Stuff You Should Know - Typewriters: Mechanical Brilliance

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

Chuck loves typewriters because he loves mechanical brilliance. Dive into the cool history of these amazing machines today. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and this is an old school Stuff You Should Know episode, yeah. It's just like a robust, jam-packed, overlooked, unsung item episode and those are often really good. Yeah. I bet we got a mechanical engineering suite in there somewhere.

I bet too, for sure. We'll have to cobble it together someday and be like, look what we did everybody. But we want to talk about something else real quick first, right? Yeah, man. So we recently did a hangout for our friend's co-ed, the cooperative for education who we've talked about plenty of times. They help kids stay in school in Guatemala and break the cycle of poverty by making sure they get an education, right?

That's right. Everybody knows about co-ed. Our first, our two-part Guatemala episode was when we went there with co-ed. So we did a hangout with them for their fall fiesta fundraiser and we found out that so far since we went to Guatemala with them, Stuff You Should Know listeners have donated, how much? I think we are, and this is our good friend, Ann, at co-ed who invited us initially, has done the math and redone the math, things that we don't do, is redo the math several

times. And Ann says we are within 100 grand of Stuff You Should Know fans having donated one million bucks. That's amazing. That is so amazing. So we were like, okay, we're at like $900,000. I feel like we should hit one million. It's just such a nice round number.

Nice and round. And co-ed will do so many good things with that extra 100 grand. So you and I both realized that 100 grand is a tremendous amount of money. So we did some number crunching ourselves and we figured out that if we divided it up among Stuff You Should Know listeners, if everyone chipped in like a nominal amount, we could reach that goal, right? Yeah. So you did the math.

I'm going to let you stand behind it. Oh man. I was hoping you'd stand in front of it. The first one's easy. So if 20,000 Stuff You Should Know listeners, and we're told there are that many out there, each chipping $5, we'll reach that goal. No problem. Yeah.

What, 10,000 Stuff You Should Know listeners, chipping $10,000 or $10 each? That's right. And then I believe if 8,695 listeners contribute $11.50, we will hit that goal as well. Right. So you get the point. It doesn't take much when you have a lot of great people banded together. This is the holiday time. I know that that's a money crunching time, but if you could throw $5 their way and we

could all like work our way towards that million before the end of the year, that would really be a big, big huge deal. It would be really cool. And believe us, we'll both be chipping in as well. Absolutely. So it's not like we're asking you to do something we wouldn't do, and we're going to make Jerry chip in too. Yeah.

That's right. And I'm going to chip in more than $5. Oh yeah. I'm going to chip in that $11.50. No, we're going to do that thing where when you split the tab at a restaurant, we try and see what the other person tipped. So one of us doesn't look cheap. That's right.

So they actually set up a specific URL for us, right? That's right. It is cooperative for, F-O-R, education.org slash S-Y-S-K. Very, very easy. Yep. And you just go on. The donation process is quick and painless, and you will be helping kids break the cycle of poverty in Guatemala and feel really good about things.

That's right. I want to make sure that our contributions count as stuff you should know, Army. Like yeah, I would hope and would make sure of that. I mean, we're part of the Army still, even though we're the, what are we, Commandance or something? I guess. That's a pretty European way to put it. Sure.

I always picture ourselves on a ship. We're admirals. I like Colonel. You could be admiral. I'm going to be Colonel. Well, if you're a Colonel, I'm just going to be a private. Oh, come on. Anyway, and count our donations if you can do that, because we're part of the Army.

And I think anyone, including us, who goes to cooperativeforeducation.org slash S-Y-S-K, their donation will automatically be counted toward the total. For sure. Okay. So go forth, everybody. It's Thanksgiving time. The holiday season is starting to kick off. Good cheer and good vibes and glad tidings are starting to fill all of our hearts and

hopefully that will culminate in us each donating five bucks. That's right. Okay. Shall we talk typewriters? Yeah, let's. Let's. Okay. Well choked.

I think it went well too. So a big shout out to our buddy Dave Roos, who I bet will also contribute, because he's also a listener as well as a writer for us. Well, he listens to the ones that he helps us write. That's true. I suspect the same thing. So he helped us out with this one on typewriters. And it's one of those things, like I said, it's kind of one of those overlooked and unsung

items that really had like a lot of effect on the world, so much so that I feel like scholarship into the impact that typewriters had on society kind of ends with ushering feminism into the workplace or at the very least women into the workplace. We'll talk a lot about that later, but I think it had even more effects, Chuck, like if you stop and think about it, like, you know, would we have the computer today if we hadn't invented the typewriter in the middle of the 19th century? Or if we did, what would it look like if we hadn't had the typewriter first? You know, because it allowed for a lot more smoothness in the business office, it allowed

for like systematic management, I think. So is it responsible for the creation of the paperwork we're all drowning in at all times? I have questions about this, and no one's answered them yet. So I'm just going to throw those questions out and just let them kind of jail over the whole episode. So would we have all the great works of literature that we have since the invention of the typewriter? People were certainly writing before the typewriter, as long as there was a feather and some ink around.

