A brief history of the 'degrading' Type-Writer - Lewiston Sun Journal

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These days we’re all used to using computers for everything from sending a quick email to writing that great American novel (that may or may not get published). But as I sit hunting and pecking, my thoughts sometimes turn to where it all started for me: writing on old manual typewriters. It inspired me to look into the history of this now outdated but still elegant (and sometimes frustrating) machine.

In the early 1870s Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee had perfected his “Type-Writer” enough so that it was put into production by arms manufacturer E. Remington & Sons, which was looking for new product lines with the Civil War over.

The first great writer to make use of this newfangled machine was Mark Twain, who purchased a Remington “Sholes and Glidden” model on the spot in 1874 for $125 ($2,500 today) after watching a highly trained young lady in Boston consistently type 57 words a minute on the thing.

Unable to even approach the young lady’s output on the machine, Twain felt it was “degrading my character,” and he soon wrote a letter to Remington telling them to stop using his name in their typewriter advertisements.

To get rid of the infernal machine, he sold it to his coachman, who returned the thing after six months. “I gave it away twice after that, but it wouldn’t stay,” he later lamented.

How then is Mark Twain credited with being the first person to write a book — “Life on the Mississippi” in 1883 — on a typewriter? By dictating it to a typist who reportedly used a new Remington No. 2 machine.

Another writer famous for his typing is Jack Kerouac, who hammered out his 1957 Beat Generation classic “On the Road” on a roll of paper that resulted in a single-spaced paragraph 120 feet long.

The manuscript’s length, along with the fact that Kerouac really didn’t care to proofread, led fellow writer Truman Capote to complain that “It isn’t writing, it’s typing.”

A few years after its introduction, improvements — such as the shift bar, so people could type in something other than all capitals — began to be made to the typewriter. But not every “improvement” caught on. The silent typewriter, for example, failed, reportedly because people felt that the noise made by the machine meant that work was getting done.

One improvement to the typewriter that did catch on (and one I use a lot) was Wite-Out correction fluid, which was invented by Bette Nesmith Graham, mother of The Monkees’ Michael Nesmith.

Probably the best known change to the typewriter was the “qwerty” keyboard, which was developed to slow down skilled typists because their fingers moved so fast that they tended to get the machine’s key arms stuck together.

So, I hope you’re up for a little qwerty trivia:

* Long words that can be typed using just the top row of letters on a standard keyboard are “proprietor” and “repertoire,” while short ones include: I, we, to, up, it, or, and pi.

* When using standard fingering, the longest word that can be typed using one hand (the left) is “sweaterdresses,” while the word “skepticism” is the longest word you can create if you alternate hands for each letter.

I’ll leave you with my favorite piece of qwerty trivia: You only need the keys in the top row to spell “typewriter.”

That’s enough hunting and pecking for now. I’d like to continue, but it’s becoming too difficult to see — my screen is covered with Wite-Out.

Jm Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.”

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