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Typewriters: Mechanical Brilliance · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
0:04
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
0:13
Speaker 1: and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, And this is
0:15
Speaker 1: an old school Stuff you should Know episode. Yeah, old school.
0:23
Speaker 1: It's just like a robust, jam packed um overlooked unsung
0:30
Speaker 1: item episode and those are often really good. Yeah. I
0:33
Speaker 1: bet we got a mechanical engineering suite in there somewhere.
0:37
Speaker 1: I'll bet too. For sure. We'll have to cobble it
0:40
Speaker 1: together someday and be like, look what we did, everybody,
0:43
Speaker 1: But we want to talk about something else real quick first, right, yeah, man? So, Um,
0:48
Speaker 1: we recently did a hang out for our friends co
0:51
Speaker 1: ed UM, the Cooperative for Education who we've talked about
0:54
Speaker 1: plenty of times. They helped kids stay in school in
0:57
Speaker 1: Guatemala and break the cycle of poverty by making sure
1:00
Speaker 1: they get an education. Right, that's right, but he knows
1:03
Speaker 1: about cod. Our first our two part Guatemala episode was
1:07
Speaker 1: when we went there with COED. So we did a
1:10
Speaker 1: hang out with them for their Fall f S, a fundraiser,
1:13
Speaker 1: and um, we found out that so far since we
1:17
Speaker 1: went to Guatemala with them, Stuff you should know listeners
1:20
Speaker 1: have donated how much I think we are And this
1:25
Speaker 1: is our good friend Ann at co Ed who invited
1:27
Speaker 1: us initially, has done the math and redone the math.
1:31
Speaker 1: Things that we reached the numbers. Things that we don't
1:33
Speaker 1: do is redo the math several times. And At says
1:37
Speaker 1: we are within a hundred grand of stuff you should
1:40
Speaker 1: know fans having donated one million bucks. That's amazing, that
1:45
Speaker 1: is so amazing. So we were like, okay, we're at
1:48
Speaker 1: like nine hundred thousand dollars. I feel like we should,
1:51
Speaker 1: you know, hit one million. It's just such a nice
1:54
Speaker 1: round number. And and Coed will do so many good
1:57
Speaker 1: things with that extra hundred gram. So you and I
2:01
Speaker 1: both realized that a hundred grand is a tremendous amount
2:03
Speaker 1: of money. So we did some number crunching ourselves, and
2:06
Speaker 1: we figured out that if we divided it up among
2:09
Speaker 1: stuff you should know listeners, if everyone chipped in like
2:12
Speaker 1: a nominal amount, we could reach that goal. Right. Yeah,
2:15
Speaker 1: So you did the math. I'm gonna let you stand
2:17
Speaker 1: behind it. Oh man, I was hoping you'd stand in
2:21
Speaker 1: front of that. So if twenty thousand stuff you should
2:25
Speaker 1: know listeners, and we're told there are that many out there. Um,
2:28
Speaker 1: each chip in five dollars will reach that goal, no problem. Uh,
2:33
Speaker 1: what ten thousand stuff listeners chip in ten thousand dollars
2:39
Speaker 1: ten dollars and then, um, I believe if eight thousand,
2:46
Speaker 1: six hundred and nine listeners contribute eleven dollars and fifty cents,
2:50
Speaker 1: we will hit that goal as well. Right, so you
2:53
Speaker 1: get the point. It doesn't take much when you have
2:55
Speaker 1: a lot of great people banded together. Uh, this is
2:58
Speaker 1: the holiday time and know that, you know that's a
3:01
Speaker 1: money crunching time. But if you could throw five dollars
3:05
Speaker 1: their way and we could all like work our way
3:07
Speaker 1: towards that million before the end of the year, that
3:09
Speaker 1: would really be a big, big, huge deal. It would
3:13
Speaker 1: be really cool. And believe us, we'll both be chipping
3:15
Speaker 1: in as well as like we're asking you to do something.
3:17
Speaker 1: We would go and we're gonna make Jerry chip into
3:20
Speaker 1: Yeah that's right, And I'm gonna chip in more than
3:23
Speaker 1: five dollars. Oh yeah, I'm gonna chip in that. No,
3:27
Speaker 1: we're gonna do that thing where h when you split
3:30
Speaker 1: the tab at a restaurant, we try and see what
3:32
Speaker 1: the other person tipped so one of us doesn't look cheap,
3:35
Speaker 1: that's right. So they actually set up a specific u
3:40
Speaker 1: r L for us, right, that's right. It is Cooperative
3:44
Speaker 1: for fo R Education dot org slash s y s k.