Sure. They would use the old quill, but the typewriter certainly sort of opened things up, not the very least, things like self-publishing and getting your own creative ideas out to the world in an easier fashion. So I think creatively the typewriter was a game changer. That's an excellent point. Mark Twain, right? He was, and this is a great, this may be the fact of the show, his book in 1882, Life on

the Mississippi, was the very first typewritten manuscript ever submitted, as far as anyone knows. Yeah. And apparently he hand wrote it and then had his assistant or secretary transcribe it onto, into a typewriter. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of how things went for a while. Type this up.

Exactly. Yeah. And I think about typewriting too. I think some of those early writers were like, well, wait a minute, does that mean we're just supposed to dictate our books? And I don't know how I feel about that. Right. And then they finally figured out like, oh, we can actually do the typing ourselves.

And I think that's when it really kind of opened up for literature, like you were saying. Right. But that also went the other way later with memoirs, with people like Keith Richards would say, you mean I can just say things out loud and it'll be a book? Right. Those 17 pages that are just the letter L. Oh, 1700 more like is, autobiography is very long and great. So one of the other things about the typewriter too is it wasn't around for that long for

as much of an effect as it did have on society. It was invented in 1868. The first thing that we recognize as a modern typewriter. And then by the 80s, it was certainly on its way out and it died really quickly because 120 years or so. Yeah. Because the technology that we invented took off really quickly. But again, it was all based on the typewriter.

There were improvements to the typewriter that eventually led to the PC. That's right. And I have a deep, deep love of mechanical machines. And I have an old typewriter and I've had it since college. I think my mom got it for me for Christmas one year, got me an old royal antique typewriter just to display. And I have moved that thing. I'll post a picture of it.

It's still on my shelf in my office upstairs. I've moved it everywhere for the past 35 years. And I still will throw a piece of paper in that thing every now and then and type on it and realize that the ribbon is dry. You're like, I'll work in no play, make Jack a dull boy. But we are the generation and me even a little bit more than you because I'm a few years older of, and we talk about Gen X being the greatest generation because we saw such transitions in technology.

But the typewriter was certainly one of them. I typed in my typing class in high school on an IBM Selectric, which we'll talk about, one of the greatest machines ever invented. And then just a few years later, when I jumped into college, I had one of those overly expensive word processors. Yeah, we had one too, and I was thinking, I was trying to remember what brand it was. And I was like, I thought it was a brother, and then I stopped and thought a little more about it.

I'm sure it was a Sears and Roebuck word processor. Not a brother. I know mine was used. I'll tell you that. Yeah. But those things were really amazing, especially if you could take the time to stop and figure out how to use it. Because that was one of the great things about typewriters is people have been using them

for so long that when you first learned how to do it, there were so many people out there who could tell you how to do it, and it was easy to pick up. Word processors made it difficult. But iPods, that they were a necessary transition from typewriters to PCs. It got people thinking in a more digital way, you know? Yeah, yeah. Just to see it on that tiny little screen, I felt like it was like two inches by three inches maybe.

That was a game changer. Yeah. We'll talk more about that later. But let's just do like a quick overview of how to use a typewriter for the chillings. Yeah. Like the parts and pieces parts? Yeah. All right.

So a manual typewriter, and that's what we're going to call anything that isn't electric or electronic, anything pre-those days. What you do, kids, is you get a piece of white paper and you feed it into this machine, this mechanical machine, by rotating a rubber cylinder that's called a platen. And then you roll it till it's lined up to where you basically want to start typing. And even that when you first start typing is a little bit weird. Like you might start typing too high, and you realize you got to roll it up a little bit more to get that, what do you call that, not the border?

The margin? Yeah, the margin. The border. I call it a border. Or the header? Yeah, the header, which is like whatever you want to set it, an inch, inch and a half. So you line up that paper where you want to start typing, and then you start typing by pressing down on a key, and Dave even says, press hard in parentheses, because you got

to give it a little bit of a strike, much more than you do even though you have abused laptops in your time. I always said you sound like the loniest monk over there on the computer, but can't imagine hearing it on a typewriter. Yeah, the reason you have to press hard, though, because we're talking about manual typewriters. There's no electricity involved. You can take it anywhere.

It sounds like that's what your royal is, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, when you're pressing on that key, it's actually causing that lever to shoot up and attach to the end of the lever is what's called a type bar. And that is basically a little mini type bar, like you'd find in a printing press. And typically, I think the top is lower case, and the bottom is upper case. And when that type bar hits the paper, depending on whether you're on lower or higher case,

it smacks the paper and it goes through the ink ribbon, which shoots up all of a sudden out of nowhere like a whack-a-mole and gets in between the type bar and the paper. So the type bar actually strikes and leaves an impression through the ink ribbon onto the paper. And that's how you type a nice inky letter. That's right. And I know we sound like we're coddling, but I'm really not when I say this. If you've never used one and you've never really looked at one much, it's like a little

stamp on the end of a metal lever, and it just stamps the letters on one at a time. Right. So I mean, that's pretty much it. The only thing is, and this is like a really ingenious part of the typewriter from way back, when you type a letter, the carriage, which is the whole assembly that holds the platen, it moves to the left, one space, so that you're now about to type your next letter to the right of the last letter that you just typed. That's right.

