TechStuff Tackles Typewriters

Special guest Holly Frey joins the show to talk about typewriters. What's their history and what's the real scoop behind the QWERTY keyboard?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from dot com.
Hey everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
and today I am joined once again by my coworker
and the one of the co hosts of Stuffy miss
in History Class, Holly. Welcome back, Hello, good to be here, Holly. Now,

(00:27):
last time when you joined us, we talked about sewing
machines and and they're amazing connection to patent wars, which
was incredible. I had never known about that. A few
people associate sewing with like fisticuffs and business anger, but
in fact we're all tied up together. It's actually quite
well tailored fisticuffs. So this time we're going to talk

(00:51):
again sort of a historical look, but now we're going
to look at typewriters, which actually have a slight connection
to sewing machines, is it turns out. But in order
to look at this, I thought we'd look at sort
of the history of type setting. And to do that
you got to go back to the fifteenth century. Yeah,
we're all the way back, and it's one of those things, uh,

(01:12):
and we'll talk about it. But I have often heard
people ask like, why didn't the typewriter happen sooner. Yeah,
we're going to touch on that. Yeah, So way back
in the fifteenth century, that's when uh, Johann Gutenberg, when
Johann Gutenberg began to experiment with printing techniques, and by

(01:33):
the fourteen fifties he had actually developed the famous printing
press produced the Gutenberg Bible, probably the most famous book
from the medieval era, simply because it was well medieval
Renaissance era, simply because it was the first one to
be mass produced in a rapid particularly compared to the
other rapid round. Rapid with air quotes is definitely the

(01:57):
way to go. But you didn't have to have a
school monks hand illuminating scripts in order to come out
with copies of something, and we wouldn't really need a typewriter. However,
this was meant to produce things on a mass scale,
like a single document on a mass scale. It wasn't
meant to be uh for one off, right, you weren't

(02:19):
going to to type set a letter to your wife,
dearest wife. How romantic would that be? Though? Right? H
I employed three clerks in the efforts I make to
write to you to tell you my tub reculosis as
settled and no, that was not the way things worked.
But one of the reasons why we didn't see a

(02:42):
need for this sort of thing to to creep into
other areas, like the idea of can we make a
device like a printing press but for a personal use?
Is that uh? Well, First, until the Industrial Revolution, there
was no way to create that kind of thing on
a mass scale, right, And you couldn't really go out
and churn out a dozen typewriters in a day back

(03:05):
in the technology of the mid fifteenth century yet. But
even if there were. The other part was that labor,
particularly in Europe, was really cheap, and there was not
really a need to go and find a labor saving
device for a person because there were plenty of people.

(03:26):
There were plenty of people who were starving, and you
could pay them a haypenny for them to write down
what you assuming they could write that, they could write
down what you wanted them to say. So, um, but
it wouldn't it wouldn't be too much longer. I mean
still pretty early when you look at the first patent
or patent as the case may be, for a typewriter,

(03:46):
which dates all the way back to seventeen fourteen. Yes,
so we jumped forward like three years, but again nothing,
an abundance of people very happy to do things in
that time when they were not, you know, stumbling around
dying or or or making one another die. Yeah. And

(04:07):
then in seventeen fourteen, Uh, there was, as you said,
the first patent for Henry Mill, and that was issued
by Queen Anne of Great Britain, of course, and that
patent uh described an artificial machine or method for the
impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively, one after another,
as in writing, whereby all writings whatsoever, may be engrossed

(04:29):
in paper or parchment, so that the said machine or
method maybe of great use in settlements and public records,
the impression being deeper and more lasting than any other writing,
and not to be erased or counterfeited without manifest discovery. Yep.
That's uh, that's patent language, guys. You can tell that
that dates from seventeen fourteen, and patents have become no

(04:51):
less obtuse in that time. That's downright clear and brief
compared to a lot of monetor's. And as is often
the case, the more words there are, the less we
know about what actually happened in historical patents. Yeah, in
this case, we have no surviving illustrations or model as
far as we've known, mill never built one of these things.

(05:14):
Perhaps he did, but if he did, there's no record
of it. So most of the sources I've read have
essentially said there's it was never probably never insisted. So
but still it shows that people as far back as
the early eighteenth century, we're thinking about creating a machine
that would allow for the writing of words in a

(05:37):
in a mechanized fashion. Then we moved to forward another
century to eight and we have an Italian inventor, Pellegrino Turi,
and he creates a typing machine for the Countess Carolina Fantoni.
D Well, sorry not da Vivizan. Oh man, my Italian
is terrible. My Germans only slightly worse. Um, at least

(06:01):
I didn't try and throw in one of those terrible
like like over the top stereotypical Italian accents, as I
am wont to do. But it was interesting, you know
he made this for the countess for a specific reason. Yeah,
she could not handwright because she had lost her vision. Yeah,
so he created this device for her. We don't know

(06:22):
what this particular device looked like. No model survives, However,
unlike the case with mill, we know that it existed
because there are still uh examples of the letters that
the Countess wrote on this device. Yeah, I would give
anything to see how it worked and how it particularly

