Typewriters: Mechanical Brilliance

Chuck loves typewriters because he loves mechanical brilliance. Dive into the cool history of these amazing machines today. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, And this is
an old school Stuff you should Know episode. Yeah, old school.

(00:23):
It's just like a robust, jam packed um overlooked unsung
item episode and those are often really good. Yeah. I
bet we got a mechanical engineering suite in there somewhere.
I'll bet too. For sure. We'll have to cobble it
together someday and be like, look what we did, everybody,

(00:43):
But we want to talk about something else real quick first, right, yeah, man? So, Um,
we recently did a hang out for our friends co
ed UM, the Cooperative for Education who we've talked about
plenty of times. They helped kids stay in school in
Guatemala and break the cycle of poverty by making sure
they get an education. Right, that's right, but he knows
about cod. Our first our two part Guatemala episode was

(01:07):
when we went there with COED. So we did a
hang out with them for their Fall f S, a fundraiser,
and um, we found out that so far since we
went to Guatemala with them, Stuff you should know listeners
have donated how much I think we are And this
is our good friend Ann at co Ed who invited

(01:27):
us initially, has done the math and redone the math.
Things that we reached the numbers. Things that we don't
do is redo the math several times. And At says
we are within a hundred grand of stuff you should
know fans having donated one million bucks. That's amazing, that
is so amazing. So we were like, okay, we're at

(01:48):
like nine hundred thousand dollars. I feel like we should,
you know, hit one million. It's just such a nice
round number. And and Coed will do so many good
things with that extra hundred gram. So you and I
both realized that a hundred grand is a tremendous amount
of money. So we did some number crunching ourselves, and
we figured out that if we divided it up among

(02:09):
stuff you should know listeners, if everyone chipped in like
a nominal amount, we could reach that goal. Right. Yeah,
So you did the math. I'm gonna let you stand
behind it. Oh man, I was hoping you'd stand in
front of that. So if twenty thousand stuff you should
know listeners, and we're told there are that many out there. Um,
each chip in five dollars will reach that goal, no problem. Uh,

(02:33):
what ten thousand stuff listeners chip in ten thousand dollars
ten dollars and then, um, I believe if eight thousand,
six hundred and nine listeners contribute eleven dollars and fifty cents,
we will hit that goal as well. Right, so you
get the point. It doesn't take much when you have

(02:55):
a lot of great people banded together. Uh, this is
the holiday time and know that, you know that's a
money crunching time. But if you could throw five dollars
their way and we could all like work our way
towards that million before the end of the year, that
would really be a big, big, huge deal. It would
be really cool. And believe us, we'll both be chipping
in as well as like we're asking you to do something.

(03:17):
We would go and we're gonna make Jerry chip into
Yeah that's right, And I'm gonna chip in more than
five dollars. Oh yeah, I'm gonna chip in that. No,
we're gonna do that thing where h when you split
the tab at a restaurant, we try and see what
the other person tipped so one of us doesn't look cheap,
that's right. So they actually set up a specific u

(03:40):
r L for us, right, that's right. It is Cooperative
for fo R Education dot org slash s y s k.
Very very easy, yep. And you just go on the
donation processes quick and painless, and you will be helping
kids break the cycle of poverty in Guatemala and a
really good about things. That's right. I want to make

(04:02):
sure that our contributions count as stuff you should know
army Well, yeah, I would, I would hoping and would
make sure of that. I mean, we're part of the
army still, even though we're you know, the motorway commandants
or something. I guess that's a pretty European. I always
picture ourselves on the ship. We're admirals. I like, colonel,

(04:23):
you could be admiral. I'm gonna be colonel. Well, if
you're a colonel, I'm just going to be a private. Oh,
come on anyway, and count our donations if you can
do that, because we're part of the army, and I
think anyone including us, who goes to Cooperative for Education
dot org slash s ysk, their donation will automatically be
counted towards the total for sure. Okay, so go forth, everybody. Uh,

(04:46):
it's Thanksgiving time. The holiday season is starting to kick off.
Good cheer and good vibes and glad tidings are starting
to fill all of our hearts and hopefully that will
culminate in us each donating five bucks. That's right, Okay,
shall we talk typewriters. Yeah, let's let's I think that
went really well. Choked. I think it went well, dude,

(05:07):
So big shout out to our buddy Dave Ruse, who
I bet will also contribute because he's also a listener
as well as a writer for us. Well, he listens
to the ones that he helps us write. It's true,
I suspect the same thing. So, um he helped us
out with this one on typewriters, and um, it's one
of those things, like I said it was, it's kind
of one of those overlooked and unsung items that really

(05:30):
had like a lot of effect on the world, so
much so that I feel like scholarship into the impact
that that typewriters had on society kind of ends with um,
you know, ushering feminism into the workplace, or at the
very least women into the workplace. We'll talk a lot
about that later, but I think I had even more effects, Chuck,

(05:52):
Like if you stop and think about it, like, you know,
would we have the computer today if we hadn't invented
the typewriter in the middle of the nineteenth century, or
if we did, what would it look like if we
hadn't had the typewriter first? Um, you know did because
it allowed for a lot more smoothness in the business office.
It allowed for like systematic management, I think, So is

(06:14):
it responsible for the creation of the paperwork we're all
drowning in at all times? I have questions about this
and no one's answered them yet, So I'm just gonna
throw those questions out and just let them kind of
jael over the whole episode. Would we have all the
great works of literature that we have since the invention
of the typewriter? People were certainly writing before the typewriter,

(06:34):
as long as there was a feather and some ink around, uh,
they would use the old quill. But the typewriter certainly, um,
sort of open things up, not the very least things
like self publishing and and getting your own creative ideas
out to the world in an easier fashion. So creatively,
the typewriter was a game changer. That's an excellent point,