So that you're not typing your entire manuscript in one single space. It seems really easy to overlook, but it's a really important part. And then eventually you get to an end, the end of the carriage reaches all the way to the left. It almost seems so wildly out of proportion that the typewriter will surely tip over at any second. Right. And then the little bell goes ding, and you hit a lever, and the thing slides back to

the right, fast as Bob's your uncle, and then you start typing the next line because it raised up one space or two spaces, depending on whether you're typing single space or double space. That's right. And you think, is there a small troll in there that is hitting a bell? No, it's all mechanical. It's wonderful. That carriage return, and you have your margin set, so it knows when to ding.

And it's just a wonder of mechanical engineering. I love a typewriter. There's a lot of, like if you only just sort of see the outside and you're looking at the typewriter, that in and of itself is kind of cool. But when you open that thing up and really look at the mechanics behind it, it's just awesome. I love typewriters. Yeah, it is very cool.

And also one of the other things that's neat about it, when you look over the typewriter, you see that all of the typebars, all of the alphabet and the numbers are looking back up at you in like a semi-circle, and so they just shoot up from their spot. Hey, hey, hey, depending on what letter you're typing, but they always hit that same part, which is exactly where the carriage wants them to hit on the plaid. So that's a typewriter, and I say, Chuck, that we take a break and then come back and talk about some of the history behind it. Let's do it.

I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. So before we go on, I do want to say that as a rite of passage for any child, when my daughter was a little bit younger, she probably still does it for all I know, I would go into my office and see my typewriter typebars all tangled together, because a rite of passage for any kid when they see a manual typewriter is just to smash all those keys at the same time and they get into a little tangled mess, which we'll get to that has a lot to do with the eventual keyboard design, but yeah, just want to throw that out there. Yeah, that was a real problem.

They turned into like a little rat's nest, right? Little rat's nest, the fingers of a little rat. Yes. So the problem that was faced by one, Christopher Latham Scholes, who is widely considered to be the inventor of the typewriter, although as we'll see, he didn't work completely alone, but he and a pal of his created the patent for the typewriter in 1868, they were the first people to get a patent for the first typewriter, but at least 50 people gave it a try before Scholes perfected it, or I shouldn't say perfected it.

Even the closest to perfecting it the first time. How about that? Yeah, because, you know, day points out, they, you know, the printing press was invented in what, the 14 something, 15th century, and it took a couple of hundred years, but then for about a hundred years, people tried to figure out a typewriter of some sort. The first sort of working typewriter may have been this guy named Giuseppe Pellegrino Turi. He was obviously an Italian guy, he was an inventor, and in 1808, he made a device for either his friend or his girlfriend, the Countess, Carolina, Fantoni, the Fivisano.

Wow, that's quite a beautiful name. It's very beautiful name, and this is a cool story because she had lost her sight. So the invention was so, you know, typing is something that you can do without sight. In fact, that's the whole goal is to learn to type without looking. Right. So there's an alternate story that her brother, Augustino, actually invented it for her and Turi improved it, but the upshot of it is whoever created this machine, it doesn't exist any longer, it didn't survive, but some of her typed letters did from 1808, all the way

back in 1808, undisputed first typed letters were from Italy back then. That's right. And then there are another couple of guys who tried their hand at it, just shout them out because we always like to shout out Detroiters. A guy named William Austin Burt in the early 1800s invented a typographer. Clunky didn't work very well. And then another pre-typewriter was built, it was called the Hansen Riding Ball. And this one is kind of interesting in that it used electromagnetic energies and electromagnetic

battery to actually power this thing, so it didn't work very well, but it was way ahead of its time. Actually, I saw that it did work really well. Well, for manufacturing, though, I think. Okay, right, true. And the arrangement of the keys, it was like a pin cushion, so you held both hands together like you were an alien for Pete's sake typing. But the thing would work really well, it would respond as fast as you typed, in part because

of those electromagnets. And he also spread the vowels to the left and the consonants to the right, which made typing even faster. And I saw it also automatically advanced the paper, too. So it didn't really resemble our earliest typewriters or our typewriters, but it was its own kind of neat thing that just didn't take off. Everybody's like, what's this pin cushion thing? This is not right.

It's the kind of fun thing you see in a museum and you marvel at how advanced it was for the time. Sure, definitely. If you want to get to real typewriters, though, we got to go back to Christopher, Latham, Scholes, who you mentioned, Milwaukeean, right? Yeah. And he was a journalist. He was a politician sometimes, almost said a superman, a newspaper man.

Superman was a newspaper man. Hey, man, that was a heck of a connection. And he was a superman, I'll say it. And he had a side gig as an inventor and he got together, he was smart enough to collaborate with people and got together in 1866 with a couple of colleagues named Carlos Glidden and Samuel Willard Soule, would you say? Or Soule? You're going with Soule.

You're going with Soule? All right. Soule with a knee. And they went to work and designed a typewriter at Klein Stuber's Machine Shop in Milwaukee. And then finally in 1868, we're able to apply for their... And this is kind of fun. I love the early sort of when things are split up into two words, capital T type dash, capital W writer, a literal typewriter.

And it's fun to look up. Look this thing up. It had little piano keys as the keyboard, which makes sense because it has a similar mechanical function. Right. And apparently the ebony keys had one function, the ivory keys had another function, but if you look at it, there's only like four or five keys of each. And I cannot make heads or tails of how the thing worked.

