Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (32 page)

What did the men and women of the 1880s and 1890s actually do with their expensive new machines? Ottmar Mergenthaler’s company trained Linotype operators, and Thomas Edison insisted
on sending a representative to demonstrate his new phonograph, but typists and their employers were on their own. The keyboard came into the world with no recommended technique. Many typewriter inventors like Christopher Sholes and enthusiasts like Mark Twain were former newspapermen who thought of setting text as the rapid motion of thumb, forefinger, and middle finger. At first neither they
nor their customers considered the fourth and fifth fingers strong enough to be used regularly—even though pianists had been applying them to fortissimo passages for years. Early typing manuals were cursory, and many were based on the alternative keyboards of other manufacturers. The Caligraph and other machines had dedicated keys for capitals, like the Linotype, above or to the side of the lowercase
keyboard. Operators worked out their own systems, nearly all searching for each letter. Typists working from stenographic or plaintext copy would look at a sentence or phrase, then tap it out. Four-finger typing could be fast enough.

Not inventors but users were the first to see that typing was a new skill that, like musical keyboard fingering before it, could benefit from systematic analysis
and practice. The pioneers formed a competitive and cooperative community of skills, like the late-nineteenth-century bicyclists and swimmers we have discussed, or the surfers and skateboarders of the twentieth century. Many early typists probably memorized the keyboard
and used all ten fingers and thumbs, but one stood out. Frank R. McGurrin, a young law clerk in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1878
competed with his employer on the office’s Model 1 Remington typewriter. The idea of touch typing was originally a joke by his employer, who claimed that a local court stenographer’s typist was able to work rapidly from dictation while looking out the window. As McGurrin later recalled, “I made up my mind that whatever a girl could do I could do,” and he started to use all his fingers instead of
two or three on each hand. By the end of the year he was able to type ninety words per minute—still considered an excellent speed now—from new copy without looking at the keyboard. Only two years later did he meet the stenographer’s typist and learn that she had never even tried the new method. His employer’s teasing provocation had spurred him to discover the obvious: a musical keyboard style could
be adapted for text.
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By the 1880s, typewriter manufacturers were sponsoring speed contests, and newer machines needed less force, making higher speeds possible. McGurrin became known as the fastest Remington operator. In an 1888 contest in Cincinnati, he confronted Louis Traub, an agent for the Caligraph, possibly the best selling of the two-keyboard machines. McGurrin won decisively, achieving
ninety-five words per minute from dictation and ninety-eight from copying against Traub’s eighty-three and seventy-one. Traub’s lower score on copy helped doom the Caligraph. Because its keys were too widely dispersed to permit the touch method, he had to take his eye repeatedly from the keyboard. Traub soon replaced all the Caligraph machines in his typing school with Remingtons and began instruction
in touch typing, signaling the end of the double keyboard. McGurrin continued on the exhibition circuit, promoting Remington as he achieved up to 125 words per minute.
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For all his prowess, McGurrin had no students and published no books. Mrs. M. V Longley of Cincinnati, whose husband operated a “Shorthand and Typewriter Institute,” developed her own system of touch typing in the early 1880s
after seeing a Remington and reading in its brief instructions the manufacturer’s advice to use only one finger of each hand, at most two fingers of the right hand. She taught classes with the all-finger method she developed, and published the first textbook for its use in 1882. Citing piano and organ fingering, she observed: “If the hands are held over the keyboard the fingers will reach the extreme
right and left, and each be in a position to do duty and the thumb will be in readiness to strike the space bar.” This method, now self-evident and ubiquitous, was a
bold departure. The goal was not so much raw speed as the ability to transcribe accurately while looking at the copy rather than the keys.
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Mrs. Longley had retired by the mid-1880s, but a Maine shorthand and typing instructor named
Bates Torrey published an even more influential manual,
Practical Typewriting
, in 1889. Citing McGurrin, and also blind typists who had mastered the all-finger method, Torrey presented a powerful case for keeping the hands in fixed positions and typing a given word consistently with the same finger motions. It was also Torrey who recognized the importance of touch, and who first applied the word
“touch” to all-finger typing. The success of his book, designed for self-instruction and correspondence as well as school use, inspired a wave of other texts, and the touch method spread across the Western states. One author, A. C. Van Sant of Omaha, developed the system of fingering that has been taught ever since and is still the basis of computer typing CD-ROMs. Within about twenty-five years
of the modern typewriter’s introduction, the community of instructors and typists had stabilized a technique.
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The Remington typewriters used by McGurrin and the early textbook writers arranged their letters in a pattern that by the turn of the century was called the Universal Keyboard. Christopher Sholes had begun with a purely alphabetic arrangement but
had revised it because the hammers, which were arranged in a circle in the earliest Remington, tended to jam. Sholes and Densmore worked out a new arrangement of keys for their No. 2 Remington machine, patented in 1878. Just as the musical keyboard was stabilized before 1500, its textual counterpart remains almost identical to the diagram on the patent.

Nobody has been able to reconstruct Sholes’s
and Densmore’s reasoning completely. It would probably be necessary to find an operating Model 1 or 2 typewriter and experiment with combinations of letters. The QWERTY keyboard, as it came to be known, was clearly a compromise. On the middle row of text there was a nearly alphabetical sequence: DFGHJKLM. The last letter was later moved to the bottom row, where the original C and X were also
later reversed. On the top row was a vowel cluster (UIO) out of alphabetical order. Sholes and Densmore were both familiar with newspaper type cases, arranged not in alphabetical order but
roughly according to letter frequency. The QWERTY keyboard did not follow these patterns but was conceived in a similar spirit.
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Sholes and Densmore made a fateful assumption about the operator’s technique.
Compositors used thumb and forefinger and looked at the type case as they worked, and it seemed reasonable to think that typewriter operators would do the same—as, indeed, all but a few initially did. For this style of work the QWERTY keyboard was relatively efficient. Its leading twentieth-century critic, August Dvorak, found that the most frequent letters were typed with the first two fingers
of the left hand and the index finger of the right. There seems to be a balance between putting all the most frequent characters near the center of the keyboard and maintaining an order that will make it easier to find keys visually, like keeping O and P as well as the middle-row sequence together.