(06:55):
Mark Mark Twain, Right, he was vive and this is
a great this may be the fact of the show. Oh.
His book in eight two, Life on the Mississippi, was
the very first typewritten manuscript ever submitted, as far as
anyone knows. Yeah. Uh, and apparently he hand wrote it
and then had his assistant or secretary transcribe it onto

(07:18):
into a typewriter. Yeah. I mean that's kind of how
things went for a while, exactly. Yeah. But um, the
one thing about typewriting too, I think some of those
early writers were like, well, wait a minute, does that
mean we're just supposed to dictate our books? And I
don't know how I feel about that. And then they
finally figured out, like, oh, we can actually do the
typing ourselves. And I think that's when it really kind
of opened up for literature, like you were saying, right,

(07:40):
But that also went the other way later with memoirs,
with people like Keith Richards would say, you mean, I
can just say things out loud and it'll be a book. Right,
does seventeen pages that are just the letter L seventeen hundred?
More like? Is is Uh, autobiography is very long and great,
so um. One of the other things about the typewriter

(08:01):
two is it wasn't around for that long for as
much of an effect as it did have on society.
It was invented in eighteen sixty eight, the first thing
that we recognized as a modern typewriter, and then by
the eighties it was certainly on its way out. And
it died really quickly because yeah, and the technology, because
the technology that we invented took off really quickly. But again,

(08:25):
it was all based on the typewriter. There were improvements
to the typewriter that eventually led to the PC. That's right. Uh.
And I have a deep, deep love of mechanical machines.
And I have an old typewriter and I've had it
since college. I think my mom got it for me
for Christmas one year, got me an old Royal antique

(08:46):
typewriter just to display. And I have moved that thing.
I'll post a picture of it. It's still on my
shelf in my office upstairs. I've moved it everywhere for
the past, you know, thirty five years, and I still well,
you know, throw a piece of paper in that thing
every now. And then and type on it and realized
that the ribbon is dry. You're like, all work and

(09:07):
no play make Jack a dull boy. But we are
the generation, and and me even a little bit more
than you because I'm a few years older of uh.
And you know, we talked about Gen X being the
greatest generation because we saw such transitions in technology, but
the typewriter was certainly one of them. Like I typed
in my typing class in high school on a on

(09:29):
an IBM Selectric, which we'll talk about one of the
greatest machines ever invented. And then just a few years
later when I jumped into college, I had one of
those over the expensive word processors. Yeah, we had one too,
and I was thinking. I was trying to remember what
brand it was, and I could remember either. I thought
it was a Brother And then I stopped and thought

(09:51):
a little more about it. I'm sure it was a
Sears and Roebuck word processor. Not. I know mine was used,
I'll tell you that. Yeah, but those things were really amazing,
especially if you could take the time to stop and
figure out how to use it. That was one of
the great things about typewriters is people have been using
them for so long that when you first learned how
to do it, there were so many people out there

(10:12):
who could tell you how to do it. It was
easy to pick up. Word processors made it difficult, but
I pods that that they were a necessary transition from
typewriters to PCs. It got people thinking in a digital way,
you know. Yeah, yeah, just to see it on that
tiny little screen, it felt like it was like two
inches by three inches maybe, Yeah, that was a game changer. Yeah,

(10:36):
we'll talk more about that later, but let's just do
like a quick overview of how to use a typewriter
for the chilling's yeah, like the parts and pieces parts. Yeah, alright,
so a manual typewriter, and that's what we're gonna call
anything that isn't electric or electronic, uh anything pre those days.
What you do, kids, is you get a piece of
white paper and you feed it into this machine, this

(10:59):
mechanical machine by rotating a rubber cylinder that's called a platon,
and you know, you roll it till let's lined up
to where you basically want to start typing. And even
that when you first start typing is a little bit weird,
like you might start typing too high and you realize
you gotta roll it up a little bit more to
get that what do you call that the not the margin? Yeah,

(11:20):
the margin, the border, I call it a order. The header, Yeah,
the header, which is like whatever you want to set
an inch inch and a half. So you line up
that paper where you want to start typing, and then
you start typing by pressing down on a key. And
Dave even says press hard in parentheses because you got
to give it a little bit of a strike, much

(11:41):
more than you do, even though you have abused laptops
in your time. I always said you sound like Thelonious
Monk over there on the type on the computer, but
I can't imagine hearing on a typewriter. Yeah. The reason
you have to press hard though, because we're talking about
manual typewriters. There's no electricity involved. You can take it anywhere.
It sounds like that's what your royal is, right, Yeah, okay,

(12:01):
So um, when you're pressing on that key, it's actually
causing that lever to shoot up. And attached to the
end of the level is what's called the type bar,
and that is basically a little mini type bar like
you find in a printing press. And typically, um, I
think the top is lower case and the bottom is

(12:23):
upper case. And when that type bar hits the paper,
depending on whether you're on lower higher case, UM, it's
it smacks the paper and it goes through the ink ribbon,
which shoots up all of a sudden out of nowhere
like a whack a mole and gets in between the
type bar and the paper. So the type bar actually
strikes and leaves an impression through the ink ribbon onto

(12:45):
the paper. And that's how you type a nice, inky letter.
That's right. And I know we sound like we're being
like we're coddling, but I'm really not when I say this.
If you've never used one, you never really looked at
one much. Um. It's like a little stamp on the
end of a of a metal lever, and it just
it just stamps the letters on one at a time, right,
So I mean that's pretty much it. The only thing

(13:08):
is and this is like a really ingenious part of
the typewriter from way back. When you type a letter,
that the carriage, which is the whole assembly that holds
the platin um, it moves to the left one space
so that you are now about to type your next
letter to the right of the last letter that you

