Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (31 page)

In the realm of the late-nineteenth-century office, the typewriter was not
a revolution but a revelation. If the ideal worker was to be a tireless and efficient machine, was not the pen—blotting, needing to be dipped—a weak link? The logical direction of standardizing technique was finding a technology that put information onto paper with the least manual effort. The keyboard began to challenge not only the pen but other information technologies: the telegraph key and the
type case.

From at least 1714, inventors in Europe and the United States had proposed dozens of systems for imprinting letters. But until the mid-nineteenth century few of the designs were suitable for replacing
handwriting in everyday commerce, literature, or education. Some, like William Austin Burt’s “Typographer” or “Family Letter Press” of 1829, produced attractive text but used dials and
levers that made the process too cumbersome for longer copy, like today’s hand-held plastic tape embossing machines. Others were conceived less as general-purpose machines than as prostheses, extensions of the body for those unable to write efficiently or legibly with a pen. The best known in North America was Charles Thurber’s device, patented in 1843, for marking letters on paper mounted on a
traveling and rotatable cylinder. The keytops, arranged around a wheel, bore raised letters for the blind. Other American and French inventors introduced systems for embossing letters for the blind; none appears to have been commercially successful.
¹²

If the keyboard was not yet viable for the disabled, it appeared far more promising for another market: the growing number of businesses with substantial
telegraph traffic. In the nineteenth century, telegraphy was an advanced technology, one that attracted many ambitious young men and a growing number of women. The men, but not the women, were initially encouraged to develop themselves scientifically and technically. They formed a network of avid tinkerers, proud of their skills, simultaneously competitive and cooperative like today’s programmers.
Thomas Edison’s genius emerged in this milieu, and New York City’s thriving financial community keenly rewarded innovations offering users a competitive advantage.
¹³

While only a few of the operators became inventors, this elite workforce was a challenge for employers. Wages were high and proficient operators in demand. Because messages were generally received by electromagnetic sounders, each
telegrapher had a recognizable rhythm, called a fist, and a proficient operator could “rush” a neophyte by sending letters faster than the recipient could transcribe them. At the other end of the marvelous new apparatus there were, after all, just ears, a brain, a hand, and a pen. Employers sought alternatives promising more speed with less skill. The musical keyboard was a familiar interface, and
the increasing durability and dynamics of pianos must have suggested that keyboards could control text as well as sound fluently and reliably. In the early 1850s, Sir Charles Wheatstone, a professor of physics at King’s College, London, devised a series of typewriters using a keyboard like a piano’s, except that black and white keys alternated evenly. Wheatstone’s machines were not designed for
message transmission, but since they produced letters on tape, they probably were intended for transcription. In 1855 and 1857, respectively, the
Italian Giuseppe Ravizza and the American Dr. William Francis used similar keyboards to imprint paper on a roller, giving their inventions the charming names of Cembalo Scrivano and Literary Piano.
¹⁴

The crucial step probably was not a device but a
manifesto. Ten years after the Francis patent,
Scientific American
described yet another “type writing machine” that John Pratt, an Alabaman, had shown in London. What was notable was not the design of Pratt’s invention but the sentiment the editors expressed: that the technique of handwriting had become a torture, and that it was time to replace it with a modern technology. The “laborious and
unsatisfactory performance of the pen” would be replaced in law offices, newspapers, and the studies of the clergy in a “revolution” comparable to that begun by the printing press. The “weary process” of school penmanship lessons could be limited to “writing one’s own signature and playing on the literary piano.” Apparently for the first time in a widely circulated periodical, the article also held
out the possibility that a machine could write not just more neatly and easily than the pen but also more rapidly
¹⁵

The first invention inspired by this article continued to take the musical metaphor. The patent demonstration model produced by Christopher Latham Sholes and Carlos Glidden, two Milwaukee amateur tinkerers who haunted a local machine shop, had six white keys alternating piano-style
with five black keys. Sholes and Glidden were soon joined by two others: Samuel Soulé, a technical man who had worked with Sholes on other inventions, and James Densmore, a former newspaper publishing colleague. The invention took another turn. Sholes and his collaborators abandoned the piano-style keyboard for an array of circles; this was to remain the definitive arrangement. But the inspiration
of musical keyboard instruments was still evident. Each key indirectly activated a hammer that forced the paper against a ribbon, much as a piano key transmits a force through the parts of its own action to make the felt hammer hit the strings.