(06:43):
addressed her lack of vision, like sort of a variant
almost Braille type situation going on, because there had to
be feel elements to the keys or should to memorize placement. Right,
we don't even know if there were keys on this device, right,
We don't know what the mechanism was for it. We
just know that it was a thing that would allow
her to write, and it's pretty phenomenal. Again, it's it's

(07:07):
sad that that's lost to history because I also would
love to hear about, you know, what actually happened. But
then we get to the point where the Americans get involved. Yeah,
as we moved deeper into the eighteen hundreds, things really
start cooking. The first one of note is William Austin Burt,
and he was an American engineer and he was issued
a patent for what he called a typographer, and this

(07:28):
basically resembled a large chunk of wood and it had
sort of a clock like face on one side of it,
and according to this pattern, it was twelve by twelve,
so twelve inches wide, twelve inches tall, and then eighteen
inches long, so a little bit bigger than an actual
cube in terms of dimension. And then it was a
little bit clunky in its actual function because to type

(07:50):
a single letter, you'd have to rotate this lever, and
then you would press down on it and make that
letter press against the paper, so you're kind of just
turn this dial. I tried to imagine what it would
be like to like type an email that way, and
it makes me both laughing cringe at the same time.
There are a couple of things. I actually watched the

(08:11):
video of one of these being used, but it was
without any helpful narration to explain what was going on,
and I, honestly I could not tell how you could
make sure you were putting the right letter on the
right spot on a page. It almost looked like the
impressions on the page we're going willy nilly. But I've
seen actual letters that were written using the typographer, and

(08:34):
they look like a fairly not the not the neatest
type letter you've ever seen, but it is obviously a
type letter and neater than handwriting. Yeah, But however it
was not faster than handwriting, So this particular device never
really took off. Also, there was a big setback. We
talked about this, I think in our Sewing Machine episode

(08:56):
two we did, and it's actually come up in other
episodes we've done. And if you missed in history class
that in UH six there was a huge fire at
the U. S. Patent Office which destroyed a lot of
historical records, including the only existing model of this device. Now,
there was a replica that was built and displayed for
the eight nine three Columbian Exposition in Chicago, So if

(09:19):
you weren't busy getting murdered by H. H. Holmes, you
could have checked out the typographer. I believe that was
the same one as H. H. Holmes being active. I
could be wrong about that, but it seems correct. But
I would want to well at any rate. Uh, it
just makes me think of The Devil in the White
City and a fantastic book that everyone should check out
about the the exposition and also about H. H. Holmes.

(09:41):
But uh, yeah, so at least there was this replica built,
and I think it was the replica of the Smithsonian
I believe holds the actual replica today. And um I
saw the video of it being used in action, and
again it didn't have any helpful narration. The patent itself
describes how it works, but again it's using such obtuse

(10:02):
language that I could not get the meaning from the description. Yeah,
it's kind of one of those things where if you
had the machine in the patent in hand and you
could like step through the steps and look it out,
it would probably become click crystal clear, right, I could
be like two elements of the key together. You cannot
crack the code exactly. Yeah, it was. It was completely
obscured from me. Now, in eighteen forty three, we have

(10:23):
another inventor, Charles Thurber, who incorporates two things that become
very important in later implementations of typewriters. He incorporates a
movable carriage that's the part that holds the paper, and
the carriage itself moves as opposed to having to move
the device around the paper in order to print the
next letter. So you type a letter, the carriage moves

(10:46):
a space so that you can type the next letter,
and then eventually you have to do a carriage return
so that you can start typing again. Any of you
guys out there who never used a typewriter, and I
assume there's probably more of you than there than otherwise,
since typewriters are rarely used at all these days, you
might not appreciate that. But of course, you get to
the end of a line in a piece of paper

(11:07):
and you have to move down and across to the
to get to the next line, and that's what the
character turn was all about. He also implemented metal levers
that stamped the letters or numbers onto paper into his
typing apparatus, and it was also considered to be really
slow and clunky and cumbersome, so it never took off
in the market. But those metal levers would become important.

(11:27):
The mechanical action of moving a lever up to press
against some sort of inked piece of paper or maybe
carbon paper, to then make an impression against a blank
sheet of paper, so that you stamp whatever letter it
is onto the sheet. Yeah, those carried on for many, many,
many many moons after that. Yeah, it was. And this

(11:48):
seems like a good time to just mention we're really
looking at the early years of the typewriter, and we're
talking specifically about mechanical ones. We could continue that discussion
and get into things like, uh, you know, electro mechanical
and electric typewriter. That's that's an entirely like that would

(12:08):
that would make a two hour podcast. So we're really
focusing on the mechanical ones here. But eighteen sixty seven
is when we meet a very important person in the
way typewriters turned out. Yeah, and we're going to give
a little bit of backstory on him because he is
such a pivotal figure. So Christopher Latham Shoals was a
US inventor. He was actually born in eighteen nineteen, so

(12:30):
by the time he was really kind of becoming a
figure on the scene of typewriters, he was pretty mature.
He had apprenticed for a printer for several years before
he eventually became an editor at the Wisconsin Inquirer, which
was based out of Madison, Wisconsin, and then he went
on to work at other newspapers as well and had
them out and he even had a little bit of
a for a into a political career. He served in