(13:28):
just typed, so that you're not typing your entire manuscript
in one single space. It seems really easy to overlook,
but it's a really important part. And then eventually you
get to an end. At the end of the carriage,
it reaches all the way to the left. It's almost
seems so wildly out of proportion that the typewriter will
surely tip over at any second. And then the little

(13:50):
bell goes thing and you hit a lever and the
thing slides back to the right fastest, bobs your uncle,
and then you start typing the next line because it
raised up once ace or two spaces, depending on whether
you're typing single space or double space. That's right. And
you think, is there a small troll in there that
is hitting a bell. No, that's it's all mechanical. It's

(14:11):
wonderful that carriage return and you have your margin set
so it knows when to ding uh, and it's it's
it's just a wonder of mechanical engineering. I love a typewriter.
There's a lot of like if you only just sort
of see the outside and you're looking at the type
bar that in it of itself is kind of cool,
but when you open that thing up and really look
at the mechanics behind it, it's just awesome. I love typewriters. Yeah,

(14:34):
it is very cool. And also one of the other
things that's neat about it. When you look over the typewriter,
you see that all of the type bars, all of
the um, the alphabet and the numbers are looking back
up at you and like a semicircle, and so they
just shoot up from their spot hey hey, hey, depending
on what um what letter you're typing, but they always

(14:54):
hit that same part, which is exactly where the carriage
wants them to hit on the plan. So that's a typewriter.
And I say, chuck um that we take a break
and then come back and talk about some of the
history behind it. Let's do it. So before we go on,

(15:33):
I do want to say that as a rite of
passage for any child, I went and when my daughter
was a little bit younger, she probably still does it.
For all I know, I would go into my office
and see my typewriter type bars all tangled together, because
the write of passage for any kid when they see
emmanual typewriters just to smash all those keys at the
same time, and they get into a little tangled mess,

(15:54):
which we'll get to that has a lot to do
with the eventual keyboard design. But yeah, just to throw
that out there. Yeah, but that was a real problem,
and they turned into like a little rats nest, right,
little rats nests, So fingers of the thinkers of a
little rat. Yes, And that was a problem that was
faced by one Christopher Latham Shoals, who is widely considered

(16:17):
to be the inventor of the typewriter, although as we'll see,
he didn't work completely alone, but he and a pal
of his um created the patent for the typewriter in
eighteen sixty eight. There were the first people to get
a patent for the first typewriter, but at least fifty
people gave it a try before Shoals, uh perfected it,
or I shouldn't say perfected, it came the closest to

(16:40):
perfecting it the first time. How about that? Yeah, because
you know day points out they you know, the printing
press was invented in what the fourteen something fifteenth century,
and it took a couple of hundred years, but then
for about a hundred years people tried to figure out
a typewriter of some sort. The first sort of working
typewriter may have been this guy named Giuseppe Pellegrin no

(17:04):
Touri Uh. He was obviously an Italian guy. He was
an inventor, and in eighteen o eight he made a
device for Uh. Either was Frinder's girlfriend, the Countess Carolina Fantoni.
That's wow, that's quite and a beautiful name. It's very
beautiful name. And this is a cool story because she

(17:25):
had lost her sight. So the invention was so, you know,
typing is something that you can do withoutside. In fact,
that's the whole goal, is to learn to type without
looking right. Um. So there's an alternate story that her
brother Augustino actually invented it for her and Tourie improved it.
But the upshot of it is whoever created this machine? Uh,

(17:48):
It doesn't exist any longer, it doesn't survive, But some
of her typed um letters did from eighteen oh, all
the way back in eighteen o eight, undisputed first type
letters were for Italy back then, that's right. Uh. And
then there are another couple of guys who tried their
hand at it. Uh. Just shout them out, because we
always like to shout out detroitter's. A guy named William

(18:11):
Austin Burt in the early eighteen hundreds invented a typographer,
uh clunky, didn't work very well. And then another pre
typewriter was built. It was called the Hansen Riding Ball.
And this one is kind of interesting, and that he
used electromagnetic energies and electromagnetic battery to actually power this thing.

(18:32):
So it didn't work very well, but it was way
ahead of its time. Actually, I saw that it did
work really well. Um that well for manufacturing though, I think, okay,
right true. And the the arrangement of the keys, it
was like a pincushion, so you held both hands together
like you were alien for Pete's sake typing. But the
thing would work really well. It would respond as fast

(18:53):
as you typed um in part because of those electro magnets.
And he also spread the vowels to the left and
the contint to the right, which made typing even faster.
And I saw it also automatically advanced the paper too,
so it didn't really resemble our earliest typewriters are our typewriters,
but it was its own kind of neat thing that
just didn't take off. Everybody's like, what's this pink Christian thing?

(19:15):
This is not right. It's a kind of fun thing
you see in a museum and you marvel at how
advanced it was for the time. Sure, definitely if you
want to get too real typewriters, though, we got to
go back to Christopher lay them shoals. You mentioned, uh,
Milwaukee in right, Yeah, and he got he was a journalist.
He was a politician. Sometimes almost said a superman, a newspaperman.

(19:40):
The superman was a newspaperman. Hey man. That was a
heck of a connection. Uh. And he was a superman,
I'll say it. Uh. And he had a side gig
as an inventor. And he got together. He was smart
enough to collaborate with people, and got together in eighteen
sixty six with a couple of colleagues named Carlos Glinden
and Samuel Willard Seul. Would you say so? All right?

