At first, [Farmer Brown] couldn’t believe his ears.
Cows that type?
Impossible!
Click, clack MOO!
Click, clack, MOO!
Clickety, clack MOO!
from Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type
written by Doreen Cronin
illustrated by Betsy Lewin
Simon Spotlight, 2000
According to typing.com's free typing test, I can type 61 words per minute with 99% accuracy. (I knew I mistyped a lowercase M when it should have been uppercase and didn’t go back to fix it.) I’m satisfied with that. I type a little (or a lot) slower, though, when I have to think before I type or remember how to spell a word instead of copying an already formulated text. I would probably type slower, too, if the words were nonsense words.
But go ahead and click the link. Check yours, too, if you are curious.
I learned to type on a manual machine, but my parents bought me an electric typewriter when I went to college. I don’t remember the brand, but it had an extra ribbon that magically erased my mistakes. I still had to listen for the ding at the end of each line and pay attention to the mark I made to show the bottom of the page, though. Lots of paper still ended up in the “scratch bin” for grocery lists, to-do lists, and checkbook balancing.
Even though typewriters and typewriting are experiencing a small resurgence, NPR reported on a story last January that the last typewriter repair shop in Boston is closing. The owner, who is ready to retire, can’t find a buyer.
Tom Furrier, who has been fixing typewriters for 45 years in Boston, will close his store at the end of this month (March, 2025). When he started working, “you could find 40 busy typewriter shops across Metro Boston,” Tom told an NPR interviewer last January.
After working there for many years, he bought the shop in 1990. Personal computers were gaining popularity, but a decade later, vintage was in, and Tom’s shop had people waiting in line for him to open.
In recent years, some big cities have become home to more shops, including Milwaukee, which claims to be the birth of the typewriter.
Henry Mill (1683?-1771), an English engineer, is credited with the invention of the first European typewriter in 1714. Queen Anne said of his machine, “[it] made counterfeiting more difficult and reading and writing easier.”
So, how easy is it to use a typewriter? Why are the keys arranged in a seemingly random order? Who came up with it? And is it really the best order?
The long progression from Johannes Gutenberg to Bill Gates was an evolution in technology, mass production, and the spread of the written word.
Today’s typewriter is based on the first commercial typewriter, designed by Christopher Latham Sholes and Carlos Glidden in 1866. Two years later, they contracted with the E. Remington Company to manufacture it.
The letters were originally arranged in alphabetical order in two rows. Like later machines, each letter on the keyboard was attached to a rod that jumped to strike a paper when the key was struck, then snapped back into position.
Sholes, it’s said, discovered that the faster someone typed, the less time the rods had to snap back. They often collided and jammed. He decided to move the commonest letters to the most difficult places on the keyboard to slow down the typing and give the rods a little longer to fall back into place. He had designed the QWERTY keyboard.
A different QWERTY story credits Densmore, a partner of Sholes. His layout considered common two-letter combinations. He placed each letter on the opposite side of the keyboard to provide efficiency in a two-handed movement while preventing collisions, clashes, and jams.
QWERTY has been analyzed, studied, and experimented with since the first keyboard to use it. Well? Is QWERTY best? Only maybe. It’s surprisingly controversial. Loads of papers, studies, and experiments have been done. For now, at least, the keyboard isn’t changing. It’s the way it’s (almost) always been done. At least in English.
All Latin Alphabets use upper and lower case. It took five more years and the Industrial Revolution for Remington to add the “shift” key, allowing the typist to toggle between them.
In Gutenberg’s time, letters used to set type were stored in cases. The capital letters or larger ones (the majuscule) were kept in the upper case, and the minuscule (smaller) ones went in the lower case. The names stuck. A discussion of majuscule and minuscule scripts would require a blog post of its own, so let’s leave it there for now.
Very literal.
The Cyrillic, Chinese, Thai, and Hebrew alphabets are some examples that mostly do not distinguish between upper and lower case. You can find more here. You can see layouts of their keyboards and type in any language you’d like here. It’s very cumbersome, though.
Centuries before modern, ok, vintage, typewriters became widely available, Johannes Gutenberg (c1395 - c1468 invented movable type. He was already familiar with printing and had created an alloy that could be quickly melted, cooled, and reformed. The small, metal pieces, each a single letter, could be arranged in infinite ways. He had also perfected an oil-based, fast-drying ink that was thick enough to coat the letters and still adhere to paper. The screw press, designed for rapid operation, also was in use before Gutenberg adapted it to its use in printing.
But the essential element was Gutenberg’s adjustable mold. By using a frame, whole lines of text, upper case and lower, could be printed at once.
Paper had already been invented by the ancient Egyptians and Chinese, and movable type had already been invented in China. Inks and alloys were already in use, too, throughout the world. Perfecting the pieces and synthesizing them to create something so useful was Gutenberg’s genius.
The importance of his printing press can’t be overstated. Like the wheel, antibiotics, and electricity, it has changed our world forever.
I just started reading When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill (Knopf Doubleday/Vintage, 2022). It’s gotten mixed reviews, but I loved her Girl Who Drank the Moon (Algonquin Books for Young Readers, 2016. Newbery winner), so I decided to give this one a try. I’ll let you know next time.