(12:53):
the state legislature and then he left his newspaper time
because someone very importank sort of came into his life,
and that was President Lincoln, who appointed him as collector
at the Port of Milwaukee. Huh. And so in case
anyone does not know what a collector at a port is,
that's the person who is responsible for collecting import duties

(13:14):
and taxes on goods that are entering the port, and
they can oversee all those people that go and do
those things. I thought he was like a Somalia, that
kind of port collector if only yeah, okay, Well, he
ended up making friends with a fellow, Samuel soul Uh,
and in eighteen sixty four, they were issued a patent
for a machine that would number pages. So it was

(13:37):
an idea. The idea was that would sequentially number pages
for like a book, So you would press this button
and you get three, and then four and then five.
And it was considered to be a labor saving device.
But then another fellow, Carlos Carlos Glidden, who was also
a fellow inventor, you know, someone who liked to work

(13:58):
with this kind of stuff, looked this and said, huh,
what if you were to, I don't know, take the
same principle that you created, but make it so that
you could type, you know, letters onto a piece of paper.
So you're using essentially the same approach that you're using here,
but now you can actually type in words and make
a mechanical typewriter. Yeah, that suggestion pretty much change shoals

(14:23):
life forever was. He then focused almost exclusively on the
typewriter for the rest of his career. And so he
produced a prototype This is around eighteen sixty eight, but
it could only print the letter w It was just
really to show a proof of concept, and not to
my dearest woo. It wasn't like that, um, but it

(14:45):
was to see if he could actually do it, and
he did, and then they said, all right, let's let's
devote more effort into creating this, uh, this typewriter and
to try and make one that we can end up
marketing and patenting. Um. So in eighteen sixty eight they
had a typewriter patent issue to them two Sholes, Glidden
and Soul collectively, and Shoals was the primary person on

(15:08):
that patent. And uh, yeah, I love that the note
you have here that the first prototype was similar to
a telegraph key. That exactly is what it was like.
You pressed down you get that little W and you're like,
just send all the W you want now. Granted, if
you if you get the letter upside down, you think
it's just like we had a really good if you
flipped your page a lot, it's about it. And they

(15:29):
did end up getting two more patents issued in the
following years because you know, they were all inventors and
tin careers, as we've said, so they were constantly trying
to improve upon it. So in eighteen seventy we get
one of the coolest, weirdest typewriters ever, Rasmus molly Hanson

(15:50):
invented what is called the writing ball. And you guys,
you need to if you don't know what this looks like,
you've got to go on a on a Google image
so or something, pull up a picture of the Rasmus
maulling Henson writing ball or typewriter ball. If that that
will probably bring it up to It looks like it
could come right out of like a Clive Barker hell

(16:11):
razor kind. Yeah, it's like Pinhead's cousin, you know, Keyhead. Yeah,
maybe that could be it. Uh So, yeah, you look
at this thing. It looks like it's it's a sphere
that's been cut in half, and it's got all the
little keys that stick out of it. Um and the
Malling Hanson Society, which by the way, is more than

(16:35):
a little biased, they call it the world's first commercially
produced typewriter, and Mulling Hanson received lots of different prizes
and recognition at various events around the world, mainly in
Europe but also in the United States for producing this
this particular piece of technology, and his version would evolve

(16:56):
over time. It wasn't just you know, it wasn't one
set and then it stayed that way, but it always
retained that strange kind of ball shape. And the society
also claims that the key layout on the writing ball
allowed for much faster typing than the quirty based keyboards
that would soon follow. So we still haven't gotten to
the point where the quirty keyboard is a thing that's

(17:19):
coming pretty soon. But the society is like, well, that
keyboard is slow and and and laborious. This thing you
could type really really quickly. Now, each key was connected
to a piston, and the piston would stamp a piece
of paper, either through a carbon paper or InCD ribbon.
The paper itself was on kind of this curved um

(17:40):
uh setting like you would you would put it. There
was these long sheets of paper and they fit on
this little curve platform that would ratchet up by by
piece by piece. So if you're typing, like facing the object, Uh,
it's almost like it's at a ninety degree angle the
way that the paper is being typed. So you wouldn't

(18:01):
type this like you would on a typewriter where you could,
especially a modern typewriter where you can actually see what
you've just typed. You type out a line and it
would it would be like it would look like it's
going vertically across the page to you, but it's because
the entire page is ninety degrees from you. So it's
a really odd thing. Uh. And Terry Gillium like, that's

(18:23):
that's a very Terry Gilliam historical film kind of piece
you would see. I would completely expect to see this
in the background during Brazil, for example. It would fit
in exact. In fact, when I saw it, I thought,
this looks like something from Brazil or maybe twelve Monkeys.
But Molling Hanson died when he was only fifty five
years old in eight and he had an outstanding order

(18:45):
for one writing balls from a manufacturer, and the manufacturer
you know, canceled it because the guy died, and since
that point no one ever made any more of them.
They are collector's items. I think one sold for like
a hundred thousand euros in an aux, and not too
long ago there are a few in museums. They are
considered to be uh, really lovely pieces for people who