And apparently no one else can because I've never found an explanation of actually how it worked. Everybody's just like, look at that thing. It looks like a piano. Moving on. Well, one thing I knew is that they lived together in perfect harmony. That's right. The other thing I found out about that too is in their prototype, all I could type was

W, but apparently a type W really, really well enough that they applied for the patent and they got it. They also did something else that was innovative that would come in. It was kind of one of those things that laid the groundwork for all typewriters to come. They had two spools that held an ink ribbon on top. And we talked about how the ink ribbon jumps up and gets in between the type bar and the paper to leave the inked letter. Well, these guys invented it basically right out of the gate.

Yeah. Because you got to have a spool. You got to move that ribbon along. Or you're just typing on the same section of ribbon over and over and over and that's no good. Sure. No. Doesn't work.

In 1872, they sold their shares in this invention to a guy, an oil guy named James Dinsmore, who we'll factor in in a pretty big way in a minute. But Scholes wasn't done. He was like, you know what, we sold this thing, but I'm going to keep working. And later that same year, that's how dedicated he was to figuring this thing out, he teamed with another inventor named Matthias Schwallbach and made an improved typewriter within the same year that he sold the patent, which is pretty, I don't know if that's shifty or just super smart.

I saw that it was glidden in soul that Scholes sold their shares and that Scholes may have kept his. Oh, okay. Well, that makes sense. Yeah. Not shady. Or invested. Yeah.

So Schwallbach and Scholes, the thing that they came up with, there's no better way to describe what it looked like than Dave put it, which is a medieval pasta maker. It's really weird and ungainly and just proportionate, like real top heavy. But it worked pretty well. But again, it was just one of those things that Scholes was, he just kept improving and improving and improving. And then you said, Dinsmore really kind of comes in in a big way in a minute and here he comes because after the Civil War, the Remington Company, which had built or manufactured

tons of guns for the Civil War, found that their gun market had suddenly dried up and they were looking for new markets to get into. And Dinsmore said, I got one for you. That's right. They also made sewing machines, which will become evident here in a minute. But in 1873, Dinsmore pitched them and said, this typewriter thing is pretty awesome. And Remington, like you said, was looking to make something literally. And they said, give me a thousand.

And I guess that was just the initial order and it really took off. They manufactured them, where they manufactured their sewing machines in upstate New York. And what it was known as was the Scholes and Glidden typewriter, that was branded. And you can look this one up too. It's a very pretty sort of Victorian era looking machine. It's actually decorative. The flowers painted on the case, it's cool. It looks like an old timey sewing machine because apparently Remington's design team

were one-trick ponies. It even had like a foot pedal too for the return. When the thing dinged, you didn't press the lever with your hand, you hit it with the foot pedal and it went, the carriage returned back to the right. I like that. Yeah. So they were like, okay, we're getting closer. This is starting to kind of come around.

And I think that Scholes and Glidden typewriter was the first one that Mark Twain had if I'm not mistaken. I think so, yeah. But Scholes invented something else. This guy is just the inventor that keeps on giving as far as typewriters are concerned. In 1878, he invented the shift key. And if you were like me and never realized why the shift key was called the shift key, then prepare to be amazed because there's an actual reason for it.

That's right. Well, we should say that that initial Scholes and Glidden was all caps. Right. That's a good point. That was a problem. Everyone, I think actually Twain handed in his manuscript on the Remington 2, which we're talking about now. But if he had handed in the Scholes and Glidden, they would have said, why is this guy shouting

at everyone all the time? It's like life on the Mississippi, he should be a little more laid back. Life on the Mississippi. So the shift key is something that literally shifted everything up. The whole carriage shifted up. And like you said earlier, there's the lowercase letter and the uppercase letter just right on top of each other. And that's all it took.

It was a mechanical solution again that lifted it up where the appropriate case of letter would hit that ribbon. And that's why they call it the shift. And they still call it that, which is hysterical. It is because you're not shifting anything on a computer, but you did physically shift the carriage up. And whatever letter was on top, I think the lowercase, which is still the case. If you press shift, it goes to uppercase, right?

Yes. Well, that finds its source back in the 1870s. And that up the lowercase letter at the top of the type bar would be too high up to hit the letter or the paper now. I just think that's amazing. Yeah. It's interesting because we do have a caps lock on a computer keyboard. I wonder why they just didn't change shift to caps.

They used to call it shift lock. That's true. And also it does more, I forgot that it also does more beyond capitalizing, does percentage and ampersand and all the number of secondary functions. But so does shift. So caps lock makes even less sense. It should be shift lock. It should be shift lock.

Yeah. Somebody really screwed up along the way. No, wait. Does caps lock doesn't do that for the numbers, does it? I'm going to find out right now. I believe it does, Ben. I'm pretty sure. I've literally never tried that.

I know. I don't think I have either. Let's try. All right, this is good. I'm demonstrating now. Caps lock engaged. I'm going to type a three, which is a pound sign. No, it was a three.

So caps lock works. We just did a live demo on air. I love that. There's probably about half the people that were on the edge of their seat and half the people are going, these guys have had the show for how long and they're this dumb. Gen X is the best generation, huh? Let's talk about QWERTY. Our old friend, QWERTY, is that how you say it, or do you say QWERTY?