3:49
Speaker 1: Very very easy, yep. And you just go on the
3:52
Speaker 1: donation processes quick and painless, and you will be helping
3:56
Speaker 1: kids break the cycle of poverty in Guatemala and a
4:00
Speaker 1: really good about things. That's right. I want to make
4:02
Speaker 1: sure that our contributions count as stuff you should know
4:05
Speaker 1: army Well, yeah, I would, I would hoping and would
4:08
Speaker 1: make sure of that. I mean, we're part of the
4:10
Speaker 1: army still, even though we're you know, the motorway commandants
4:14
Speaker 1: or something. I guess that's a pretty European. I always
4:19
Speaker 1: picture ourselves on the ship. We're admirals. I like, colonel,
4:23
Speaker 1: you could be admiral. I'm gonna be colonel. Well, if
4:26
Speaker 1: you're a colonel, I'm just going to be a private. Oh,
4:29
Speaker 1: come on anyway, and count our donations if you can
4:32
Speaker 1: do that, because we're part of the army, and I
4:35
Speaker 1: think anyone including us, who goes to Cooperative for Education
4:38
Speaker 1: dot org slash s ysk, their donation will automatically be
4:41
Speaker 1: counted towards the total for sure. Okay, so go forth, everybody. Uh,
4:46
Speaker 1: it's Thanksgiving time. The holiday season is starting to kick off.
4:50
Speaker 1: Good cheer and good vibes and glad tidings are starting
4:53
Speaker 1: to fill all of our hearts and hopefully that will
4:56
Speaker 1: culminate in us each donating five bucks. That's right, Okay,
5:00
Speaker 1: shall we talk typewriters. Yeah, let's let's I think that
5:03
Speaker 1: went really well. Choked. I think it went well, dude,
5:07
Speaker 1: So big shout out to our buddy Dave Ruse, who
5:09
Speaker 1: I bet will also contribute because he's also a listener
5:13
Speaker 1: as well as a writer for us. Well, he listens
5:15
Speaker 1: to the ones that he helps us write. It's true,
5:18
Speaker 1: I suspect the same thing. So, um he helped us
5:21
Speaker 1: out with this one on typewriters, and um, it's one
5:25
Speaker 1: of those things, like I said it was, it's kind
5:27
Speaker 1: of one of those overlooked and unsung items that really
5:30
Speaker 1: had like a lot of effect on the world, so
5:34
Speaker 1: much so that I feel like scholarship into the impact
5:38
Speaker 1: that that typewriters had on society kind of ends with um,
5:43
Speaker 1: you know, ushering feminism into the workplace, or at the
5:46
Speaker 1: very least women into the workplace. We'll talk a lot
5:49
Speaker 1: about that later, but I think I had even more effects, Chuck,
5:52
Speaker 1: Like if you stop and think about it, like, you know,
5:54
Speaker 1: would we have the computer today if we hadn't invented
5:58
Speaker 1: the typewriter in the middle of the nineteenth century, or
6:01
Speaker 1: if we did, what would it look like if we
6:02
Speaker 1: hadn't had the typewriter first? Um, you know did because
6:07
Speaker 1: it allowed for a lot more smoothness in the business office.
6:10
Speaker 1: It allowed for like systematic management, I think, So is
6:14
Speaker 1: it responsible for the creation of the paperwork we're all
6:17
Speaker 1: drowning in at all times? I have questions about this
6:20
Speaker 1: and no one's answered them yet, So I'm just gonna
6:22
Speaker 1: throw those questions out and just let them kind of
6:24
Speaker 1: jael over the whole episode. Would we have all the
6:28
Speaker 1: great works of literature that we have since the invention
6:31
Speaker 1: of the typewriter? People were certainly writing before the typewriter,
6:34
Speaker 1: as long as there was a feather and some ink around, uh,
6:38
Speaker 1: they would use the old quill. But the typewriter certainly, um,
6:42
Speaker 1: sort of open things up, not the very least things
6:45
Speaker 1: like self publishing and and getting your own creative ideas
6:49
Speaker 1: out to the world in an easier fashion. So creatively,
6:52
Speaker 1: the typewriter was a game changer. That's an excellent point,
6:55
Speaker 1: Mark Mark Twain, Right, he was vive and this is
6:58
Speaker 1: a great this may be the fact of the show. Oh.
