TechStuff Tackles Typewriters

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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,

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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, 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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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?

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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.

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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 on this and bausands of other topics. Does it have stuff works dot com