Qwerty Who?

Like so many other everyday items of our modern world, the beginnings can be traced back to the American Civil War.  In 1860, just before the start of the war, the entire United States Army had about 16,000 men, or roughly the size of today’s Ohio National Guard.  

Everything changed in 1861, of course, after the secession of the southern states and the start of the war.  The Confederate Army grew to a peak of roughly 465,000 men, with over a million men having served at some point in the four years of fighting.  The Union army was roughly twice that, with a peak of just over a million men and a total of over two million having been in uniform during the war. 

The rapid growth in size of the armies was a logistical nightmare for both armies, but it was a windfall for manufacturers who were awarded huge contracts for the vast array of goods needed by troops in the field.  Most factories hired new workers and added shifts to meet the demand for a veritable flood of supplies.

In the manufacture of handguns, Samuel Colt’s company, Colt's Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company held a patent that prevented most manufacturers from producing a viable competitor to his revolver.  When the Colt patent expired in 1857, several companies began producing excellent revolvers.

Perhaps the best revolver manufactured during the war was the .44-caliber Remington Army revolver with an eight-inch barrel, an uncommon length today, but in the 19th century provided a barrel long enough for the slow burning black powder to completely combust while providing an excellent sight radius.  The Remington firearm had a more solid frame and because it used a cylinder pin instead of a lug like the Colt revolver, was a little easier to reload by swapping out a spent cylinder with a previously loaded cylinder.  (Watch Clint Eastwood do just this with a Remington revolver in the movie Pale Rider.)

Remington tooled up to make the revolvers as fast as possible, eventually selling over a hundred thousand of them to the army.  Then, just as Remington had fully expanded its manufacturing process…the war ended.  Once again, the size of the military shrank, eventually numbering only slightly more than fifteen thousand.  Since surplus firearms were as common as ants at a picnic, it was a tough time for Remington and a lot of other firearm companies to stay afloat.

If only there were something else that those machines could make!  Take, for example, those small metal working lathes that had been turning out the eight-inch barrels for revolvers.

Remington continued to make some revolvers, but also branched out into other forms of manufacturing, such as the production of sewing machines.  The Remington Lock-Stitch sewing machine was reliable and was cheaper than a comparable model from Singer.  (In a strange reversal of events, both the Remington and Singer sewing machine factories would shift over to manufacturing firearms for the U.S. Army during World War II.)

For more than a decade, Christopher Sholes had been independently working on a mechanical typewriter, but the biggest problem he faced was that the average typist could type fast enough to jam the mechanical keys of the mechanism.  Contrary to the popular myth floating around on the internet, Sholes was not looking for the least efficient arrangement of keys in order to slow down a typist, but a layout that separated the most commonly used combinations of letters (such as ST and ON) further apart, thus lessening the chances that keys would strike each other.

Note.  It occurs to me that my generation may be the last generation to have any idea what I am talking about when I mention “typewriter keys”.  Mechanical typewriters vanished in the 1970’s, replaced by electric typewriters that couldn’t jam, which were, themselves, completely replaced by computer printers a decade later.  To anyone born after about 1980, a typewriter is as quaintly obsolete as a butter churn.  (I wonder if that old IBM Selectric stored away in our spare room closet is a valuable antique yet?)

Sholes came up with a keyboard layout that looks fairly familiar to everyone today.  When he sold what became known as the Qwerty keyboard to Remington in 1873, the layout looked like this:

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - ,

Q W E . T Y I U O P

Z S D F G H J K L M

A X & C V B N ? ; R

Now, Remington got interested in manufacturing typewriters when it noticed that they already possessed most of the machines necessary for production and the casing used for sewing machines could also be used for typewriters, so it purchased the patent for the keyboard layout from Sholes and the rest (as they say) is history.  Remington made a few changes—in particular, swapping the positions of the period and R, and the A and the Z.  (Of course, there were no lower-case letters then.)  

When the Remington typewriter went on the market in 1874, it was the first time a good typist could produce legible text faster than a person could write.  Four years later, Remington introduced a more robust model—complete with lower case letters—that sold at a price reasonable enough that the machines quickly took over the workplace.  (If you are curious, typewriters didn’t routinely include a numeral one until late in the sixties, just before typewriters started to be replaced with computer printers.)

To use these early typewriters, people bought the biggest piece of paper that would comfortably fit on the platen (the large rubber-coated roller that was manufactured on those old gun-making lathes that had once produced pistol barrels).  Over time, this piece of paper became a standard of eight and a half inches wide, and folders, notebooks, and filing cabinets were all manufactured to accommodate this size of paper.

Typewriters usually used either ten or twelve-point type, which allowed for a one-inch margin on each side of the paper, making an average line of monospaced print on a page about 65 to 78 characters per line. Given the average distance between the written page and the reader’s eyes, this turned out to be ideal.  

That ideal number of characters per line has long been observed by book publishers.  Select a book at random off a shelf and you will probably find that the average number of characters per line is fairly close to that number or less.  Publishers also know that sufficient margins are necessary to “rest” the eyes while reading.  If there are too many characters per line, or that margin is cut, the reader develops eye strain and will probably stop reading.  It is something of a challenge to find a book, newspaper, magazine, or even an online blog that violates this rule.

And then, the computer printer came along.  Since printers are capable of true proportional spacing, the average number of characters per line quickly increased to a more-than-uncomfortable 100.  It was too late to narrow the paper, and the paper wasn’t wide enough to allow two columns...

What was needed for the comfort of the reader was either more white space on the page, or a somewhat dramatic increase in the size of the font used.  Widening the margins to two inches per side seemed wasteful, and increasing the size of font produced an unattractive page, so the most commonly used remedy is to double space the document.  While most people believe this is done to make it easier for teachers to edit and grade students’ papers, tests show that the readers actually read faster, and remember more of what they have read on double-spaced documents.  The extra white space between lines rests the eyes of the reader—a job once done by the margins.

This means that this weekend, as I write my research paper for my final art history class, the reason that I double space the increasingly lengthy document is, in part, due to the requirements of black powder burning in the elongated barrels of Civil War pistols.  As a historian, I find that somehow comforting.