The Look Back

QWERTY: How Wisconsin Holds the Keys to Typing History

Jason Puskar: The original prototypes of all these typewriters that the Sholes group made had piano keyboards.

[bright music]

Kacie Lucchini Butcher: What are we even doing here? Sergio seemed more excited than usual.

Cat Phan: I have no idea. All I know is he said to come to Milwaukee right away for some big Wisconsin history news.

Sergio Gonzlez: Oh, guys, guys, guys, I’m so happy you’re here. You’re not gonna believe this. I just learned about a Wisconsin invention that’s used all over the world. It might be the most widely-used invention from Wisconsin.

Kacie: Is it cheese?

Cat: I’m pretty sure cheese wasn’t invented in Wisconsin.

Kacie: Yeah, but we perfected it.

Sergio: Guys, it’s not cheese. It’s something you have on you right now. Take out your phones. Okay, all right, now, look at the keyboard. You see the Q, W, E, R, T, Y

at the top there?

Cat: Mm-hmm.

Sergio: The QWERTY keyboard was invented right here in Milwaukee! And they have an entire event that celebrates the QWERTY keyboard and typewriters. Guys, I’m going to QWERTYFEST.

Kacie: Ooh!

Sergio: Let’s go. Molly, thanks for having us here. Really appreciate it. Where are we?

Molly Snyder: We are at Turner Hall in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and we are at the opening night party of QWERTYFEST.

Kacie: So, what are some of the things that people do at QWERTYFEST?

Molly: We have a lot of type-ins. We also have a lot of live music. We have the Boston Typewriter Orchestra here tonight. They play their typewriters

as instruments. We have a retro gaming lounge. We have a lot of vending, a lot of book sales.

Sergio: Tell me a little bit about who would come to QWERTYFEST. What’s the typical QWERTYFEST attendee?

Molly: You would think it would just be a bunch of nerds like myself. And there are a lot of us. It’s also writers. It’s artists. It’s people who love history,

Milwaukee history. But it’s also about taking all of this great stuff that happened in Milwaukee and moving it with us forward into the future to keep that innovation going.

[typewriter keys clicking]

Kacie: So, why is there a whole festival dedicated to typewriters and the QWERTY keyboard in Milwaukee?

Well, the typewriter as we know it today was invented in Milwaukee. Sort of. If we look at the historical evidence, there were lots of people who developed writing machines during the 1800s. The first known typewriter-like device dates back to 1808. That’s when the Italian inventor Pellegrino Turri built a machine for his friend, the Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano. The Countess was blind, and Turri wanted to make her a machine she could use for writing. Dozens of other inventors in the 1800s worked on their own designs. Many of them were also trying to make machines that could be used by people with visual or physical disabilities. But it was Milwaukee in the 1860s and ’70s where all the pieces

really came together, including the QWERTY keyboard.

Kacie: Who is the inventor credited with creating the keyboard?

Jason: In truth, it was a really big team effort. The person who gets most of the open credit is a man named Christopher Latham Sholes, who was a newspaper editor and a printer working with a colleague named Samuel Soul. And they were trying to make a new gizmo that would number the pages of booklets. Another man, Carlos Glidden, was working on an automatic shovel system. And Glidden said, “You know, “if you can make a machine that numbers the pages of booklets,

you can just make a machine that writes. Why don’t we all get together

and do that?” And they did.

Cat: Christopher Latham Sholes may not have invented the very first typewriter, but he did play a major role in its history and modern form, most notably in the development of the QWERTY keyboard still in use today. Sholes and other colleagues in a Milwaukee makerspace worked on 25 or 30 or more designs

in the years from 1867 to 1873, continually refining the original idea. In early 1873, the businessman George Washington Newton Yost negotiated a deal with the arms manufacturer E. Remington and Sons. They were looking to enter new markets following the end of the Civil War. Remington began manufacturing

Sholes’ design in September 1873, and the first models shipped early in 1874.

Cat: QWERTY, why did it end up with those letters in that order? How did the keyboard end up the way it was?

Jason: I’ll tell you why it’s not. And this is the most common myth of QWERTY is that they scrambled the letters to slow down typing. And if you think about it for a couple of minutes, how long would it take you to master a new arrangement? We’ve all done it, right? It’s not gonna slow you down for very long. There are a couple principles that you can observe in your QWERTY keyboard that you might not have noticed. We think of the letters as scrambled, but they’re not as scrambled as you think. If you look at the middle row, take out S, everything’s in alphabetical order left to right.

Kacie: Oh!

Jason: There you go.

Kacie: That’s cool.

Jason: You never noticed, right?

Kacie: Pretty cool.