QWERTY. QWERTY. I think I say both actually because they both sound right now that you say it. Well, QWERTY, as everyone knows, is the style of keyboard, the arrangement of the letters on most Western typewriters that you'll see. As you'll see, and maybe surprised, there are a lot of other different arrangements, but the QWERTY is the one that stuck and it is named after those first six letters on the top row of the typewriter.

Yeah. Starting from the left, right? That's right. That should have said English language. Well, not just English language, any Latin alphabet, so the ABCs, those are considered the Latin alphabet. And so like if you go to, I don't know, Italy, you can find QWERTY keyboards there too, right?

But there's a legend, I guess, with QWERTY. A lot of people say that, and it was Scholes who came up with the QWERTY keyboard, yet another amazing milestone that this man delivered to humanity. Okay, not an amazing milestone, but something that's still around today and is mildly interesting to talk about at least. Boy, really cut him out, cut his knees out on that one, didn't you? So there's a legend that he created the QWERTY keyboard because people were typing too fast. So he, because he originally had it alphabetized.

And that's true. He originally had the keyboard alphabetized, I think starting from the top left, maybe I'm not sure. But apparently some, I think some researchers at Kyoto University in Japan did some analysis on this legend and were like, we think this is a myth. Apparently Scholes is the kind of guy who would have been like, oh, people are typing too fast and my typewriter's jamming up. He wouldn't have tried to slow the typist down.

He would have tried to have improved the typewriter. But more to the point, they think actually it was Morse code operators whose input led to the QWERTY keyboard from Scholes. Because if you're transcribing Morse code, QWERTY layout makes a lot of sense. Oh, really? Mm-hmm. Do you know how? I don't.

I'm just taking it on faith from the Kyoto researchers that that's the case. Yeah. And again, he made an improvement and he found that they were more likely to jam with the more frequently used letters next to each other. So he did some thinking about it and decided that if I space these things out, the most common two-letter combinations, then in theory we should be getting fewer jams. Sure it'll happen every now and then, but at least we can reduce the number of jams. And that was it.

But that's not the only alternative, right? But the other kind of keyboard? Well no, there are quite a few other alternatives to the QWERTY. Right. The layout of it, right? Yeah. Okay. And by the way, what you just said was the legend from what I understand.

Well, I thought he did not look and arrange them by two-letter combinations? I don't know. Again, I think it's because of the, at least, okay, the Kyoto people say it's because of the Morse code operators. Other people say, no, it absolutely is true that he was trying to fix the jam. We just don't know. It's just interesting to debate. See, what I saw was that he was trying to fix the jams, but he wasn't so concerned about

fast typing. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's a really good point. And it was lost on me until you just said that. So he was making it so letters that were next to each other that you'd frequently use wouldn't be used at the same time and so it would cut down on the chance of them jamming. That's what I've heard, but also, you know, maybe it was both.

Okay. I think we should just spend the rest of this episode talking about the QWERTY legend. I think we should move on from the QWERTY to the DIAtensor. Yeah, you set me up. So there's other keyboard layouts. I hadn't heard of DIAtensor, have you? No. So a guy named George Canfield Blixenderfer, which is a wonderful name.

He did some analysis all the way back in 1892 and figured out that there was an optimal way to design a keyboard. And by analyzing the English language, he found that if he put D-H-I-A-T-E-N-S-O-N-R, and I believe the middle row, I think 85% of all English words would use those letters. And the reason why the middle row is important is because the middle row... Well, they were bottom row, actually. Were they? Okay.

Well, in other keyboard layouts to come, they usually put the most important letters in the middle row because that's considered the home row or the home position, right? Yeah. Okay. But so he said to heck with that. I'm not including that. But regardless, whatever row the D-H-I-N-T-E, D-H-I-A-T-E-N-S-O-R was in, bottom row, I guess, 85% of all English words would use those letters.

So you would be able to type most words without even leaving the bottom row, which would let you type way fast. Yeah. I guess he just had a different idea of where home was because he went bottom up the diatom source on the bottom. Then the middle row had 13% of all English words use those letters. And then at the top row, only 2%. So he really went all in on the bottom end.

He did. And then there's another one called the Dvorak simplified keyboard, and apparently this one is still popular. It was created in the 30s. Yeah. I think this one, if I'm not mistaken, and it didn't do much digging, but I think the Dvorak is the one that really has a lot of very passionate proponents still. And like you can get Dvorak keyboards, right?

Yeah. I think it's a setting or an app you can download for your phone or your computer. Oh, that's interesting. I don't know if you could order it, maybe from Alienware. I could see them creating those. I don't even know what that is. It's like a gamer system computer. But the Dvorak is the one that really has a lot of people still out there saying, Quirty

stinks, and the Dvorak is what we should have done. Dr. August Dvorak was the inventor, like you said, and I think it was 1936 specifically, but also did a lot of studying of the English language. And also, apparently, this had a lot to do with fatigue for your fingies. Right. Because he put, I think, the most used consonants on the right side and the vowels on the left. And you were able to type many more words staying in that home position. And again, I think home position is typically the middle of the middle row with the absolute

middle two keys not touched, but the other eight keys are touched by your fingers, and then both of your thumbs are on the spacebar. That's right now. Like, I think, Chuck, we should explain this. People are just left to pick up typing on their own today because it's so ubiquitous. There were classes in high school. You referenced earlier taking one. I got out of it.