(19:08):
have lots and lots of money, not highly coveted. In
the typewriter aficionado heard yeah and who knew there is one? Oh? Yeah,
I actually I own a good old uh. I think
it's a own a Rimington's and an Underwood and old.
Both of them are pretty old um that I just
happened to find it like a h an old uh

(19:31):
secondhand shop, and I was very proud of them. They are,
by the way, some of the heaviest pieces of technology
I've ever had to carry. Yeah, we have an Underwood
number five that has been in my husband's family forever
and it needs some work, but it's that's a backbreaker
to hook it around there. Well. One interesting thing about
the writing ball, apart from its strange shape and the
fact that it's supposedly was much more easy to type

(19:53):
on than the quirty keyboards. Was that a famous person
owned one, Friedrich Nietici. Did I hear that it was
a gift from his sister and his mother. That's what
I had originally read, although I never substantiated it. I
couldn't find a ductual sources that said that was true.
That's what I heard, But I also heard that Molly

(20:14):
Hansen delivered it in person to Nietici, so it may
be that it was arranged by his mother and sister.
Is we enter the realm of myth occasionally, and I
think this is one of those times. So Nietchie his
vision was failing, so he needed to have something to
help him right. He wanted to continue writing, but he
could not really see to write out things Longhand. And

(20:36):
what's really cool to me is that there are scholars
who talk about how Nietchie's writing the style of Nichi's
writing changed when he switched over to typing on the
writing ball as opposed to trying to write in Longhand.
And you might argue that that style could have been
affected by the fact that he could no longer really see,
but most people said that it was the actual mechanical

(20:57):
process of typing on the keys that change the tone
of his writing, and Nietzche's response to this was actually
that he agreed. He said, our writing equipment takes part
in the forming of our thoughts. So the way that
we are expressing ourselves, the medium through which we do it,
impacts the way we we expressed that thought. And if

(21:19):
we're writing, longhand, we're going to do it in a
different way than if we're typing. I think a lot
of people would actually agree with that. But it's kind
of fascinating those this early on in the birth of
the typewriter that we see someone make that observation. Wouldn't
he be fascinated by texting? Probably? Omg uh. And I

(21:40):
mean I completely subscribe to that mode of thought because
I know even if I change pens, my handwriting changes,
and the tone of my writing will change based on that.
If I have to write and pen, the tone changes
so that I write as brief message as I possibly
can because I'm left handed, so I smudge a lot.
But at any rate, getting back to in eighteen seventy three,

(22:03):
back to shoals And and his fully functional typewriter. Now, uh,
it was finally a real improvement here in the United
States over just writing things out with a pen. It
was it was faster, it was easier. And that's where
we get to the Shoals and Glitten typewriter. Yeah, as
we mentioned sort of where we left off with these

(22:24):
guys before we went to the ball, they were they
had additional patents. They had really sort of started to
refine and develop this thing, but they were having some
very serious money problems. They just did not have the
capital to start churning these things out on their own.
So they sold the patent rights for twelve thousand dollars
in eighteen seventy three, some serious money in eighteen Yeah,

(22:48):
that is not jump change. And the company that bought
those rights was the Remington's Arms Company. Wait like like
like the gun. Uh, Well they did a lot of
They had their hands in many many pies. Uh. And
so Shoals continue to work with Remington on this on
the development of the typewriter, and the company had resources

(23:08):
and machinery where they could develop and manufacture things, and
it would eventually become the Remington typewriter. Although the initial
the very first model that came out was still called
the Shoals in Glitten, right. Uh. And you know Remington
make the joke about the company that makes guns. Uh.
We talked about them, I think in our sewing machine episode,
because they also made sewing machines. Uh. It was one

(23:30):
of the things that allowed them to say like, well,
we've got a lot of the we've got a lot
of of expertise in making these machine parts, these fiddlely
bits that need to all work together, so I think
that we can take this on. And uh, yeah, it
was if we If you were to look at the
Shoals and Glitten typewriter, the the first match to come out,

(23:53):
you'd see all the basic parts of typewriters that would
follow for many years afterwards, decade afterwards. So they it
had the keys that were linked to leavers. These were
the mechanical so you pressed down on a key, it
would cause the lever to pivot uh and hit a
sheet of paper first of course, striking an inked ribbon.

(24:14):
So that's what actually would stamp the letter onto the
sheet of paper. And uh. And however, you were had
some limitations here, like you could type any letter you wanted,
only if you love capitals the right. This is this
is like the constant screen. The first typewriters were like
YouTube commenters who haven't figured out that the caps lock

(24:36):
is not really an effective means of trying to get
your point across. Um, Yeah, there there were There were
no lower case letters. Is all upper case. And it
also introduced the now standard Corty keyboard. And you might ask,
why the heck is the keyboard like that? Why do
we have this weird layout? You know, if you were

(24:58):
to look at a keyboard, just take a little get
a keyboard anywhere near you at the moment, you'll see. Yeah,
you're right. The letters are not in any kind of
order that I would normally consider. So why is that?
And there are a couple of reasons, or at least
a couple of reasons that we tend to think of today.
The real reason is possibly lost to antiquity, but we