(20:04):
Soul with any And they went to work and designed
um a typewriter at Klein Stuber's machine shop in Milwaukee,
and then finally in eight sixty eight were able to
apply for their and this is kind of fun. Always
loved the early sort of UM when things are split
up into two words, capital T, type dash, capital W

(20:27):
writer a literal type writer. And it had a little
it's fun to look up. Look this thing up. It
had a little piano keys as the keyboard, which makes
sense because it has a similar mechanical function, right, And
apparently the ebony keys had one function. The ivory keys
had another function. But if you look at it, there's
only like four or five keys of each. And I

(20:50):
cannot make heads or tails of how the thing worked,
and apparently no one else can, because I've never found
an explanation of actually how it worked. But it's just like,
look at that thing. It looks like a piano moving on. Well.
One thing I knew is that they lived together in
perfect harmony. That's right. The other thing I found out
about that too, is in their prototype, all I could

(21:12):
type was W. But apparently type W really really well
enough that they applied for the patent and they got it.
They also did something else that was innovative that would
come in UM. It was kind of one of those
things that laid the groundwork for all typewriters to come.
They had two spools that held an ink ribbon on top,
and we talked about how the inc ribbon jumps up
and gets in between the type bar and the paper

(21:33):
to leave the the inked letter. Well, these guys invented
it basically right out of the gate. Yeah, because you
gotta have a spool, you gotta move that ribbon along,
or you're just typing on the same section of ribbon
over and over and that's no good, sure, uh. In
eighteen seventy two, they sold UH their shares in this
invention to a guy, an oil guy named James Dinsmore,

(21:56):
who will factor in UH in a pretty big way
in a minute. And but Shoals wasn't done. He was like,
you know what, we sold this thing, but I'm gonna
keep working. And later that same year, like that's how
like dedicated he was to figuring this thing out. He
teamed with another inventor named Matthias Schwalbach and made an
improved typewriter within the same year that he sold the patent,

(22:17):
which is pretty I don't know if that's shifty or
just super smart. I saw that it was glitten and
soul that Shoulder sold their shares and that UM Shoals
may have kept his or invested. Yeah, so so schwall
Back and Shoals. The thing that they came up with,

(22:37):
there's no better way to describe what it looked like
than Dave put it, which is a medieval pasta maker.
It's really weird and ungainly and like just disproportionate, like
real top heavy. Um. But it worked pretty well. But again,
it was just one of those things that that um
that Shoals was, he just kept improving and improving and improving.

(22:59):
And then he said, Densmore really kind of comes in
in a big way in a minute. And here he
comes because after the Civil War, the Remington Company, which
had built, uh manufactured tons of guns for the Civil War,
found that their gun market had suddenly dried up and
they were looking for new markets to get into, and
Densmore said, I got one for you, that's right. They

(23:21):
also made sewing machines, which will become evident here in
a minute. But in eighteen seventy three Densmore pitched them
and said this typewriter thing is pretty awesome. And Remingtons,
like you said, was looking to make something literally, and
they said give me a thousand and uh, I guess
that was just the initial order and it really took off. Um.
They manufactured them where they manufactured their sewing machines in

(23:44):
upstate New York, and the what it was known as
was the Shoals and Glinden typewriter. It's how it was branded.
And it's it's you can look this one up to
It's a very pretty, sort of Victorian era looking machine.
It's actually decorative. They have flowers painted on the case.
It's it's cool. It looks like an old timey sawing
machine because apparently Remington's design team were one trick ponies. Um.

(24:07):
It even had like a foot pedal too for the
return Like when when the thing dinged, you didn't press
the lever with your hand, you hit it with the
foot pedal and it went the carriage returned back to
the right. Um yeah. Um. So they were like, Okay,
we're getting closer. Um, this is starting to kind of
come around. And I think that Shoals and Glinten typewriter

(24:28):
was the first one that Mark Twain had. If I'm
not mistaken, I M think so. Yeah, But Shoals invented
something else, Like this guy is just the inventor that
keeps on giving as far as typewriters are concerned. In
seventy eight he invented the shift key. And if you
were like me and never realized why the shift key
was called the shift key, then prepared to be amazed,
because there's an actual reason for it. That's right, when

(24:51):
you hit the ship, well, we should say that that
initial shoals in glinten was all caps. Right, that's a
good point. That was a problem everyone, you know. I
think actually Twain handed in his manuscript on the Remington two,
which we're talking about now, But if he had handed
in the shoals and glint and they would have said,
why is this guy shouting and everyone all the time?
It's like life on the Mississippi should be a little
more laid back life on the uh. So the shift

(25:15):
key is something that literally shifted everything up. The whole
carriage shifted up. And like you said earlier, there's the
lower case letter and the upper case letter just right
on top of each other. And that's all it took.
You just it was a mechanical solution again that lifted
it up where the appropriate uh case of letter would

(25:37):
hint that ribbon. And that's why they call it the
shift and they still call it that, which is hysterical.
It is because you're not shifting anything on a computer,
but you did physically shift the carriage up and then
whatever letter was on top, I think the lower case,
which is still the case. If you press shift, it
goes to upper case. Right. Yes, well that's that finds
its source back in the eighteen seventies and up the

(26:00):
lower case letter at the top of the type bar
would be too high up to hit the the letter
or the paper. Now, I just think that's amazing. Yeah,
it's interesting because we do have a caps lock on
a computer keyboard. I wonder why they did didn't change
shift to caps They used to call it shift lock.
That's true. And also it does more. I forgot that.
It also does more beyond capitalizing, does percentage and a

(26:23):
person and all the number secondary functions. But so does shift.
So caps lock makes even less sense. It should be
shift lock. It should be shift lock. Yeah, somebody really
screwed up along the way. No, wait, does cap cap
slock doesn't do that for the numbers, does it. I'm
gonna find out right now. I believe it does. Man,

(26:43):
I'm pretty sure I've literally never tried that. I know,
I don't think I have either. Let's trust I'm demonstrating
now capslock engaged. I'm gonna type of three, which is
a pound sign. No is the three, So calock. We
just did a live demo on air. I love that.
There's probably about half the people that were on the