I really didn't want to take typing, but they would teach you typing. They would take an hour out of the day to go to typing class, and you would learn to type, right? Well, yeah. This is where I was going to ask you what your typing method is. I took the typing class. It was typing shorthand, and it was one of those classes where you did three things in a quarter.

Yeah. It was typing speed writing, which I've talked about in another episode, I guess the shorthand episode. And I think the third one was those classes that told you how to keep a bank account and write checks and stuff, which is funny now. You could teach that in a day, and yet we had a third of a quarter. But I never learned to type properly, even though I took that typing class. I am almost a no-look typist now, but it's just from repetition.

I don't type correctly. I think I type with my pointer and my middle fingers generally only. Sometimes I use the ring finger a little, never use the pinky, or even supposed to use your thumb. I don't remember. I think for space. For spacing. For space bar.

I don't use the thumb at all. So I'm a hunter and a pecker who just got really fast and memorized the keyboard. So you still generally hunt and peck, but really fast? Well, hunting and pecking looks like you're seeking it. I've memorized the keyboard, but what I mean to say is I don't type properly. In typing class, they would say, your pinky hits the P or whatever. And I was just like, my pinky isn't that, you know, my pinky is a bad fingy. It doesn't do what I tell it to all the time.

My pinky is my worst guitar finger, so it's like, yeah, it's just, I don't have a lot of dexterity with my pinky. Okay. I don't know if that's a personal issue or what, I never really thought of it. I never trained my pinky to do much. I've never really given that much thought to how I type either, but I started out as a hunter and pecker and then now I'm a full typist, but I'm totally self-taught. Never had a lesson.

But do you type properly according to like the classroom instruction? I don't know. Let me see. Oh, here we go. No. I think I start, I think kind of, I don't know where I start. I've got to pay attention to this. I've never stopped and thought about where I put it, but I think I generally start in

the home position. I think I do. That feels natural. So, but yeah, it is kind of neat to be able to boast, to be like a self-taught typist because people out there did learn and class, I was talking to you, me about it and she's like, are you guys going to talk about the computer games that taught you typing? What? I should not play those.

So there's one I looked up that was really popular called type master where you would, you were a UFO and there was like space invaders coming at you and each one had a word associated with it. So you'd type the word really fast before the alien got to you and blow it up. That's very stressful for me to think about. It is. Yeah. Yeah.

It would make typing stressful for sure. I was a dumb little boy. I was like, where's the laser? Right. So they started typing, I think, all the way back in the 1870s, they started teaching people typing. I think the YWCA of New York was one of the first groups to teach typing and it just kept going on from there because this is not, typewriters were not an intuitive machine.

Like they didn't really, they weren't laid out alphabetically. We don't just normally use our fingers for such endeavors, like it's something you had to learn, but they were able to teach enough people and get across the importance of it to enough people that typewriters like weren't just a passing fad, like a lot of people initially thought they were. That's right. Very cool. And it, as we'll see after the break, it changed the workforce.

But before we break real quick, we do want to point out there are a lot of other keyboards in the world. There are French specific keyboards, French keyboards say Azzartie in that home top row. I think Germans say, instead of Quartie, Quartz with a Z. And they're Braille keyboards. There are cool Japanese typewriters. Man, those are complicated. Yeah, no kidding.

Have you ever typed on one? No, I can't figure it out. Like I read descriptions on how to use them. Like I don't understand this at all because they're in kanji, the Japanese characters, there's thousands of characters. Yeah, pretty amazing. Have you ever used one? Oh, no, no, no.

Okay. Yeah. They look pretty neat. Should we take that break? Yeah, let's. All right. We'll take that break and we'll talk about how typing changed everything right after this.

I'm Mange Shatikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. Lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Okay, so the Remington number two that I think you mentioned was Mark Twain's second typewriter. That was the first one to really blow up. It came out in 1878 and it was like the typewriter for a very long time, for at least a decade. But one of the things about the Remington number two and all the other typewriters at the time was you couldn't see what you were typing while you were typing because the typebars were striking the paper from underneath. So you couldn't watch yourself type at all.

You just had to hope for the best. That's right. They were called upstriker, understriker, blind typewriters. And you had to lift that carriage up that was on a hinge to see what you had done, to see if you had made a mistake or not, or whether or not that's what you wanted to say. And along comes the Underwood. I wanted to Underwood. I got a Royal.

That's fine. My mom did a great job, but I kind of wanted to Underwood because that's the classic old mechanical typewriter in my mind. That was the first front stroke visible typewriter to hit the market invented by Franz Xavier Wagner or Wagner, I'm not sure. And John T. Underwood, you're psych wise, it called the Underwood. He was an office supply magnate and he bought that patent, said I'm going to call it the Underwood as if I invented it.

And that was kind of it. That was a big game changer and everything moving forward was front facing. Yeah. It set the design standards until the IBM Selectric came out in 1961, basically, 65 years later, I guess. And the Underwood was different because you could see what you were typing. The type bar struck the platen in front of you rather than from underneath. There was one shift key, the keyboard was in four rows.