(25:19):
can make some guesses. I think it's a combo burrito
of these reasons. I think so too. The first one
is that one of the problems was that if a
user type too quickly, uh, the letters would jam up. Yeah,
the levers would cross one another, they get stuck. Then
you'd have to unstick the levers get them all back
in place and start again, because keep in mind, this

(25:39):
is purely mechanical. Yeah, so there is the the story
that it was designed. This keyboard layout is designed to
kind of slow you down and not necessarily be intuitive,
where one letter follows another the way you would anticipate.
So it's still faster than writing, but not as fast
as you would like it to be, because if it
were as fast as you like it to be, it
would all jam up. That's that's one story. Another one

(26:01):
is just that the printing bars themselves they wanted to
separate out letters that would be uh common combinations so together.
You wouldn't want the T, N H to to be
placed so that the two bars would be right next
to each other because they'd be more likely to jam

(26:21):
one another. So you wanted to spread it out so
that any letters that would be a good combination would
normally come from different parts of the machine, which meant
that the keys themselves had to be placed in specific parts.
So I'm guessing there was a lot of R and
D that they did to figure out, like, well, if
we put the T here, where do we put the H?

(26:41):
Because if the H is right here, it's gonna mess
everything up. I was gonna say, I bet there is
a notebook somewhere of like the most wonderfully bizarre series
of tests and notes on how they could and couldn't
arrange these. I can just imagine notes like Glidden tried,
uh tried keyboard number seven and FIA today tossed that

(27:01):
one out. Uh Yeah, So it's probably a combination of
these two things. I personally it maybe that they wanted
to physically slow people down so that they made the
keyboard awkward as a result, But I think it's probably
more likely they wanted to just get these letters as
far apart the levers, as far apart from the most
common letters as possible, and as a result, the keyboard

(27:25):
is awkward and thus were slowed down. But that that
was not necessarily the intent, however, I don't know for sure.
Here's my favorite fact about the shoals in Gluten typewriter. Okay,
it was made by Remington's sewing machine division, And if
you have ever seen an older like treadle sewing machine,
they often have these beautifully embellished little flowers and stuff

(27:46):
on them. So did the typewriter. Yeah, and only that,
but the earliest typewriters they had. They were on top
of a of a of a pedestal like a sewing machine.
It was like part of a of a table almost,
And they even had the earliest ones had foot pedals
for the carriage return. Yeah, and so you would make
sense if that's your manufacturing equipment, you have an engineer

(28:08):
that goes we can adapt that well. Yeah, especially if
they're saying, look how effective this is on sewing machines,
It only makes sense that we should have it where
the same sort of thing works here. The only problem
was that they discovered that putting the pedal it wasn't
always reliable. The carriage would catch, it would be problems
that would get jammed up, and so it wasn't It
wasn't long after that. I think it might have even

(28:30):
been their second model where they introduced the hand powered
carriage return, where that would be a little lever on
one side. When you depressed the lever, it allows you
to push the carriage back to a starting position and
start over again. So whenever you hear old movies where
you hear the typewriting sound and you hear thing, that
was the indicator that you were getting toward the end

(28:51):
of the line, you needed to hit a character turn
to start the next next page. Did you ever type
on a regular typewriter? Yeah, because I remember I would
hear the ding and I would try to keep going
as long as I could because I was an obstinate.
It was just you were playing chicken with the end
of that piece of paper. I was also young enough
that it wasn't really life and death kind of situation

(29:11):
I had. I had the typewriter I was using as
a kid was not It wasn't a hand powered carriage return.
It was an electric typewriter. But it still would do
the ding. It wouldn't automatically go to the next line.
You had to hit a hard return to do it.
But I did type on that kind of typewriter as

(29:32):
a kid. So there's a no here about this being
an understroke machine. Holly, can you explain to me what
that means. Yeah, So this is what's also referred to
as a blind machine. And the way that the keys
were arranged, uh and where they struck meant that the
space on which they typed was actually covered. It sat

(29:55):
in like this little basket underneath the keys, so that
the type is could not actually see what they were typing.
They had to lift up the carriage to check things out.
And you've probably seen it happen in movies sometimes, like
older movies, where you'll see the secretary typing away and
then she'll pause and lift up the carriage and check.
And that's what's going on, is that she simply could

(30:15):
not see what she was typing. Right. You would didn't
have any field of view of that at all. So
once you started typing several lines, you could see the
things that you type ten minutes ago, but you couldn't
see the the actual line that you're typing at that
moment right, which I would think would be maddening, But
I guess people adapt to anything. Well, yeah, I think
I've finally gotten to a point now where I can
type without looking at the screen and I can be

(30:38):
fairly confident that I'm doing it properly. But when I
was learning, it certainly would have been a detriment seeing
not knowing if I typed, you know, something that was
intelligible or just gobbledegook um. An interesting little little point here.
We talked about Nietsche previously with the typing ball, Well,
the original Remington typewriter also had a celebt pretty uh

(31:01):
consumer Mark Twain. He purchased an early Remington typewriter for
the princely some of dollars back in eighteen seventy four,
and then later on wrote a letter to the Remington
company using the typewriter that said he would stop using
the typewriter because he said it was a bad influence.
I think he said it was specifically it was corrupting
his morals because it was causing him to swear so much. However,