(27:03):
edge of their seat and half the people are going
these guys have had the show for how long? And
they're this tim is the best generation. Uh. Let's talk
about quirty, our old friend. Quirty is how you say it?
Or do you say quarity quirty querty? I think I
say both actually because they both sound right nowhere in

(27:25):
the well. Querity, as everyone knows, is the style of keyboard,
the arrangement of the letters on most Western typewriters that
you'll see. As you'll see and maybe surprise, there are
a lot of other different arrangements, but the quarty is
the one that's stuck, and it is named after those
first six letters on the top row of the typewriter. YEP,

(27:47):
starting from the left right, that's right, that should have
said English language, well, not just English language, any Latin alphabet.
So the abcs those are considered the Latin alphabet. So
like if you go to um, I don't know Italy,
uh you you can find Quarity keyboards there too, right. Um,
But the there's a legend, I guess with Quarity, A

(28:09):
lot of people say that. Um, and it was Shoals
who came up with the Quarity keyboard. Yet another amazing
milestone that this man delivered to humanity. Um. Okay, not
an amazing milestone, but something that's still around today and
is mildly interesting to talk about. At least boy really
cut him out, cut his knees out on that one,
didn't you. So um he there's a lot of there's

(28:32):
a legend that he created the Quarity keyboard because people
were typing too fast. So he because he he originally
had it alphabetized. And that's true, he originally had them
the keyboard alphabetized. I think starting from the top left.
Maybe I'm not sure, but apparently some I think some
researchers at Kyoto University in Japan did some analysis on

(28:55):
this legend and we're like, we think this is a myth.
Apparently Scholz is the kind of guy who would have
and like people are typing too fast, and my typewriters
jamming up. He wouldn't have tried to slow the types down.
He would have tried to have improved the typewriter. But
more of the point, they think. Actually it was morse
code operators whose input led to the Querity keyboard from Shoals,

(29:16):
because if you if you're transcribing my morse code, querity
layout makes a lot of sense. Really, do you know how?
I don't. I'm just taking it on faith from the
Kyoto researchers that that's the case. Yeah. Well, again, he
made an improvement, and he found that they were more
likely to jam with a more frequently used letters next

(29:39):
to each other. So he did, uh. He did some
thinking about it and decided that if I come, if
I space these things out the most common two letter combinations,
then in theory, we should be getting fewer jams. Sure
it'll happen every now and then, but at least we
can reduce the number of jams. And that was it.
But that's not the only altern native, right, What the

(30:01):
other kind of keyboard? Well, no, they're there are quite
a few other alternatives to the Querity right. The the
layout of it, right, yeah, okay, And by the way,
what you just said was the legend. From what I understand, well,
I thought he he did not look in the arrange
them by two letter combinations. I I don't. I don't know. Again,
I think it's because of the at least Okay, the

(30:23):
Kyoto people say it's because of the Morse Code operators.
Other people say no, it absolutely is true that it was.
It was the he was trying to fix the jam
We just don't know. It's just interesting to debate. See.
What I saw was that he was trying to fix
the jams, but he wasn't so concerned about fast typing.
Oh okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's a really

(30:44):
good point, and it was lost on me until you
just said that. So, so he was making it so
letters that were next to each other that you'd frequently
use wouldn't be used at the same time, and so
cut down on the chance of them jamming. That's what
I've heard. But also, you know, maybe it was both. Okay,
I think we should just spend the rest of this
episode talking about the querity legend. I think we should

(31:06):
move on from the quarity to the diet tensor. Yeah,
you set me up, so there's other keyboard layouts. I
hadn't heard of diet tens or have you? So a
guy named George Canfield Blicksender for a wonderful name. He
did some analysis all the way back in and figured
out that there was an optimal way to design a
keyboard UM and by by analyzing the English language, he

(31:30):
found that if he put d H I A T
E N, s O and R and I believe the
middle row um, he the I think of all English
words would use those letters. And the reason why the
middle row is important is because were they Okay, Well,
in other keyboard layouts to come, they usually put the

(31:53):
most important letters in the middle row because that's considered
the home row where the home um position right. Yeah, okay,
but so he said to heck with that, I'm not
including that. But regardless whatever row, the d H I
in t E d h I A T E N,
s O, R was in bottom row, I guess of

(32:15):
all English words would use those letters, so you would
be able to type most words without even leaving the
bottom row, which would let you type way fast. Yeah.
I guess he just had a different idea of where
home was because he went bottom up. UM the diet
in stars on the bottom in the middle row had
of all English words use those letters, and then at

(32:38):
the top row only two percent. So he really, uh,
he really went all in on the bottom end, he did.
And then there's another one called the Divorak simplified keyboard,
and apparently this one is still popular. It was created
in the thirties. Yeah, I think this one, if I'm
not mistaken, and I didn't do much digging, but I
think the Divorak is the one that really has a

(32:58):
lot of very past and it proponents still UM and
and like you can get Divorak keyboards, right, Yeah, I
think it's I think it's it's a setting or an
app you can download for your phone or your computer.
At that time, I don't know if you could order it,
maybe from like Alien where I could see them creating those.

(33:19):
I don't even know what that is. It's like a
gamer system computer. But the Divorak is the one that
really has like a lot of people still out there
saying puirty uh stinks And the Dvorak is what we
should have done, uh, Dr August Divorac was the inventor,
like you said, and I think it was six specifically,

(33:40):
but UM also did a lot of studying of the
English language. And also apparently this had a lot to
do with um fatigue for your finkies, right, because he
put I think the consonants the most used consonants on
the right side and the vowels on the left, and
you were a to type many more words staying in

(34:02):
that home position. And again, I think home position is
typically the middle of the middle row with the act
the absolute middle two keys not touched, but the other
the other eight keys are touched by your fingers, and
then both of your thumbs are on the space bar.
That's right now, Like I I think, Chuck, we should
explain this, Like people are just left to pick up

(34:24):
typing on their own today because it's so ubiquitous. There
were classes in high school you referenced earlier, taking one
I got out of it. I really didn't want to
take typing, but they would teach you typing. They would
take an hour out of the day to to go
to typing class and you would learn to type. Right. Well, yeah,
this is where I was going to ask you, like,
what you're typing method is? Like I took the typing class.