7:00
Speaker 1: His book in eight two, Life on the Mississippi, was
7:04
Speaker 1: the very first typewritten manuscript ever submitted, as far as
7:07
Speaker 1: anyone knows. Yeah. Uh, and apparently he hand wrote it
7:12
Speaker 1: and then had his assistant or secretary transcribe it onto
7:18
Speaker 1: into a typewriter. Yeah. I mean that's kind of how
7:20
Speaker 1: things went for a while, exactly. Yeah. But um, the
7:24
Speaker 1: one thing about typewriting too, I think some of those
7:26
Speaker 1: early writers were like, well, wait a minute, does that
7:28
Speaker 1: mean we're just supposed to dictate our books? And I
7:31
Speaker 1: don't know how I feel about that. And then they
7:33
Speaker 1: finally figured out, like, oh, we can actually do the
7:35
Speaker 1: typing ourselves. And I think that's when it really kind
7:37
Speaker 1: of opened up for literature, like you were saying, right,
7:40
Speaker 1: But that also went the other way later with memoirs,
7:43
Speaker 1: with people like Keith Richards would say, you mean, I
7:46
Speaker 1: can just say things out loud and it'll be a book. Right,
7:50
Speaker 1: does seventeen pages that are just the letter L seventeen hundred?
7:54
Speaker 1: More like? Is is Uh, autobiography is very long and great,
7:58
Speaker 1: so um. One of the other things about the typewriter
8:01
Speaker 1: two is it wasn't around for that long for as
8:03
Speaker 1: much of an effect as it did have on society.
8:05
Speaker 1: It was invented in eighteen sixty eight, the first thing
8:09
Speaker 1: that we recognized as a modern typewriter, and then by
8:12
Speaker 1: the eighties it was certainly on its way out. And
8:15
Speaker 1: it died really quickly because yeah, and the technology, because
8:20
Speaker 1: the technology that we invented took off really quickly. But again,
8:25
Speaker 1: it was all based on the typewriter. There were improvements
8:27
Speaker 1: to the typewriter that eventually led to the PC. That's right. Uh.
8:31
Speaker 1: And I have a deep, deep love of mechanical machines.
8:37
Speaker 1: And I have an old typewriter and I've had it
8:39
Speaker 1: since college. I think my mom got it for me
8:43
Speaker 1: for Christmas one year, got me an old Royal antique
8:46
Speaker 1: typewriter just to display. And I have moved that thing.
8:49
Speaker 1: I'll post a picture of it. It's still on my
8:51
Speaker 1: shelf in my office upstairs. I've moved it everywhere for
8:55
Speaker 1: the past, you know, thirty five years, and I still well,
9:00
Speaker 1: you know, throw a piece of paper in that thing
9:02
Speaker 1: every now. And then and type on it and realized
9:04
Speaker 1: that the ribbon is dry. You're like, all work and
9:07
Speaker 1: no play make Jack a dull boy. But we are
9:10
Speaker 1: the generation, and and me even a little bit more
9:12
Speaker 1: than you because I'm a few years older of uh.
9:16
Speaker 1: And you know, we talked about Gen X being the
9:18
Speaker 1: greatest generation because we saw such transitions in technology, but
9:22
Speaker 1: the typewriter was certainly one of them. Like I typed
9:26
Speaker 1: in my typing class in high school on a on
9:29
Speaker 1: an IBM Selectric, which we'll talk about one of the
9:31
Speaker 1: greatest machines ever invented. And then just a few years
9:35
Speaker 1: later when I jumped into college, I had one of
9:38
Speaker 1: those over the expensive word processors. Yeah, we had one too,
9:43
Speaker 1: and I was thinking. I was trying to remember what
9:45
Speaker 1: brand it was, and I could remember either. I thought
9:48
Speaker 1: it was a Brother And then I stopped and thought
9:51
Speaker 1: a little more about it. I'm sure it was a
9:53
Speaker 1: Sears and Roebuck word processor. Not. I know mine was used,
9:57
Speaker 1: I'll tell you that. Yeah, but those things were really amazing,
10:01
Speaker 1: especially if you could take the time to stop and
10:03
Speaker 1: figure out how to use it. That was one of
10:05
Speaker 1: the great things about typewriters is people have been using
10:08
Speaker 1: them for so long that when you first learned how
10:11
Speaker 1: to do it, there were so many people out there
10:12
Speaker 1: who could tell you how to do it. It was
10:14
Speaker 1: easy to pick up. Word processors made it difficult, but
10:18
Speaker 1: I pods that that they were a necessary transition from
10:21
Speaker 1: typewriters to PCs. It got people thinking in a digital way,
10:24
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, yeah, just to see it on that
10:26
Speaker 1: tiny little screen, it felt like it was like two
10:30
Speaker 1: inches by three inches maybe, Yeah, that was a game changer. Yeah,
10:36
Speaker 1: we'll talk more about that later, but let's just do
10:37
Speaker 1: like a quick overview of how to use a typewriter
10:40
Speaker 1: for the chilling's yeah, like the parts and pieces parts. Yeah, alright,
10:45
Speaker 1: so a manual typewriter, and that's what we're gonna call
10:47
Speaker 1: anything that isn't electric or electronic, uh anything pre those days.