(31:26):
in his nineteen oh four autobiography, Twain said that his
first novel was written on a typewriter, which isn't actually
true because his first novel was Tom Sawyer and that
was on a handwritten manuscript. His book was not a novel,
but his book Life on the Mississippi, was typed, although
some suspect that by then he had employed a typist

(31:49):
and that he essentially dictated the book to the typeist,
and that he maintained his distance from the infernal device
his moral high ground. Yes, he was, he was. His
morality was preserved. Not long after the Shoals and Glynn
typewriter came out, another one called the calligraph Branded Typewriter

(32:09):
appeared on the market, and this machine made another little
step forward in terms of technology and that now you
could have upper or lower case. It was your choice.
You could use them both, but they had a separate
set of keys for each instead of like the shift key.
That was so twice as many keys. Yeah. Wow, I
can't imagine what that must have looked like. Dizziness, I would, Yeah,

(32:31):
it would have to be. So those two were clunking
around and giving people opportunities to type like the wind
for a while before in the Smith Premier came onto
the market. It to use the Corty keyboard, and at
that point that was becoming really standard in terms of, uh,
how typing machines were going to work, And so a

(32:52):
lot of typewriters at this point we're starting to adopt
this basic form factor, the one that we associate with
old typewriters, but not every one. No, now we're going
to talk about a really cool one. Yeah, and this
really is awesome if you take a look at some
of the ones we're about to talk about. Yeah. So
we're going back a few years to kind of the
middle of that between eighteen eight and eighteen ninety, where

(33:14):
things were mostly pretty much Smith Glidden Remington and then
the Smith Premiere uh to talk about the Hammond. And
this did not follow the similar design to the Shoals
and Glinden typewriter at all. It had this really unique
looking curved keyboard. It kind of made like a U shape,
which was supposed to be much more ergonomically natural for people.

(33:37):
The whole typewriter was like a giant circle. Yeah, and
it also used this type shuttle made a vulcanized rubber.
It almost looked like a puck when you saw it,
just inserted into the middle of the machine, and it
used that to imprint the paper. And you can actually
remove the shuttle and put in new shuttles if you
wanted different typefaces, and you could also do different languages,

(33:58):
which is pretty cool. Yeah, you could do. It's like,
for example, if you wanted to do something in a
European language, for example, German has letters that have boomblouts,
or perhaps French which has accents over certain letters, which
you couldn't do with a standard American typewriter. But this
would allow you to have that flexibility where by switching
out that shuttle you could have a brand new typeface,

(34:22):
whether it's a different font or even different letters that
normally wouldn't be accessible to you. That's really forward thinking idea. Yeah,
and I sort of liken the Hammond as the typing
equivalent to the Apple Newton. Yeah. This may seem weird,
but come along with me. It had a really devoted following.
There were a lot of people that were like, alright,
that typewriter seemed cool, but this is perfect, uh, And

(34:45):
they just loved it. It really seemed like the best
branch of the technology tree to them at the time.
And there were a lot of people that use them
for way longer than you might have expected. Those things
were built really well. They lasted forever, well into the
nineteen hundreds. People were still using them, and I it
makes me think of my friends that had Newton's that
just insisted on carrying them forever when other people were like, really,

(35:07):
what is that thing? It looks huge and clunky. You
shut up, it's my Newton. It just makes me think
of the Simpsons. Write it down in your Newton. Beat
up Martin, beat up Martha. Uh. Yeah, And I love
that you have here that you know that his ideas,
James B. Hammond's ideas were preserved his patents. He left

(35:28):
them upon his death to the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
So that that says a lot too. This wasn't just
a utilitarian device. It was a work of art. And
if you look at one of these things, it really does. Yeah.
I mean, anyone who has that that they love, like
that steampunk aesthetic, something that that just looks different has

(35:49):
has real character to it. This I think has a
lot of appeal. Oh yeah, they're gorgeous, and part of
it is just like the curvy lines are just very
sort of appealing to a lot of people, especially curvy
lines in technology. If you look at it from above,
based upon just the different elements, it kind of was
like a smiley face. The keys are there, the mouth,

(36:10):
and then there's a couple of round elements that look
like eyes. Yeah, I could see that. And they did
keep making those even after James Hammond died, um but
in the nineteen twenties, so those were being made for
quite a while. At that point, almost forty years the
company was purchased by Frederick Hepburn Company, and the Hammond
was eventually rebranded under the name Vera Typer uh and,

(36:31):
which is sort of much less romantic sounding. I think
of Hammond Organs when I Vera Typer, I think of
some sort of AlSi reptor. Yeah. And while it was
still the Hammond Company, they had also been producing producing
a design that was more of a rectangular keyboard, similar
to the shoals in glynd And they were kind of like,
we'll cover the whole market. Uh, And that was called

(36:53):
the Hammond Universal, and the Vera Typer once they had
rebranded it pretty much went along with that model and
they abandoned that beautiful career design. And this also eventually
introduced electricity into typing. I think that was the first
one that had an electric typing function, right. So I
liked also that you have detailed out the first time

(37:15):
we finally get away from that understroke approach, the one
that didn't allow type as to actually see what was
going on. Yeah, that was the first one that allowed
you to actually see was the Doherty Visible in eight,
which had front stroke and type bars that set below
the Was it Playton platin, I don't know. I don't