The technical details of the Sholes typewriter’s history interest mainly collectors and other specialists, but the fact that it went through many versions
in the 1860s and 1870s was part of the reason for its triumph. The Sholes-Glidden-Soulé design was inelegant. For decades after its introduction, users could not see their work as they typed; the paper had to be removed. Hammers (typebars), clashing frequently, had to be untangled. The machine was limited to a single typeface. While many rival designs were mainly attempts to get around the Sholes
patents, others had major
advantages. At about the same time, James Bartlett Hammond was developing a writing machine that used a replaceable circular typewheel, permitting multiple fonts. Text produced on the Hammond could be read with the paper still in the machine. Perhaps best of all, the Hammond type-wheel not only made jamming impossible but assured an even impression. The typewheel was
fixed. Pressing a key triggered a hammer that struck the paper through the ribbon against the typewheel with unvarying force. Hammond was not the only inventor to use such a principle. Thomas Edison, too, after examining and rejecting the Sholes machine for his employers at the Automatic Telegraph Company, invented an alternative machine with a small rotating wheel against which the paper was pressed.
¹⁶

After World War II, the Hammond principle became part of a versatile and successful composition system called the Varitype that remained the most economical way to set mathematical copy before the computer. Beginning in the 1960s, IBM introduced the Selectric typewriter with its tilting and rotating golf-ball style element; a number of manufacturers still make word processors with rotating type
wheels of the kind Hammond pioneered. Why, then, did the Sholes typebar triumph? What it lacked in design elegance it more than made up for with one of the best systems for product improvement that the industrial world had yet seen, and the credit goes to Sholes’s associate James Densmore, one of America’s most underrated entrepreneurs. Densmore not only risked all of his $600 in savings in a quarter-share
of the invention, he gradually bought out the other partners. Equally important, he realized the power of steady incremental improvements. Densmore relentlessly pressured Sholes to produce one new model after another. Believing that court reporters would be an important early market, he sent models to James O. Clephane, one of Washington’s leading practitioners, for rigorous testing that
led to new rounds of changes—as many as thirty models over four years. Densmore also found an ideal manufacturing partner in the Remington Arms Company of Ilion, New York, where expert mechanics had benefited from the advanced machine-shop practice developed at America’s national armories and then introduced into private manufacturing.
¹⁷

The Remington Model 1 typewriter, introduced in 1874, employed
most of the principles of a twentieth-century mechanical typewriter, from the spring-driven carriage with its rubber platen to the keyboard arrangement and basket of typebars. But although it had been through years of relentless development, the Model 1 was limited even by the day’s standards. It was slow and expensive, at $125 about the real price of today’s
high-end personal computers. Fewer
than a thousand a year were sold during the 1870s, even after Remington offered shifting for upper and lower case. The machines were far more popular with court reporters than with businessmen, whose customers often suspected typewritten letters of being printed handbills intended for the semiliterate. The technique of penmanship was still esteemed, and the legal validity of typewritten documents
and signatures was debated. Sears, Roebuck & Company sent handwritten correspondence to its rural customers, and the U.S. government did not start to authorize typewriter use until the end of the century Handwriting was laborious, and many people yearned to do without it, but when the opportunity appeared they hesitated. Palmer’s penmanship schools at first spread faster than the machine that was
supposed to put them out of business.
¹⁸