The numbers and the symbols were at the very top row. Basically everything you kind of think about as a keyboard today was that Underwood that came out way back in 1896. That's right. Yeah. We talked about the workforce changing and this is one of those things where we'll just tell it how it happened. It was a time when women did not work in the office world.

They weren't part of that workforce. And from the very beginning, the typewriter, there was a book in the 1888 called Manual of the Typewriter where its writer, author John Harrison, talks about it being especially like fit for feminine fingers. It's like they seem to be made for women. There's not a lot of hard labor involved and a lot of women play piano and it's a similar skill as that. In 1870, this is a stat that's really revealing, 2.5 of the clerical workforce were women

in 1870 and in 1930, thanks to the typewriter, that rose to 52.5%. Man. Plus also the clerical workforce itself grew because of the typewriter because before that you had Bartleby the Scrivener types where they were copying by hand like legal documents and stuff like that. There just wasn't as much paperwork because it was so much more time consuming and difficult. But Scholes the typewriter hero of the century or millennia really, if you think about it. He was very proud of his invention because he saw that it allowed, it was an entrance

for women into the workplace. They came out of the home and it's incorrect to say that the typewriter is what got women in the workplace. There was a civil war in the federal government hiring women for clerical positions, but it gave women a completely different type of life and salary and much more, I don't want to say equal footing, but it got a foot in the door into the office world. Thanks to the typewriter because people, I saw it described as secretarial work was associated with typewriters and women were associated with secretaries and it just took

off from there. Right. And again, we're not saying that, and before you know it, they were CEOs. There is still so much work to be done on that front, but just getting inside the room is a big, big deal and that got more and more women inside the room. They were kept apart for a little while, late 19th and early 20th century. They didn't think men and women could work in the same rooms as one another. So they had what was called typing pools, which was literally where all these women

typed, these huge rooms with like 100 typewriters that you've seen in movies and these women just typing away. That was the typing pool and then they would integrate the offices in that way before too long. Right. And also the whole idea of like, well, women's places in the home, why are we trying to get them into the workplace? This is wrong.

That's the process of modernization unfolding like we talked about in the fundamentalism episode. That is a perfect example of modernization happening. Again, though, it's like you said, it was something, but it definitely wasn't everything and it wasn't like throwing a switch because you had to be single, typically young and well educated to be a typist in the business world, especially early on. And when you were married, then your role was definitely back in the home. So you would get married, oftentimes you would meet somebody at work and marry them and they'd

be like, okay, congratulations, you're fired and that was that, and then you went off to become a homemaker. So yeah, there's still a lot of work to do, but there was a lot of work that had been done from the 20s and the 30s up to today. That's right. We need to skip forward in time a little bit because we've been talking about manual typewriters this whole time. Right.

So we said the word game changer a lot, the real game changer because there were electric typewriters starting in the 1920s where things were motorized, but it wasn't until the 1960s with the introduction you mentioned earlier that IBM's electric typewriter and the typeball, that was what really changed everything. If you look at an old electric typewriter, I mean, this is what we learned on in high school, like that was the sort of the go to before the word processor and Dave described it and it's pretty appropriate. It's about the size of a golf ball, but it's embossed with all the letters all the way

around it and there is this, you need to check out this video on YouTube of how the electric actually works. It's an amazing marvel of engineering. There are actual cables that spin super, super fast, I think seven tenths of a second to get the right character into place to meet with that ribbon, or I guess it wouldn't even a ribbon at that point, was it? Or was it just automated? No, I think the ribbon does come up still, but it's the ball, the spin and the tilt.

It's just got really impressive yaw control. Yeah. And you didn't have to wind the ribbon anymore. I think that was the deal. It was just all electrified. Right. Okay. So in the video you referenced, you can look up engineer guy on YouTube and IBM Selectric

and he does a really great job of explaining it and how it uses some, a series of levers called the Whiffle Tree, but basically your mechanical input from your finger triggered a series of motors that would make this thing happen again in like seven tenths of a second. It was really impressive. It's still impressive to see. Oh, absolutely. And that changed everything because before when you were typing on a manual type or you had to press really hard and if that's all you were doing for eight hours a day, your

hands started to hurt probably by midday Tuesday, I'm guessing. This was totally different. You just kind of barely pressed the button and all of a sudden the thing would just respond fully to that button press. So that really helped. It also made everybody a lot faster. And there were some other like cool components that were added later. Like I think this electric was the first one to use basically disk drives.

I think onboard disk drives to store a whopping 30 words at a time or something like that. But that was huge because it meant you could type a letter once and then you could recall the letter and print it again. You could edit it. You could do all sorts of neat things. So that made this electric also the first word processor. Right. And these are electric.

There is a difference. There are also electronic typewriters that came along and that was sort of the next evolution in the game. And they use circuit boards, silicone chips and everything to control those motors and memories because the electric was, while powered by electricity, was still a very sort of mechanical machine in the insides, in the guts and the electronic typewriters came around in 1978. And I guess that's what I was using in high school actually. But they were still those.

Electronic. Yeah, yeah. But they were still IBMs. I don't know. I could see public schools still having the old typewriters by the time you were in school. I don't think so. From the 60s? Well, maybe.