(34:47):
It was typing shorthand and it was one of those
classes where you did like three things in a quarter. Yeah,
it was typing, shorthand or speedwriting, which I've talked about
in another episode. I guess the shorthand episode, and I
think the third one was like does classes. It told
you like how to keep a bank account and right
checks and stuff, which is funny now, like you can

(35:08):
teach you that in a day. And yet we had
like a third of a quarter. But I never learned
to type properly, even though I took that typing class.
I am a almost a no look typus now, but
it's just from repetition, it is. I don't type correctly.
I think I type with my my pointer in my

(35:31):
middle fingers generally only sometimes I use the ring finger
a little, never used the pinky I never used. Are
you even supposed to use your thumb? I don't remember.
I think for space for spacing, I don't use the
thumb at all. So I'm a hunter and a pecker
who just got really fast and memorized the keyboard. So
you still generally hunting peck, but really fast. Well, hunting

(35:52):
and pecking looks like you're seeking it, like I've memorized
the keyboard. But what I mean to say, is I
don't type properly, Like in typing class they would say, like,
your pinky hits the p or whatever, and I was
just my pinky. My pinky isn't that you know. My
pinky is a bad finky. It doesn't do what I
sell it to all the time. My pinky is my
worst guitar finger. So it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I

(36:15):
just I don't have a lot of dexterity with my pinky.
I don't know if that's a lame duck personal issue.
I never really thought. I'd never trained my pinky to
do much. I've never really given that much thought to
how I type either. But I started out as a
hunter pecker and then now I'm a full typist. But
I'm totally self taught, never never had a lesson. But
do you type properly according to like the classroom instruction?

(36:38):
I don't know. I see here we go, I think
I start. I think, do you think a kind of
I don't. I don't know where I start. I've got
to pay attention to this. I've never stopped and thought
about where I put it. But I think I generally
start in the home on the home, Yeah, in the
home position. I think I do. That feels natural, okay,

(36:58):
so um, but yeah, it is kind of neat to
be able to boast to be like a self taught
type is because people out there did learning in class.
I was talking to you me about it, and she's like,
are you guys going to talk about the computer games
that taught you typing? Not play those? So um. There's
one I looked up that was really popular called type Master,
where you would you were a UFO and there was

(37:19):
like space invaders coming at you and each one had
a word associated with it, so you type the word
really fast before the alien got to stressful. Yeah, it
would make typing stressful. Where's the laser? Right? Right? So
they started typing, I think all the way back in
the eighteen seventies they started teaching people typing. I think

(37:40):
the y w C A of New York was one
of the first groups to teach typing, and it just
kept going on from there. Because this is not Typewriters
were not an intuitive machine, like they didn't really they
weren't laid out of alphabetically. We don't just normally use
our fingers for such endeavors, Like it's something you had
to learn. But they were able to teach enough people

(38:03):
and get across the importance of it to enough people
that typewriters like weren't just a passing fad like a
lot of people initially thought they were. That's right, very
cool and it, as we'll see after the break, it
changed the workforce. Um. But before we break real quick,
we do want to point out there are a lot
of other keyboards in the world, their language specific keyboards.
French keyboards say as ort and that home top row.

(38:27):
I think Germans say set of querity quarts with a
Z and they're brail keyboards. There are uh, there are
cool Japanese typewriters. Man, those are complicated. Yeah, no kidding.
Have you ever typed on one? No? I I can't.
I can't figure it out. Like I I read descriptions

(38:47):
on how to use them. I'm like, I don't understand
this at all because they're in kanji, the Japanese characters,
So there's thousands of characters. Yeah, pretty amazing. Have you
ever used one? Oh? No, no, no, okay, yeah, they
look pretty neat. Uh shall we take that break? Yeah,
let's all right, We'll take that break and we'll talk
about how typing changed everything right after this. Okay, so um,

(39:31):
the Remington number two that I think you mentioned was
Mark Twain's second typewriter. Um that was the first one
to like really blow up. It came out and it
was like the typewriter for a very long time, for
at least a decade um. But one of the things
about the Remington Number two and all the other typewriters

(39:51):
at the time was you couldn't see what you were
typing while you were typing because the type bars were
striking the paper from underneath, so you couldn't watch yourself
type at all. You just had to hope for the best.
That's right. They were called up strike or understrike or
blind typewriters, And you had to lift that carriage up

(40:13):
that was on a hinge to see what you had done,
to see if you had made a mistake or not,
or whether or not that's what you wanted to say.
And along comes the Underwood. I wanted to Underwood. I
got a Royal, that's fine, my mom did a great job,
but I kind of wanted to Underwood because that's the
classic old mechanical typewriter in my mother. That was the
first front stroke visible typewriter to hit the market. Invented

(40:35):
by France Xavier uh Wagner or Wagner, I'm not sure.
And John T. Underwood, you're psychic? Is it called the Underwood?
He was Office Supply magnate and he bought that patent.
He said, I'm gonna call it the Underwood as if
I invented it. And it was that was That was
kind of it. That was a big change, game changer,
and everything moving forward was front facing. Yeah, it's set

(40:58):
the design stand until the IBM Selectric came out in
nineteen sixty one. Basically, you know, seventy the sixty five
years later, I guess um. And the Underwood was different
because you could see what you were typing. The type
bar struck the platin in front of you rather than
from underneath. There was one shift key keyboard was in