As early as 1875, proposals circulated for more efficient keyboards. Once touch typing prevailed,
it would have been logical to look for even greater speed and comfort by devising a new arrangement. Yet neither McGurrin, nor Mrs. Longley nor Torrey is known to have proposed any modification. It is unlikely that they feared devaluation of their skill by keyboard reform. McGurrin became a well-to-do banker in the West, Mrs. Longley left teaching, and Torrey and others could have sold new editions
of their textbooks. The QWERTY keyboard was not the best imaginable, even in the late nineteenth century, but it was good enough that expert typists did not feel frustrated by it. Remington wisely did not try to monopolize its keyboard arrangement under patent law. And instead of developing their own proprietary systems, Remington’s major emerging competitors, Underwood and Royal, kept the Universal
Keyboard. The innovators were producers of interchangeable type element machines, notably George C. Blickensderfer. The Blick’s home row, DHIATENSOR, was claimed capable of spelling 70 percent of English-language words. But even Blickensderfer offered the Universal Keyboard as an alternative option.
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The Universal Keyboard was spreading just as the Jankó piano keyboard was failing in the musical
marketplace. Most typists were no longer independent writers, attorneys, or court reporters but part of a large labor pool operating machines they did not own. Just as concert halls needed pianos with standardized keyboards, businesses wanted to be able to engage typists without having either to replace or refit the machines, or retrain their recruits. Typists and typing students likewise wanted
to learn
the most widely accepted arrangement. Later the economist Paul David called such pressures for standardization “network externalities” and cited the QWERTY keyboard in an influential paper arguing that historical contingency can, paradoxically lock inferior technology into place.
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During the early twentieth century those who challenged the QWERTY design came from outside the office
machine business. Apostles of industrial rationality they would have found it inconceivable that the dead hand of the past could constrain the invisible hand of the marketplace. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who developed new methods for analyzing human skills, took an interest in the typewriter, producing equipment and techniques for people with disabilities. They also took notes on the sequence of
motions in typing and made slow-motion study films of championship typists at work. One of Gilbreth’s assistants in his typewriter work was William Dealey who later became a professor of education in Texas. Dealey’s brother-in-law, August Dvorak, taught educational psychology at the University of Washington.
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Dvorak is best known today as the inventor of the leading alternative keyboard design,
but he was interested in everything that could affect typing productivity, including posture and fatigue. In the text that he wrote with Dealey and two typing teachers, Nellie L. Merrick and Gertrude Catherine Ford, and in workbooks for students, Dvorak actually devoted little space to keyboard reform. He was more concerned with every detail of skill regardless of keyboard design, especially developing
a rapid, light touch (“ballistic motion”) and reducing tension. He was a connoisseur of techniques, showing aspiring typists and typing teachers how they could benefit from the “looseness and lightness” of top performers in fields as different as tournament golf and window washing. All of this he supported with citations from the latest in the growing psychological literature of typing behavior.
Dvorak’s book, sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, is still impressive for its unpretentious but authoritative manner, and for its belief that typing students could participate in the scientific advancement of their own skills. And Dvorak also fought some dogmas of traditional typing instruction, especially exaggeration of the importance of touch and the
“queer bias for petty accuracy.”
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Keyboard reform was still important to Dvorak and Dealey. They were convinced that the universal keyboard was an obstacle to good technique. It was expert typists who first noted the problems of QWERTY. A speed coach interviewed by the Gilbreths had already remarked that “[t]he young ladies think that it is the mechanical construction of the machine that is
retarding their speed.” The speed coach went on to note that most of the writing was done with the left hand and that too many words were typed by that hand only Dvorak went on to estimate that overcoming the defects of QWERTY accounted for half to three quarters of instruction time. Work was divided unevenly among the fingers. Overloading the left hand interrupted the ideal rhythm of alternating
use of left and right. Too many combinations of two letters (digraphs) were made by adjoining fingers. Eighty-five percent of digraph combinations had to touch the top row, while only 7 percent could be made on the home row.
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August Dvorak, a disciple of the time and motion expert Frank Gilbreth, devised, with William L. Dealey, one of a number of reform keyboards promising new efficiency in writing, as Paul von Jankó’s keyboard did in musical performance. Dvorak’s claims for higher speed proved exaggerated. Comfort was the real advantage of the arrangement. From U.S. Patent 2,040,248, May 12, 1936
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Rejecting previous
revised keyboards, Dvorak and Dealey developed and patented a new arrangement. Vowels were relocated to the home row of the left hand, and the consonants most often used were on the right, so that hands had to alternate with each syllable. Loads were adjusted to the capacity of each finger. The largest source of errors, digraphs made by adjoining figures, was cut by 90 percent. Much more work
could be done on the home row, cutting “hurdling”—the scurrying of fingers over the keyboard. (Only a hundred common words can be made on the home row of the Universal Keyboard, three thousand with the simplified.) Dvorak and Dealey’s studies in junior and senior high schools suggested substantial gains: an average of 48 words per minute in the second semester, for example, versus a maximum of 28.4
w.p.m. in comparable studies with a Universal Keyboard.
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