Jason: All the vowels went to the top row, except for A, which starts the second row, and on the bottom row, except for C and B, everything is in alphabetical

order from right to left. And the reason for that is that the original prototypes of all these typewriters that the Sholes group made had piano keyboards.

[hosts murmuring]

And the letters of the alphabet went on the black keys, A through M on the black keys, and on the white keys, they went back the other way, N through Z. So if you look on your QWERTY keyboard to this day, A is on the left, is right above Z, exactly as it would’ve been on these old piano keyboards that were the prototypes

up to about 1871.

Cat: So, how did we go from piano keys to the more familiar shapes we know today? It’s probably linked to the story of the telegraph and telegraph operators.

Jason: Nobody knew who a typewriter was for when they started making typewriters. Who’s gonna use this? Sholes thought maybe telegraphers would use it to transcribe incoming Morse code messages. There was a peculiarity of Morse code back at that point, American Morse code. And as a result, there were ambiguities. A sequence of two letters

[beeping]

might seem exactly the same as another code for one letter.

[beeping]

And so, if you’re doing an incoming message, you actually have to wait a little bit to decide, what does the context tell me? Is that the single letter, or is it these

two different letters? And some of those ambiguous combinations are on the left side of the keyboard are all grouped together. The transcriber can have his

finger poised, listening for what the word is before he commits to two letters

or one letter, which will sound very similar in Morse code. And one of the reasons

we know he was thinking hard about Morse code is very early typewriters

have a special key. It’s three dots vertically, and that is the Morse code

symbol for paragraph break.

Cat: Oh!

Sergio: Oh!

Cat: Whoa.

Kacie: That’s cool.

Sergio: What made Milwaukee the perfect place for this to happen?

Jason: You know, there’s no reason why it necessarily had to happen in Milwaukee, but I think the reason it did happen in Milwaukee is we got very lucky. We had a post-Civil War economy with a lot of surplus American tinkerers who needed something to do. And then you had German Milwaukee, with all of these really expert, skilled craftsmen. And neither of those could have done it on their own.

Kacie: Many early typewriters were created to address physical and visual accessibility needs. But what about typing and accessibility needs today? I’m here with my friend Kate to talk about it. Hi, Kate.

Kate Melberg: Hi. Nice to be here.

Kacie: Tell me about all these cool tools that you brought.

Kate: Of course. Okay, so collectively, these are all tools that you would use to read and write in Braille. This first thing here is a stylus and slate. And these are, this is an early tool for writing in Braille. Another thing that I have here is a refreshable Braille display. This is kind of like a Braille computer. And then finally, I have a brailler, a Perkins Brailler. It was developed at the Perkins School for the Blind. Can I show you what typing on it looks like?

Kacie: Yeah!

Kate: Okay, cool. So, let’s type the word apple. Braille works on a matrix of six dots. And that’s how you determine every letter, every piece of punctuation, everything that you wanna type. When you wanna type, each letter is its own cell,

is its own grid. And you have to press all the keys at the same time for whatever dots you’re creating. For the letter A, that’s simple. We’re just gonna type dot one.

Easy peasy. Typing the word apple, then we’re gonna move to a P. You have to press dots one, two, three, and four all at the same time.

Kacie: Whoa! Yeah, okay.

Kate: P, do another P. L, dots one, two, and three.

Kacie: Okay.

Kate: And then E, one and five. And then, I don’t know if you can see, but there, you can actually feel it if you want to, written over here on this piece of paper.

Kacie: Oh, yeah!

Kate: Yeah.

Kacie: So, basically this functions like a typewriter, but to type out Braille.

Kate: Yes, that’s right.

Kacie: So, I have to ask, who is your friend here?

Kate: This is Nora, and she is my guide and mobility dog. And she just goes everywhere where I go. [chuckles]

[typewriter keys clicking]

Cat: Christopher Latham Sholes may not have invented the typewriter, but he and his fellow Milwaukeeans did play a major role in its history and modern form, most notably in the development of the QWERTY keyboard, still in use today. Milwaukee in the 1860s and ’70s had the right combination of curious tinkerers and skilled engineers to give us an invention used by billions of people all around the world. The story of QWERTY and the typewriter is an example of how lots of people

kept reworking their ideas in the quest for better designs. And even if QWERTY

isn’t the perfect keyboard, we’re happy to have it and don’t think it’s going away anytime soon.

[typewriter dinging]

Kacie: Oh, I’m gonna pronounce the Italian wrong, I just know it. Countess Carolina van Tony Da…

It’s…

Pellegrino Too-reek.

[all laughing]

You guys are always throw–

There’s a lot of Italian in here, you guys.