(41:19):
four rows. The numbers and the symbols were at the
very top row. Basically everything you kind of think about
as a keyboard today was that Underwood that came out
way back in eight Yeah, we talked about the workforce changing,
and this is one of those things where we'll just
tell it how it happened. It was a time when

(41:42):
women did not work in the office world. They weren't
part of that workforce. And from the very beginning the typewriter.
There was a book in the eight called Manual of
the Typewriter where it's writer, author John Harrison, talks about
it being especially really like fit for feminine fingers. It's

(42:02):
like they seem to be made for women. Uh, you know,
there's not a lot of hard labor involved, and a
lot of women play piano and that's a similar skill
as that. And in eighteen seventy, Uh, this is a
stat that's really revealing. Two point five of the clerical
workforce were women in eighteen seventy and in nineteen thirty,
thanks to the typewriter, that rose to fifty two point

(42:25):
five per cent man and plus also the clerical workforce
itself grew because of the typewriter, because before that you
had like Bartleby the scrivener types where they were copying
by hand, like legal documents and stuff like that. There
just wasn't as much paperwork because it was so so
much more time consuming and difficult. But Shoals the typewriter

(42:46):
hero of the century UM or millennia, really, if you
think about it, um He was very proud of his, um,
his uh invention because he saw that it allowed it
was an entrance for women into the world place. They
came out of the home. And it's it's not it's
incorrect to say that the typewriter is what got women
in the workplace. Actually was a civil war in the

(43:07):
federal government hiring women for clerical positions. But it gave
women a completely different type of um life and salary
and um much more I don't want to say equal footing,
but it got a foot in the door into the
office world, um thanks to the typewriter because people I
saw it described as secretarial work was associated with typewriters,

(43:28):
and women were associated with secretaries. And it just took
off from there, right and again we're not saying that,
you know, and before you know it, they were CEO
s like there is still uh so much work to
be done on that front, but just getting inside the
room is a big, big deal, and that got more
and more women inside the room. Uh. They were kept

(43:49):
apart for a little while late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
They didn't think men and women could like work in
the same rooms as one another. Uh, So they had
what was called typing pools, which was lit really where
all these women type, these these huge rooms with like
you know, a hundred typewriters that you've seen in movies
and these women just typing away. That was the typing
pool and then they would integrate the offices in that

(44:11):
way before too long, right, And also the whole idea
of like, well, women's places in the home, why are
we trying to get them into the workplace? This is wrong?
Like that's the process of modernization unfolding, like like we
talked about in the Fundamental Fundamentalism episode, Like that is
a perfect example of modernization happening. Um again though it's

(44:33):
it's like you said it was. It was something, but
it definitely wasn't everything, and it wasn't like throwing a
switch because you had to be UM single, typically young
and UM well educated to be a typist in the
business world, especially early on UM and when you were
married then your role was definitely back in the home.

(44:54):
So you would get married. Oftentimes you would meet some
somebody at work and marry them and they'd be like, Okay, congratulations,
you're fired, and that was that, you know, and then
you went off to become a homemaker. So yeah, there's
still a lot of work to do, but there was
a lot of work that had been done from you know,
the twenties and the thirties up to today. That's right. Uh,

(45:15):
we need to skip forward in time a little bit
because we've been talking about manual typewriters this whole time.
And you know, we said the word game changer a lot,
the real game changer because they were you know, electric
typewriters starting in like the nineteen twenties where things were motorized,
but it wasn't until the nineteen sixties with the introduction

(45:37):
you mentioned it earlier of that IBM S electric typewriter
and the type ball that was what really changed everything.
If you look at an old electric typewriter, I mean,
this is what we learned on in high school. Like
that was the sort of the go to before the
word processor. And Dave described it and it's pretty appropriate.

(45:57):
It's about the size of a golf ball, but some
boss with all the letters all the way around it.
And there is this you need to check out this
video on YouTube of how the selectric actually works. It's
an amazing marvel of engineering. There are actual cables that
spin super super fast, I think seven tenths of a
second to get the right uh character into place to

(46:21):
meet with that ribbon, or I guess it wouldn't even
a ribbon at that point, was it. I think the
ribbon does come up still, but it's the ball um,
the spin and the tilt. It's just got really impressive
y'all control. Yeah, and you didn't have to wind the
ribbon anymore. I think that was the deal. Was just
all uh electrifide and all that video you're referenced UM.

(46:44):
You can look up engineer guy on YouTube and IBM
S electric and he does a really great job of
explaining it UM and how it uses UH some a
series of levers called a whiffle tree, but basically your
your mechanical input from your your finger triggered a series
of motors that would make this thing happen again in

(47:04):
like seven tenths of a second. It's it was really impressive.
It's still impressive to see UM. And that changed everything
because before, when you were typing on a manual type
or you had to press really hard, and if that's
all you're doing for eight hours a day, your hands
started to hurt. Probably by midday Tuesday, I'm guessing, UM,
this was totally different. You just kind of barely pressed

(47:25):
the button and all of a sudden the thing would
just respond fully to your to that to that button press,
so that really helped. It also made everybody a lot faster.
And there was some other like cool components that were
added later, Like I think this electric was the first
one to use basically UM disk drives. I think onboard
disc drives to store you know, a whopping, you know,

(47:47):
thirty words at a time or something like that. UM.
But that was huge because it means it meant you
could type a letter once and then you could recall
the letter and print it again. You could edit it,
you could you all sorts of neat things. So that
made this electric also the first word processor, right, and
these are electric, there's a difference. There are also electronic
typewriters that came along and that was sort of the

(48:11):
next evolution in the game. And they used circuit boards,
silicone chips and everything to control those motors and memories. Uh.
Because the electric was UM while powered by electricity, was
still a very sort of mechanical machine in the in
the insides, in the guts, UH, and the electronic typewriters
came around in nineteen eight, and I guess that's what

