The machine that shaped the keyboard
For more than a century, the clatter of the typewriter was the sound of office work. The machine itself has now disappeared from all but a few desks, yet it has left behind something that billions of people touch every day: the arrangement of the letters on their keyboards.
The typewriter had no single inventor. From the early eighteenth century onwards, dozens of people in Europe and America designed machines for writing, and several were actually built, but none was a commercial success. The man usually given the credit is Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer in the American city of Milwaukee. Working with two friends in the late 1860s, he produced a model with keys rather like those of a small piano, and in 1868 they were granted a patent.
Their machine had a serious fault. Each key was connected to a thin metal bar with a letter on the end, which swung upwards to strike the paper. On the earliest version the keys were set out in alphabetical order, and when two neighbouring bars were used one after the other they tended to collide and stick together. Sholes's answer was to rearrange the letters so that those most often typed in succession were kept apart. The result is known as QWERTY, after the first six letters of the top row. It is widely believed that the layout was intended to slow typists down. This is a misunderstanding. Its purpose was to prevent jams, and by doing so it allowed people to type faster.
Sholes had neither the money nor the commercial talent to exploit his invention, and he sold his rights to a businessman, who took the machine to the firm of Remington. Remington was a manufacturer of guns which, after the end of the American Civil War, had turned to producing sewing machines as well. The first Remington typewriter, which went on sale in 1874, clearly showed its origins: it was mounted on a sewing machine stand, and the typist moved to a new line by pressing a pedal with the foot. It had two major limitations. It could print only capital letters, and because the bars struck the underside of the roller, the typist was unable to see what had been written until several lines later.
Sales were slow at first. One early purchaser was the novelist Mark Twain, who afterwards claimed to have been the first author to send a typewritten manuscript to a publisher. A second model, introduced in 1878, added a shift key, which allowed the same key to produce either a capital or a small letter. Machines on which the typing was visible followed from a rival company in the 1890s.
At first, people operated the machine with two fingers, looking for each letter in turn. That changed after a public contest held in Cincinnati in 1888. One of the two competitors, Frank McGurrin, had memorised the keyboard and used all ten fingers without looking at his hands. His opponent, who had learned on a rival machine with a different layout, used only four. McGurrin won with ease, and the newspapers reported the result across the country. The contest established 'touch typing' as the method to be taught, and because the schools that taught it used Remington machines, it also fixed QWERTY as the standard.
The social effects of the typewriter were considerable. Before it appeared, office clerks were almost all men. Typing, however, was a new occupation with no tradition of belonging to either sex, and employers quickly discovered that women could be hired to do it for lower pay. By 1900 about three-quarters of the typists in the United States were women, and the word 'typewriter' was used for the operator as well as for the machine. For many women, it offered the first opportunity to earn an income of their own, even if promotion was rare.
Later history can be told briefly. Electric typewriters arrived in the 1930s. In 1936 a professor named August Dvorak patented a layout that placed the commonest letters on the middle row, where the fingers rest, and claimed that it was faster and less tiring to use. It never caught on, because millions of typists had already been trained on the old one. In 1961 a new machine replaced the separate bars with a single metal ball carrying every character. Then, in the 1980s, computers made the typewriter itself unnecessary. The keyboard layout survived the change, although it had been designed to solve a mechanical problem that no longer existed.