(37:38):
know typewriter lingo. I have heard it both ways. Wow, okay,
but I don't know how much of that was regional
dialect well, I'll just say Playton because I'm from the South.
It was just but anyway, it hits the front of
the paper that way and you could actually see where
you could what you were typing. And uh, I think
that is probably bly the biggest advance before you get

(38:04):
to electric typewriters, uh, that the basic system had. You know,
it's it's one of those things where the the basic
design of the mechanical typewriter there were important developments, but
it remained largely the same for a really long time. Yeah,
and really like the dirty Visible is probably one of

(38:26):
those that anyone listening that has ever seen a typewriter
would look at and go, oh, that's a typewriter, and
I wouldn't really think a whole lot other than oh,
it's old and interesting, whereas any of these previous models,
they'd be like, that's a typewriter, but there's something really
weird about it, and it would be one of these
other things that had not advanced yet the typewriter have
an accelerated Yeah, well, I mean that it's it's great

(38:49):
to think of, uh, these tiny little things that we
would you know, in retrospect, we see it being a
huge benefit. But It's interesting just seeing people sit there
and say, you know, what would been make this device
really useful if I could see what the heck I
was typing. Uh. And there were other models that did
the same thing, Like once the Visible came out. There

(39:10):
were of course many many other careers and companies that
were like, oh, of course we should have been doing
this all along. So uh, a brand called the Williams
came out, and then a machine called the Oliver. But
then this is also when I feel like the most
famous of the old old typewriters I say with air
quotes came out, which is the Underwood, and that came
out in I Love, I love the Underwood I have.

(39:33):
It is, like I said, incredibly heavy. It's one of
the earlier models. Probably not not. I'm pretty sure it's
from early twentieth century, so not one of the first
models that were released, but they definitely have a lot
of character to them. UM and UH, I love that
you have the origin story. It's like a superhero tale. Well,

(39:55):
you know, I always like when there's a little intrigue.
So the Underwood Lee was born out of what I
like to call a business burn UM, which is the
the company that produced. Underwood was originally a company that
just produced ribbons and carbon paper for other typewriters and
type machines. But then Remingtons, which was of course the
big player at that point in terms of the market,

(40:18):
decided that they were going to do their own accessories
and they didn't need Remington's products anymore, or they didn't
need Underwood products anymore. Underwood leadership was like, well then fine,
we're gonna make our own type, right, We'll use our
own stuff. I just kind of love that once again
we see businesses entering into ecosystems that, uh that you

(40:39):
get trapped in. You know, Oh, I've got a ribbon,
but it's only for an Underwood. Guess I better go
out and buy an Underwood typewriter. Um. Yeah, I wonder.
I wonder if they ever got to the point where
it was just cheaper to buy a new machine than
a new ribbon, because that's kind of how we are
with printers. I don't think so. Yeah, No, that's that's
a relatively new development. Uh yeah, I mean tween sort

(41:00):
of from the eighteen nine time frame up through the twenties,
typewriters evolved a little bit, but by the time we
reached the twenties, they had really completely homogenized, like they
were almost all quirty. They were all using a ribbon,
They all had the four rows or banks of keys
and one shift key like some of the previous ones
that had multiple shift keys depending on which keys you

(41:21):
were trying to switch over to the capitol or lower case.
This is where it kind of really all just smoothed out.
And then from that point forward we kind of stuck
with that form factor until we got to the electro
mechanical and electrical typewriters, and then started looking at different
ways to imprint letters onto paper. But as I said,

(41:42):
to cover all that would take another podcast, I did
want to spend a little more time to talk about
the quirty issue because a lot of people pointed out
that once you got away from the metal levers coming
up and hitting the paper, because that that that held
sway for a long time and time yewriters. But eventually
we got away from that, then there wasn't as much

(42:03):
of a reason to keep the quirty keyboard. The only
reason was that we were entrenched in that form factor.
You know, It wasn't that this is what we're all
used to we'll just keep going. This is the way
we've done it forever, so we're going to keep doing
it this way. But people were pointing out, they said, well,
if in fact the Corty keyboard was designed to either
slow people down or to put common letters far apart,

(42:26):
so that um, so that the you you avoid this
this jamming issue, and we now no longer have to
worry about the jamming issue, why don't we revisit the
type the typewriter's keyboard layout and see if we can
create a better one. No change is scary. Yeah, Well,
early in the twentieth century we had Dr August Dvorak

(42:49):
who was looking into this, and he came up with
the Dvorak keyboard. You've probably heard about that, and in
fact you may use one. There are people who use
the Vorat keyboards. And the idea was to reduce the
amount of movement that fingers would typically need to make
when typing. The idea being that if you have to
type a lot, let's say your job is a typist,
that after a while you could really you know, end

(43:11):
up straining your your hands and hurting your fingers trying
to use this antiquated, ridiculous system. That is inefficient on purpose.
At least that was what the popular belief was, and
so he laid out the keyboard in a totally different
way to put the most common letters in the home row.
That's the row where your fingers rest, so all the