Be curious! (and literal, when necessary)
Cows that type?
Impossible!
Click, clack MOO!
Click, clack, MOO!
Clickety, clack MOO!
from Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type
written by Doreen Cronin
illustrated by Betsy Lewin
Simon Spotlight, 2000
According to typing.com's free typing test, I can type 61 words per minute with 99% accuracy. (I knew I mistyped a lowercase M when it should have been uppercase and didn’t go back to fix it.) I’m satisfied with that. I type a little (or a lot) slower, though, when I have to think before I type or remember how to spell a word instead of copying an already formulated text. I would probably type slower, too, if the words were nonsense words.
But go ahead and click the link. Check yours, too, if you are curious.
I learned to type on a manual machine, but my parents bought me an electric typewriter when I went to college. I don’t remember the brand, but it had an extra ribbon that magically erased my mistakes. I still had to listen for the ding at the end of each line and pay attention to the mark I made to show the bottom of the page, though. Lots of paper still ended up in the “scratch bin” for grocery lists, to-do lists, and checkbook balancing.
Even though typewriters and typewriting are experiencing a small resurgence, NPR reported on a story last January that the last typewriter repair shop in Boston is closing. The owner, who is ready to retire, can’t find a buyer.
Tom Furrier, who has been fixing typewriters for 45 years in Boston, will close his store at the end of this month (March, 2025). When he started working, “you could find 40 busy typewriter shops across Metro Boston,” Tom told an NPR interviewer last January.
After working there for many years, he bought the shop in 1990. Personal computers were gaining popularity, but a decade later, vintage was in, and Tom’s shop had people waiting in line for him to open.
In recent years, some big cities have become home to more shops, including Milwaukee, which claims to be the birth of the typewriter.
Henry Mill (1683?-1771), an English engineer, is credited with the invention of the first European typewriter in 1714. Queen Anne said of his machine, “[it] made counterfeiting more difficult and reading and writing easier.”
So, how easy is it to use a typewriter? Why are the keys arranged in a seemingly random order? Who came up with it? And is it really the best order?
The long progression from Johannes Gutenberg to Bill Gates was an evolution in technology, mass production, and the spread of the written word.
Today’s typewriter is based on the first commercial typewriter, designed by Christopher Latham Sholes and Carlos Glidden in 1866. Two years later, they contracted with the E. Remington Company to manufacture it.
The letters were originally arranged in alphabetical order in two rows. Like later machines, each letter on the keyboard was attached to a rod that jumped to strike a paper when the key was struck, then snapped back into position.
Sholes, it’s said, discovered that the faster someone typed, the less time the rods had to snap back. They often collided and jammed. He decided to move the commonest letters to the most difficult places on the keyboard to slow down the typing and give the rods a little longer to fall back into place. He had designed the QWERTY keyboard.
A different QWERTY story credits Densmore, a partner of Sholes. His layout considered common two-letter combinations. He placed each letter on the opposite side of the keyboard to provide efficiency in a two-handed movement while preventing collisions, clashes, and jams.
QWERTY has been analyzed, studied, and experimented with since the first keyboard to use it. Well? Is QWERTY best? Only maybe. It’s surprisingly controversial. Loads of papers, studies, and experiments have been done. For now, at least, the keyboard isn’t changing. It’s the way it’s (almost) always been done. At least in English.
All Latin Alphabets use upper and lower case. It took five more years and the Industrial Revolution for Remington to add the “shift” key, allowing the typist to toggle between them.
In Gutenberg’s time, letters used to set type were stored in cases. The capital letters or larger ones (the majuscule) were kept in the upper case, and the minuscule (smaller) ones went in the lower case. The names stuck. A discussion of majuscule and minuscule scripts would require a blog post of its own, so let’s leave it there for now.
Very literal.
The Cyrillic, Chinese, Thai, and Hebrew alphabets are some examples that mostly do not distinguish between upper and lower case. You can find more here. You can see layouts of their keyboards and type in any language you’d like here. It’s very cumbersome, though.
Centuries before modern, ok, vintage, typewriters became widely available, Johannes Gutenberg (c1395 - c1468 invented movable type. He was already familiar with printing and had created an alloy that could be quickly melted, cooled, and reformed. The small, metal pieces, each a single letter, could be arranged in infinite ways. He had also perfected an oil-based, fast-drying ink that was thick enough to coat the letters and still adhere to paper. The screw press, designed for rapid operation, also was in use before Gutenberg adapted it to its use in printing.
But the essential element was Gutenberg’s adjustable mold. By using a frame, whole lines of text, upper case and lower, could be printed at once.
Paper had already been invented by the ancient Egyptians and Chinese, and movable type had already been invented in China. Inks and alloys were already in use, too, throughout the world. Perfecting the pieces and synthesizing them to create something so useful was Gutenberg’s genius.
The importance of his printing press can’t be overstated. Like the wheel, antibiotics, and electricity, it has changed our world forever.
I just started reading When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill (Knopf Doubleday/Vintage, 2022). It’s gotten mixed reviews, but I loved her Girl Who Drank the Moon (Algonquin Books for Young Readers, 2016. Newbery winner), so I decided to give this one a try. I’ll let you know next time.
Be curious! (and literal, when necessary)
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