Yeah, because I mean, if the electronic typewriters arrived in 78, you know that IBM was still making selectrics then. Yeah, that's true. So it's possible you were using a selectric. I mean, was there like a little LCD screen on your typewriter? No. Yeah, my friend, that was an IBM selectric brand. Oh, did all the electronics have those?

I think most of them did. I think it was a pretty quickly introduced thing that you had the little LCD printout so you could see what you had just typed before the typewriter actually typed it up onto the paper. So I think you could edit it and rearrange it and do all sorts of stuff, which is the definition of word processing is what that means. That's what I ended up getting in college. And I think mine might have been a brother.

But they looked, you know, they makes a good point. They look better than printing something out from your computer at the time because Dot Matrix printers stunk. And this looked way better. This looked like you typed it out by hand. Well, because you did. In 1984, I think the Xerox Memory Writer 630 was a big game changer and it had 20 lines of display, which was a lot.

But it also cost in today's dollars more than 10 grand. Yeah. It was like a major piece of office equipment in 1984. Yeah. I didn't have any money back then. I bought something used and it was not this. There's no way. Or maybe they just got a lot cheaper, obviously, over that six years.

I remember having one at home and it must have been 88, 89, something like that. So yeah, I think it came down in price really quickly because my parents weren't shelling out 10 grand for a word processor, I can tell you that. No way. So Dave dug up this New York Times article from 1984 that was really prescient. It was cool. It was a really wonky article about the state of the typewriter and word processor market. But there's parts of it where they were saying like analysts say that by the end of the 80s,

you won't be able to distinguish a typewriter from a word processor from a personal computer, which are these newfangled things coming online. And that the secretaries of the future will sit down at one machine that will be able to do all these functions and what they're doing will just depend on what software they choose to be working on. And in 1984, they're like, hey, here's the PC of the future. They nailed it. I love it.

They actually put it in quotes. A secretary of the future will sit at the keyboard of a piece of quote hardware with this function to be determined by the choice of software analysts say. Yeah. That's pretty great. They had it for sure. You got anything else about the typewriter? I got nothing else.

I got nothing else about the typewriter either, which means everybody, if you want to know about typewriters, go look them up and you can buy them for a lot of money, depending on the type. Yeah. Get it? That was an unintentional pun, as always. And since I said unintentional pun, that means it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this, we're going to come up with this guy's personalized plate.

Hey, guys. I just loved the recent episode on license plates at the beginning of the app. One of you mentioned that you thought the topic was kind of boring, but I really loved it. I also love license plates. I'm particularly fond of personalized license plates and recently tried to get one for myself for the first time. Despite the talk of First Amendment rights, there are some rules in my state about what

you can and can't have. For instance, nothing vulgar, of course, which we talked about. The plate I applied for spelled out Fartin, F-A-R-T-N. I know it's childish, but I think that it's funny, and the right amount of vulgar. He's got that right. However, the state of Utah disagreed, no surprise there, and thought it was too vulgar because I was denied. Now that my first choice has been denied, I need some ideas, so help me out.

This is Matt, so I thought on the fly, maybe we could think of something that's just the right amount of vulgar. What about Tootin? It's pretty good, or is it all gas-centered? I mean this guy clearly likes that kind of thing. All right, let's go a different direction. Tootin is our replacement for Fartin. How about that?

Okay, Tootin's a replacement for Fartin. What about Cruisin, C-R-U-Z-N? That'd be pretty boss. Yeah, not vulgar. No. How about, I don't know if I could say this. We got to, you know. On our family-friendly show.

How about B-A-L-Z-O-U-T? Right. Yeah? Sure. That might be the right amount of vulgar, but that's also, that's not a good look these days either. I don't know. I'm not quite sure.

It's like those guys have testicles hanging from their truck. Did they still do that? Oh, sure. Drive out in the country in Georgia, and testicles all over the place. What about to the metal, but M-D-L? We just need to figure out how to shorten the, as in he has the pedal to the metal. Oh, oh. Well, I could do the number two.

Or M-T-L, not M-D-L. Number two, T-H-E, M-T-L, to the metal. That's the most amazing way. Well, no, that's what I was saying. We've got two shortened. We need to shorten D to the metal, like D. How do you shorten T-H-E? Well, in speed riding, you would make a downstroke like an L and then a line to the right. Can you get that on a license plate?

I don't think so. How about two D-A-M-T-L? I think we've landed on it. That's pretty good. Oh, and also real quick, I'd lost the email. I don't know how we missed this, but somebody sent in an email saying, just go check out the license plate for the Northern Territories, Canada. It is a metal plate that is bare-shaped.

Yeah, it's really neat looking. I want to get one for the camp wall. I'm trying to buy one on eBay as we speak. Not right this second, but I've been looking around. Who was that letter from? I don't know. Well, this was Matt, but I don't know who sent in the Northern Territories one. But Matt's the guy that we just helped out.

Yeah, he's to the metal. Okay. Hopefully we did help somewhere in there, Matt. By the way, every time I hear Utah now, I can't help but think of NBC Peacock's A Friend of the Family, weirdo mini-series that my niece Mila is on. Fantastic. If you want to get in touch with us like Matt did and ask us to help you out, we'll do what we can.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House.

But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.