(43:33):
vowels except for why we're in the home row for
the left hand. Oh, this was another interesting thing. So
the Quirity keyboard, according to divor x extensive studies, favors
the left hand over the right. That the most popular
letters in the English language are located on the left
side of the keyboard and the less popular ones on

(43:53):
the right. So right handers, which that's most of the population,
we're having to work harder to try and type. Well.
We left handers finally caught a darn break. Although once
you get in the computer age, if we're mousing a
lot with the right, then your left is freed up
to do that typing a little bit more. Yeah, but
that just means that I can't click one for us right. Yeah. Yeah,

(44:17):
when you get to when you get to the point
where the mouse is involved, and then you get into
first person shooters, I am left way behind. But the
Devora keyboard tried to put those common letter combinations closer
together to make it much easier to type, and DeVore
did some really extensive studies. He said that if you
look at a typical typing, you know, like you were

(44:38):
to type out a typical amount of words on a
piece of paper, of all, typing would require keys on
the top row, So the row above where your fingers
are resting would be on the home row, and scent
would be on the bottom row. Now, he thought of
the bottom row as being the most difficult to reach
because you have to curl your fingers in a little bit, right,

(44:58):
So he thought the best thing to do it would
be to concentrate the letters that are most common in
the home row, um slightly fewer on the top row,
and then the fewest on the bottom row. So his approach,
he claims, or claimed, I should say, he passed away
several years ago. He claimed that his approach meant that
you would type on the top row, seventy percent on

(45:19):
the home row, and only eight percent on the bottom
rowe and that these would then favorite right handers instead
of left handers, because why should I want to type anything? Uh? Now, now,
you can't really find a whole divort keyboards out there,
although a lot of operating systems support divorat keyboards and
then and they have for years. I mean there were

(45:40):
you know, the old Apple operating system, not even Mac,
but the old Apple operating system supported dvorate keyboards. So
you might be able to find that setting on your computer,
and depending what operating system you use, you could switch
it to a divorat keyboard and uh, if you really wanted.
You know, you don't necessarily have to go out and
buy a new keyboard, but you might want to buy
some stickers so that you can write the new letters

(46:03):
and stick them on top of the letters that exist,
and then give it a try, supposedly after a few
you know, it takes several hours of practice for you
to get used to the new layout, but once you do.
I've heard, and this is truly anecdotal, that people have
doubled their typing speed as a result. Someone claimed to

(46:23):
have been to have gone from fifty words per minute
to a hundred words per minute. Um, just because it
was so much easier and more efficient to type this way. UM.
I have never mucked around with one. Neither have I.
I have never used a dvort keyboard I type pretty quickly.
I think I'm right around a hundred words per minute,
So I for the sake of humanity, I don't want

(46:45):
to type faster. The smoke and stuff, Yeah you don't.
You never know, I could summon Cathulu. It's one of
those things. So this was a fun topic to look at.
I mean, it's really interesting to look back at the
development of the typewriter lists less controversial, I would say
than the sewing machine. Yeah, you don't get a lot
of good stories about people getting punched in the face. No,

(47:06):
there's there's that one competition thing with Underwood, but it
seems like it was all handled in a fairly gentlemanly
kind of way. Yeah. Yeah, there were no pistols at dawn.
There's no throwing anyone down the steps like there was,
right right, and also the uh I remember reading some
of these where. Don't get me wrong, typewriter enthusiasts can

(47:27):
also get a little a little raucous, because there was
there was one I was reading that was talking about
how the Brits like to talk about how they developed
typewriter areas typewriters because you look at this patent from
seventeen fourteen, but no one ever made one of those.
Typewriters are an American thing because in America we didn't
have enough people to have cheap labor. We were forced

(47:47):
to work for ourselves, which is why we built labor
saving devices. And uh as to the the truth of that,
I cannot say, but this was a fun one to
look at. Holly, thank you so much for joining me
again for this episode. Appreciated. My pleasure, My pleasure. Where
can folks find your stuff? They can visit us at
misst in history dot com or on Facebook dot com

(48:10):
slash mist in history, on Twitter at most in history. Uh,
we're at pinterest dot com slash mist in history. Pretty
much any iteration of social media. If you magically put
in mist in history will somehow pop up. Do you
have a recent episode that you would recommend to people
that you just think was really cool and fun to do? Uh?
We do. We have a number of fun ones. We

(48:31):
have some interesting Christmas ones that are coming out. But
one of my favorite recent ones that we did was
the sinking of the S five, which is a sub
that went down. It is a fun maritime disaster, but
it is one of the more humorous and enjoyable maritimestory. Sorry,
you know, from the scale of one to oh, this
one's pretty good, pretty delightful actually, which is part of

(48:54):
why I love it that all of the terror and
none of the drama. All okay, some of the drama,
but it turns out pretty good, so excellent. Well, we'll
definitely have to check that out. Thank you again, and guys,
thank you for listening to Text Stuff. Remember if you
have any questions, suggestions, anything you want me to cover
in future episodes, or a guest you want me to

(49:15):
have on the show, you can write me. My email
address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
or drop me a line on Twitter, Tumbler or Facebook
to handle it. All three is tech Stuff H. S W.
And we'll talk to you again really soon for more
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