原创 End of an era - Goodbye to mechanical typewriters (Part 1)

A few weeks ago, my old friend Alan Winstanley in England sent me an email with a link to an article in the Telegraph newspaper. According to the articke, the world's last mechanical typewriter manufacturer – Godrej and Boyce, of India – now has only 500 units left in stock (they ceased production in 2009 and have now almost cleared their remaining inventory).

This is a little sad in a nostalgic sort of way... not that any of us would ever again want to use a mechanical typewriter, of course, but still... I wonder how much one of these last-ever typewriters sells for; in a way it would be a collector's item.

When you come to think about it, the typewriter actually had a fairly long run as a piece of mechanical technology that stayed in use for over 150 years (if you count the fact that there are still a few being used to this day). The first practical typewriter was conceived in 1867 by three American inventors and friends: Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samual W. Soulé.

As an aside (on the off-chance you were interested):

- Typewriter salesmen in the early 1900s were held in the same contempt that accident-chasing lawyers are today, because they used to pursue fire-fighters in the hope of selling new typewriters to burned-out businesses.
- In the early 1920s, in order to indicate that businessmen were very busy, it became common for their letters to close with the words: "Dictated but not signed." In an effort at one-upmanship this was soon supplanted by the words: "Dictated but not read." Finally, in a surrealist attempt at Monty-Python foolishness, the yuppie-equivalent of the era started to use the words: "Dictated by transatlantic telephone and recorded on tape but not read and not signed," which, when you think about it, was almost a letter in itself! (Lawyers occasionally use similar terms to this day, thereby protecting themselves from inadvertent dictation and transcription errors; the result being that irrespective of how badly they do their job ... it's not their fault!)
- In a 1930s survey of 16-year old girls across the United States, 32% stated that they wanted to grow up to be typists (which was seen as a glamorous profession) as opposed to only 5% who wanted to be film stars.

Actually, before I wander off into the weeds as is my wont, I would like to show you a picture of an antique Underwood typewriter that usually graces the shelves of my study at home (I just put it on the table to get a better picture). This is well over 100 years old and – although you can't really see it – the space bar is a piece of wood (I think it's Oak, but I'm not an expert on this).

OK, now let's wander off into the weeds ... I can't help myself ... the following is abstracted from the history section of the book Bebop Bytes Back (An Unconventional Guide to Computers) that I co-authored with my chum Alvin Brown. This is replicated here with the kind permission of ... well, me, really...

The Sholes (QWERTY) keyboard
It is commonly believed that the original layout of keys on a typewriter was intended to slow the typist down, but this isn't strictly true. Sholes and his friends obviously wished to make their typewriters as fast as possible in order to convince people to use them. However, one problem with the first machines was that the keys (or rather, the hammer bars used to strike the paper) jammed when the operator typed at any real speed, so Sholes invented what was to become known as the Sholes keyboard:

As we see, the top row of keys was used for numbers, while the bottom three rows were used for the alpha characters (the blank keys in this illustration were used for punctuation and special characters). So why did Sholes decide upon this particular layout of the keys? Well, the term digraph refers to combinations of two letters that represent a single sound, such as "sh" in "ship," where these letters are frequently written or typed one after the other. What Sholes attempted to do was to separate the letters of as many common digraphs as possible so as to prevent the keys from jamming. But in addition to being a pain to use, the resulting layout also left something to be desired on the digraph front; for example, "ed", "er", "th", and "tr" all use keys that are close to each other.

Happily, the jamming problem was eventually overcome by the use of springs that were used to quickly return the keys (hammer bars) to their initial positions, but the monster had been let loose amongst us – existing users didn't want to change and there was no turning back.

The original Sholes keyboard (which is known to us as the QWERTY Keyboard, because of the ordering of the first six keys in the upper alpha-character row) is interesting for at least two other reasons: first, there was no key for the number '1', because the inventors decided that the users could get by with the letter 'I'; and second, there was no shift key, because the first typewriters could only type uppercase letters. The first shift-key typewriter (in which uppercase and lowercase letters are made available on the same key) didn't appear on the market until 1878, and it was quickly challenged by another flavor which contained twice the number of keys, one for every uppercase and lowercase character. For quite some time these two alternatives vied for the hearts and minds of the typing fraternity, but the advent of a technique known as touch-typing favored the shift-key solution, which thereafter reigned supreme.

Speaking of touch-typing, the illustration of the Sholes keyboard above shows the 'A', 'S', 'D', and 'F' keys in white to indicate that these are the home keys for the left hand. Similarly, the other four keys shown in white are the home keys for the right hand. The terms home keys and home row refer to the base position for your fingers (excluding thumbs, which are used to hit the space bar) when you're practicing touch typing, which means that you type by touch without looking at the keyboard.

However, Sholes didn't invent these terms, because he actually gave very little thought to the way in which people would use his invention. The end result was that everyone was left to their own devices, effectively meaning that two-fingered typists using the "hunt-and-peck" method ruled the world. It was not until 1888 that a law clerk named Frank E. McGurrin won a highly publicized typing contest with his self-taught touch-typing technique, and a new era was born. (In fact, McGurrin was proficient at touch typing ten years before the contest, because he'd been practicing in the evenings since 1876 so as to gain recognition as a fast worker. However, after receiving the $2 weekly pay-raise that he'd been looking for, he neglected to tell anyone else what he'd done.)

[To be continued on This marks the end of an era (Part 2)]