What finally overcame obstacles to the typewriter was not any price reduction or further technological breakthrough. It was the changing face of organizations and society. Companies and government bureaus were growing larger, and their internal as well as external communication needs grew even more rapidly. Fine penmanship might still be a welcome courtesy
to an individual customer, yet it could not address this volume of business. As the number of public and private clerical employees rose, all the schools’ penmanship exercises could not assure the uniformity that new bureaucratic life demanded. Eliminating confusing individual variations in writing, the technology of the typewriter permitted standardized fonts that were as closely tied to the
emerging industrial and commercial society as the late medieval
textus quadratus
, Gutenberg’s model, had been to the scriptures and devotional books of its own day. Black letter had achieved shortcuts in writing and reading with dozens of ligatures and abbreviations; typing achieved the same through speedier use of a more limited character set. The typewriter fonts familiar well into the twentieth
century, pica and elite, were as anonymous in design and as ubiquitous as black letter had been. Although a variety of typefaces was available from the earliest days of typing, there seemed to be an overpowering unconscious will to suppress variation in the interest of interchangeability It did not matter that each manufacturer used slightly different matrices or that each typewriter produced
unique details of letterforms and alignment. Often ornate printers’ fonts, especially for advertising, were proliferating in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the typewriter retained its chaste uniformity.
¹⁹

By 1886, Remington and other makers were selling fifty thousand
typewriters a year, and organizations were embracing textual uniformity
The Writer
, a leading journal for authors,
repeatedly reminded subscribers of magazine publishers’ preference for typewritten copy The advantages of standardized text for compositors working with hundreds of manuscripts each year were obvious; book typesetters could afford to be more indulgent, and only after World War II did nearly all of them require typewritten copy Even so, as early as 1889 the city editor of the
Boston Globe
could
declare that a typewritten manuscript improved chances of acceptance by 10 percent.
²⁰

The uniformity of type had a social advantage, too, at least for employers. Carbon paper banished cumbersome methods of duplicating handwritten documents and made it possible to generate a copy of every outgoing letter automatically. Even more important, the keyboard responded to an emerging management trend:
turning the previously flexible definition of clerical work into a hierarchy with more limited opportunities for advancement. As part of the trend, stenography and typing were feminized once the New York Young Women’s Christian Association began to offer courses. Women, who had become so fluent at the piano, were now thought to have a special affinity for keyboards. Best of all for the initially
skeptical employers, women could be hired for wages 25 percent lower than those men earned for comparable work. In Frank Lloyd Wright’s state-of-the-art Larkin Building (1904) in Buffalo, where we encountered the “suicide chair” in Chapter Five, messengers took (male) correspondents’ “graphophone” cylinder customer-service responses to the (female) Typewriter Operators’ Department, a novelty with
a balcony for visitors. Economic rationalization and gender stereotyping went together.
²¹

The keyboard turned out to be not only a tool but a management weapon. After an operators’ strike in 1907, the Western Union Telegraph Company, which had spurned earlier automatic transmission systems, began to replace its unionized, mostly male Morse operators with women using automatic transmission equipment
with typewriter-style keyboards. After sixty years of prototypes and experiments, anonymous keyboarding replaced the distinctive techniques and knowledge of a formerly proud craft. The new generation of female telegraphers would never have the chance to produce its own Edison. Bookkeeping, too, was shifted to machines that combined alphanumeric keyboards with mechanical calculators. The keyboard
was dividing the clerical workforce into semiskilled and professional castes. Only the mechanical compositors were able to
continue corporate traditions with the new technology. Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype, which prevailed in newspaper work, had a distinctive keyboard pattern needed to accommodate stacks of matrices. The keys were arranged by declining frequency of use in English. Because no
typewriter used this arrangement, it took decades before typists could be enlisted in periodical typesetting. Male hand compositors, unlike their telegrapher brethren, welcomed automatic technology. Women had been gaining ground as manual typesetters. While the Linotype Company insisted they could also be excellent operators of its machines, the men were able to exaggerate the strenuousness and
danger of working with heavy equipment and reservoirs of molten lead. Even after punch tape operation removed this pretext, hot metal composition remained masculine keyboarding.
²²