that should be placed behind glass nor dusty relics made obsolete by the computer. They are intricate, yet simple pieces of machinery that radically changed the course of everyday life at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. This exhibit has two goals: first, it is to share the Heritage Center’s collection. These artifacts need to stop catching dust and starting catching eyes; secondly, the goal of this exhibit is to examine how seemingly mundane everyday objects (such as typewriters) influence our lives. By using manual typewriters, this investigation has the advantage of hindsight. Perhaps these typewriters can clue us into other changes.
Typewriters and Modernity
There is a myth that Mark Twain was the first writer to turn in a typewritten manuscript and that the said manuscript was Tom Sawyer. While Twain did use a typewriter (if for only a short, frustrating time) he was not the first writer to do so and the book he wrote on the typewriter was Life on the Mississippi, not Tom Sawyer. He quickly grew sick of the trouble and promptly trashed his typewriter.
Frederic Nietzsche was another 19th century writer (some say the first) who used a typewriter, although one that was in its very early forms. Nietzsche used what he called a writing ball, an early model that looks nothing like the typewriters that became popular in later years, discarded it. Despite this, Nietzsche saw the potential of the typewriter, not only as a new way of recording a writer’s words, but a new influence on those words, saying, “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.”
20th Century influences
How has the typewriter influenced the literary and cultural styles of the 20th century world? That was the question to which Nietzsche answered affirmatively: yes, our instruments powerfully effect what we create with them. In the previously mentioned article, Arthur Krystal rightly points out that the world style, “derives from stylus (from the Latin stilus, meaning any sharp, pointed implement used for writing, drawing, or engraving.)” How we communicate does affect what we communicate, and even more so, it affects the way we communicate. When typewriters were first entering the scene, typewritten business letters were sometimes seen as a sign of disrespect. Richard Polt shares the story of the “customer who received a typed letter from a business in the 1870’s and wrote back angrily to say that he was perfectly capable of reading handwriting.” Now we may see handwritten business letters as a sign of laziness and amateurism.
These are just a few examples of how the typewriter has changed communication, and one could probably come up with as many examples of how communication styles have stayed the same despite changes in technology.
Typewriters and Women
If you used the word typewriter at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, people would have trouble telling whether you were talking about the machine or the women who spent much of their day pecking away at it. That is because the association between women and typewriters was so strong at that time that both female typist and machine went by the same name. While such a close association between a machine and its operator may be dehumanizing on the surface (a genre of typewriter erotica became popular at the outset of the 20th century, featuring women seductively fingering their typewriters while showing off legs and breasts), the typewriter was one of the major causes of women entering the white-collar workplace. Take for example the growing percentage of female stenographers over these years:
1870-5% female
1890-64%
1920-92%
As the typewriter became more commonplace in American offices during the 1880’s and 1890’s, the number of women who worked those typewriters skyrocketed until they constituted a near monopoly. Women’s presence in the office became so great that, as Richard Polt, philosophy professor at Xavier and typewriter collector states, “by the 1920’s, Christopher Latham Sholes, the primary inventor of the Sholes and Glidden, could be hailed as a great contributor to women’s liberation.”
The typewriter was no cure-all for women’s disenfranchisement. The 19th Amendment, which allowed women the right to vote, was not ratified until 1920, decades after the typewriter entered popular consciousness, and women still face employment discrimination today. However, the typewriter is an example of a technology whose effects were wide-ranging. It did more than change the way we put words on a page; it changed the way we understand society and our roles in it.
QWERTY
Christopher Latham Sholes’ first typewriter, logically enough, featured an alphabetical keyboard. However, Sholes quickly found out that this set-up caused type bars to jam frequently. This led Sholes to scatter the keys across the keyboard, not completely randomly, but in a manner that would lead to fewer jams. Thus was born the QWERTY keyboard (named after the first six letters on the left top row of the keyboard). Upon bringing his new keyboard to Remington, who was manufacturing Sholes’s invention, Remington marketers added the letter p to the top row, allowing salesmen to type the word typewriter using only the top row.
Some QWERTY critics claim that Sholes deliberately used anti-engineering principles to design his keyboard and to slow down typists, but really, Sholes was only providing what he thought was a temporary solution to a sticky problem. However, the increasing popularity and huge sales of typewriters made the QWERTY a permanent fixture on the keyboards. In coming years, Sholes himself entered a design for a more efficient keyboard, but the manufacturers ignored him, choosing instead to stick with what was selling.
The Dvorak keyboard
Enter August Dvorak (distantly related to the composer), a professor of education, who in 1936 patented a keyboard configuration that he built around the letter frequencies that Dvorak observed while studying typists. The Dvorak keyboard places all the vowels on one side of the home row and the most commonly used consonants on the other side of the home row, thus forcing the typist to alternate hands and increase speed and also allowing the typist to keep their fingers on the home row most of the time. According to Jared Diamond’s article “The Curse of QWERTY,” “in a normal workday a good typist’s fingers cover up to 20 miles on a QWERTY keyboard, but only one mile on a Dvorak keyboard.”
Of course, as looking at any computer keyboard will show, we live in a world ruled by QWERTY. QWERTY’s critics and supporters fiercely debate the reasons behind QWERTY’s success. Opponents claim that QWERTY is an example of market failure: in a free-market economy, the clearly superior Dvorak keyboard should have won out, but such was not the case. QWERTY supporters claim that QWERTY did in fact win out in the free-market and therefore, is the better keyboard design. These supporters also question the objectivity of the methods Dvorak and others used to show the superiority of Dvorak over QWERTY.
The reign of QWERTY may seem innocent enough, but the issue raises questions about how the market works, if the market always rewards the best products, and how we as consumers adapt or resist to changes in things we think of as standard. As Dvorak stated shortly before he died in 1975, “I’m tired of trying to do something worthwhile for the human race. They simply don’t want to change.”
Bibliography
Alec Longstreth, Michael Cardiff, and Gabe Carleton-Barnes. “The Dvorak Zine.” http://dvzine.org. 2005.
Diamond, Jared. “The Curse of QWERTY.” Discover. April 1997. Vol. 18. Issue 4.
Early Office Museum. 2000-2005. http://www.officemuseum.com.
Krystal, Arthur. “Against Type? What the writing machine has wrought.” Harper’s Magazine. Dec. 2002. Vol. 305. Issue 1831.
Liebowitz, S.J. and Stephen E. Margolis. “The Fable of the Keys.” Journal of Law & Economics. Vol. XXXIII. April 1990.
-----“Typing Errors.” Reason. June 1996. Vol. 28. Issue 2.
Polt, Richard. The Classic Typewriter Page. 1995. http://staff.xu.edu/~polt/typewriters/index.html
-----“Back to the Things Themselves.” Paper presented to philosophy conference, March 1996.
Rehr, Darryl. The QWERTY Connection. 1996. http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/
Roberts, Paul. “The Virtual Typewriter Museum.” http://www.typewritermuseum.org
----Sexy Legs and Typewriters. The Virtual Typewriter Museum, 2003.
The Typewriter Database. http://www.tw-db.com/indexen.htm