![]() ![]() The writing was on a tape of tissue paper, and the platen was fastened to the body of the boxlike affair. The original model was very clumsy and weighty. The framework is of wood, with the leverage below, and the basket form of typebars above closely resembles those of some machines in use today. The first row is of ivory, duly lettered the second row is of ebony and then, as you see, a third row, made up of letters and characters that are little used, is in the form of pegs. And yet in another sense Sholes was full of intuition and prescience: purportedly, the first letters he typed on the machine were “WWW.” George Iles’s 1912 book, Leading American Inventors, describes the mechanics: They also couldn’t be bothered with lowercase letters-the first Sholes model was in a condition of eternal caps lock, doomed to permanent shouting. Notice the absence of 0 and 1 Sholes and his cohort assumed that people would make do with I and O. ![]() As you can imagine, it didn’t boast what today’s designers would call “intuitive UX.” Its keys, borrowing from innovations in telegraphy, were arranged as such: It looks like a miniature piano crossed with a clock and/or a phonograph and/or a kitchen table-and Sholes did, in fact, design the prototype out of his kitchen table. It helped to prevent jams and increase typing speeds by putting frequently combined letters farther apart-but that took years of trial and error the initial iteration of his typewriter was far more rudimentary in design. Sholes is widely credited with having invented the first QWERTY keyboard. There are rough analogs for Bill Gates and for Steves Jobs and Wozniak (though there’s no one so delirious and insane as Steve Ballmer)-and one such analog is Christopher Latham Sholes, a Milwaukee printer whose first “type-writer” was patented 146 years ago today. The history of the typewriter is, as with the history of the personal computer after it, rife with collaboration, ingenuity, betrayal, setbacks, lucre, acrimony, misguided experimentation, and bickering white men. ![]()
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