Excursus

As this blog is about the technology of writing, perhaps it is not too far off topic to post about its history.

The New Yorker currently has a review of The Iron Whim, A Fragmented History of the Typewriter by Darren Wershler-Henry.

While writing machines were being designed since at least the eighteenth century (many with the expressed intent of being a prosthetic device for the blind), Christopher Latham Sholes is credited as being the “father” of the typewriter as the arms manufacturer E. Remington & Sons took up his design after the American Civil War in a bid to diversify their production portfolio as the demand for rifles had dried up. Before designing the typewriter, Sholes had been working on a mechanical paginator (a need later fulfilled by procedural markup).

For those of you not yet familiar with the origins of QWERTY, the unfortunate history of yet another species of the undead is retold:

Sholes was also the author of the so-called QWERTY keyboard, which, with a few modifications, is still in use on our personal computers. (Look at the top row of your letter keys.) A problem with early typewriters was that the key arms kept getting stuck together. As the arm of the letter that had just been typed was falling back into place, it would jam against the arm rising to type the next letter, and the typist would have to stop and pry them apart. Reportedly, Sholes’s partner delegated his son-in-law, the superintendent of schools for western Pennsylvania, to draw up a list of the most common two-letter sequences in the English language. Sholes then designed the keyboard so that these pairs were separated, thus introducing a tiny delay between the activation of one letter and the next. Wershler-Henry quotes an early history of the typewriter, Bruce Bliven’s “The Wonderful Writing Machine,” to the effect that the QWERTY keyboard was in fact “considerably less efficient than if the arrangement had been left to chance.” Nevertheless, people got used to it, and it was never replaced.

Joan Acocella, the author of the review, makes an interesting observation about the difference between typing on a computer and a typewriter:

Consider, for example, our physical involvement with the typewriter, which stands in relation to our connection with the P.C. as a fistfight does to a handshake. On the P.C., we use the same typing skills that we used on the typewriter, but the contact is not the same. We run our fingers lightly over the keys, making a gentle, pitter-patter sound. On the typewriter, by contrast, we had to stab, and the machine recorded our action with a great big clack. We liked that. (As Wershler-Henry tells us, a silent typewriter was put on the market in the nineteen-forties, and nobody wanted it.) The noise told us that we had achieved something. So, in larger measure, did the carriage return—another line done!—and the job of changing the paper—another page done!

I, for one, think she is right (though perhaps this is rose colored nostalgia for the days when I used a typewriter). This kind of aural feedback is similar to the ping that is sounded when you increase or decrease the volume on a Mac—something I consider to be a good design feature. If there were a program that would generate the clatter of a typewriter as one typed, would you use it?