(48:33):
I was using in high school actually, but they were
still electronic. Yeah, yeah, but they were still IBM s.
I don't know. I could see public schools still having
the old typewriters by the time you were in school.
I don't think so. From the sixties, well maybe, yeah,
because I mean the electronic typewriters arrived in seventy eight.
You know that IBM was still making electrics then, yeah,

(48:54):
that's true, So it's possible you were using this selectric
I mean, was there like a little l c D
screen on your on your typewriter? Well, then, my friend,
that was an IBM Selectric brand. Oh did all the
electronics have those? I think most of them did. I
think it was a pretty quickly introduced thing that you
had the little l c D print out so you
could see what you had just typed before the typewriter

(49:18):
actually typed it up onto the paper, So I think
you could edit it and rearrange it and do all
sorts of stuff, which is the definition of word processing. Yeah,
that's what mean, that's what I ended up getting in college,
and I think mine might have been a brother. But
they looked you know, day makes a good point. They
look better than printing something out from your computer at
the time because not matrix printers uh stunk. And this

(49:42):
looked way better. This looked like you typed it out
by hand. Uh, well, because you did. Um. I think
the Xerox Memory Writer six thirty was a big game changer,
and it had twenty lines of display, which was a
lot um but it also ca in today's dollars more
than ten grand. Yeah, it was like a major piece

(50:05):
of office equipment in there's I didn't have any money
back then. I bought something used and it was not this.
There's no way. I mean, they just got a lot
cheaper obviously over that six years. I remember having one
at home and it must have been eighty nine something
like that. So yeah, I think it came down in

(50:25):
price really quickly because my parents weren't shelling out ten
grand for a word process right, no way. So um,
Dave dug up. This New York Times article from was
really prescient. It was cool. It was really wonky article
about the state of the typewriter and word processor market.
But there's parts of it where they were saying, like,

(50:46):
analysts say that by the end of the eighties you
won't be able to distinguish a typewriter from a word
processor from a personal computer, which are these new fangled
things coming online, and that the secretaries of the future
will sit down at one machine that will be able
to do all these functions, and what they're doing will
just depend on what software they choose to be working on.

(51:06):
And in ninety four they're like, hey, here's the PC
of the future. They nailed it. I love it. They
actually put in quotes, a secretary of the future will
sit at the keyboard of a piece of quote hardware,
with this function to be determined by the choice of software.
Analyst's say, yeah, that's pretty nat. They had it for sure.
You got anything else about the typewriter? I got nothing else.

(51:29):
I got nothing else about this typewriter either, which means everybody,
if you want to know about typewriters, go look them
up and you can buy them for a lot of
money depending on the type. Ye get it. Uh, that
was an unintentional pun, as always. Uh. And since I
said unintentional punt, that means it's time for a listener mail.

(51:50):
I'm gonna call this We're gonna come up with this
guy's personalized plate. Hey, guys, love the recent episode on
license plates. At the beginning of the up, one of
you mentioned that you thought the topic was kind of boring,
but I really loved it. Also love license plates. I'm
particularly fond of personalized license plates, and recently try to
get one for myself for the first time. Despite the
talk of First Amendment rights, there are some rules in

(52:11):
my state about what you can and can't have. For instance,
nothing vulgar, of course, which we talked about. The plate
I applied for spelled out farting f A R T N.
I know it's childish, but I think that it's funny
and the right amount of vulgar. Let's got that right. However,
the state of Utah disagreed No surprise there uh and

(52:33):
thought it was too vulgar because I was denied. Now
that my first choice has been denied, I need some ideas,
so help me out. This is Matt, So I thought
on the fly, maybe we could think of something that's
just the right amount of vulgar. What about tuting is
pretty good? Or um? I mean? Is it? Is it

(52:55):
all gas centered? Well? I mean that kind of thing.
All right, let's go a different direction. So Tuton is
our our our replacement for farting. How about that? Okay,
tutings a replacement for farting. What about cruise in c
R U z N that'd be pretty boss. Yeah, not
vulgar about I don't know if I could say this

(53:19):
on our family friendly show. How about b A L
z O U t R. Yeah, sure, that might be
the right amount of vulgar. That's also that's not a
good look these days either. I don't know. Guys have
testicles hanging from their truck? Did they still do that? Oh? Sure,

(53:40):
drive out in the country in Georgia and testicles all
over the place. Um, what about to the medal? But
m d L we just need to figure out how
to shorten the as as in he has the pedal
to the metal. Oh well, you could do the number
two or m t L not m d L number

(54:00):
two h m t L to the medal. That's the
most amazing way. Well, no, and that's what I was saying.
We we've got too short and we need to shorten
D to the medal, like with the how do you
shorten th h G? Well in speedwriting. You would make
a downstroke like an L and then a line to
the right. Can you get that on a license plate?

(54:21):
I don't think so. How about two DUH D A
M T L. I think we've landed on it. That's
pretty good. Oh and also, real quick, I lost the email.
I don't know how we missed this, but somebody sent
in an email saying, just go check out the license
plate for the Northern Territories, Canada. It is a metal

(54:42):
plate that is bare shaped. Yeah, it's really neat looking.
I want to get one for the camp wall. I'm
trying to buy one on eBay as we speak, not
right in the second, but I've been I've been looking around.
Who was that letter from. I don't know. Well, this
was Matt, but I don't know who's sent in the
the Northern Territories. But Matt's the guy that we just
helped out. Yeah, he's to the metal. Okay, hopefully we

(55:05):
did help somewhere in there. Matt. And by the way,
every time I hear utah now, I can't help but
think of um NBC Peacocks, a friend of the family,
weird o mini series that my niece Mila is on fantastic. UH.
If you want to get in touch with us like
Matt did and asked us to help you out, We'll
do what we can. UH. You can send us an

(55:26):
email to stuff podcast at i heeart radio dot com.
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