“What’s really interesting is that right underneath our fingertips is this old-timey machine that we don’t think about as old-timey,” says science and technology historian Jason Puskar of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, author of the forthcoming book The Switch: An Off and On History of Digital Humans. “There are so few technologies that don’t change at all. It’s a Victorian interface in the middle of a high-tech computer.”
The QWERTY design was partly influenced by an earlier type of writing machine called the printing telegraph, Puskar says. The keyboards for these devices had black and white keys that resembled piano keys.
“Starting in the 1840s, they made these amazing machines that…had little piano keyboards, and on one end you would type in your message, and on the other end it would print out a spool of paper,” says Puskar. “This was a major influence on the QWERTY keyboard, because on the black keys you had the letters ‘a’ through about ‘m’ going from left to right, and then on the white keys, it wrapped around from right to left, from ‘o’ to ‘z.’ If you look at your keyboard now, that middle row is basically the black keys from the printing telegraph, with a few modifications.”
Christopher Latham Sholes, the typewriter’s inventor, was an intriguing hybrid of journalist, printer, politician, and father of 10 children. Born on Valentine’s Day of 1819 near Mooresburg, Pennsylvania, Sholes moved to Wisconsin in 1837, where he worked for his brothers’ newspaper in Green Bay. In the early 1860s, Sholes worked as an editor for The Wisconsin Enquirer, The Milwaukee News, and The Milwaukee Sentinel. He then became involved in politics and served in the state legislature. An appointment from President Abraham Lincoln to serve as collector at Milwaukee’s port led him to give up his position at the newspaper. During that time, Sholes began pursuing his interest in developing what eventually became the typewriter. Much of Sholes’ collaborative efforts with Soulé and Glidden took place at the Kleinsteuber Machine Shop in Milwaukee, which was something of a gathering place for local inventors.“That machine shop was a place where people could come to use precision equipment that the shop provided,” says Puskar. “It was also a networking hub for innovators, inventors, tinkerers, etc. Sholes and Samuel Soulé met Carlos Glidden there—he was apparently working on a new kind of plow. Sholes and Soulé were working on an automatic ticket numbering machine there before he started on the typewriter.”