10:53
Speaker 1: What you do, kids, is you get a piece of
10:55
Speaker 1: white paper and you feed it into this machine, this
10:59
Speaker 1: mechanical machine by rotating a rubber cylinder that's called a platon,
11:04
Speaker 1: and you know, you roll it till let's lined up
11:06
Speaker 1: to where you basically want to start typing. And even
11:09
Speaker 1: that when you first start typing is a little bit weird,
11:12
Speaker 1: like you might start typing too high and you realize
11:14
Speaker 1: you gotta roll it up a little bit more to
11:16
Speaker 1: get that what do you call that the not the margin? Yeah,
11:20
Speaker 1: the margin, the border, I call it a order. The header, Yeah,
11:23
Speaker 1: the header, which is like whatever you want to set
11:25
Speaker 1: an inch inch and a half. So you line up
11:28
Speaker 1: that paper where you want to start typing, and then
11:31
Speaker 1: you start typing by pressing down on a key. And
11:35
Speaker 1: Dave even says press hard in parentheses because you got
11:39
Speaker 1: to give it a little bit of a strike, much
11:41
Speaker 1: more than you do, even though you have abused laptops
11:43
Speaker 1: in your time. I always said you sound like Thelonious
11:46
Speaker 1: Monk over there on the type on the computer, but
11:48
Speaker 1: I can't imagine hearing on a typewriter. Yeah. The reason
11:52
Speaker 1: you have to press hard though, because we're talking about
11:55
Speaker 1: manual typewriters. There's no electricity involved. You can take it anywhere.
11:58
Speaker 1: It sounds like that's what your royal is, right, Yeah, okay,
12:01
Speaker 1: So um, when you're pressing on that key, it's actually
12:06
Speaker 1: causing that lever to shoot up. And attached to the
12:10
Speaker 1: end of the level is what's called the type bar,
12:12
Speaker 1: and that is basically a little mini type bar like
12:16
Speaker 1: you find in a printing press. And typically, um, I
12:20
Speaker 1: think the top is lower case and the bottom is
12:23
Speaker 1: upper case. And when that type bar hits the paper,
12:27
Speaker 1: depending on whether you're on lower higher case, UM, it's
12:31
Speaker 1: it smacks the paper and it goes through the ink ribbon,
12:34
Speaker 1: which shoots up all of a sudden out of nowhere
12:37
Speaker 1: like a whack a mole and gets in between the
12:39
Speaker 1: type bar and the paper. So the type bar actually
12:41
Speaker 1: strikes and leaves an impression through the ink ribbon onto
12:45
Speaker 1: the paper. And that's how you type a nice, inky letter.
12:48
Speaker 1: That's right. And I know we sound like we're being
12:51
Speaker 1: like we're coddling, but I'm really not when I say this.
12:54
Speaker 1: If you've never used one, you never really looked at
12:56
Speaker 1: one much. Um. It's like a little stamp on the
12:59
Speaker 1: end of a of a metal lever, and it just
13:02
Speaker 1: it just stamps the letters on one at a time, right,
13:05
Speaker 1: So I mean that's pretty much it. The only thing
13:08
Speaker 1: is and this is like a really ingenious part of
13:10
Speaker 1: the typewriter from way back. When you type a letter,
13:15
Speaker 1: that the carriage, which is the whole assembly that holds
13:18
Speaker 1: the platin um, it moves to the left one space
13:23
Speaker 1: so that you are now about to type your next
13:25
Speaker 1: letter to the right of the last letter that you
13:28
Speaker 1: just typed, so that you're not typing your entire manuscript
13:32
Speaker 1: in one single space. It seems really easy to overlook,
13:36
Speaker 1: but it's a really important part. And then eventually you
13:39
Speaker 1: get to an end. At the end of the carriage,
13:42
Speaker 1: it reaches all the way to the left. It's almost
13:44
Speaker 1: seems so wildly out of proportion that the typewriter will
13:48
Speaker 1: surely tip over at any second. And then the little
13:50
Speaker 1: bell goes thing and you hit a lever and the
13:53
Speaker 1: thing slides back to the right fastest, bobs your uncle,
13:57
Speaker 1: and then you start typing the next line because it
13:59
Speaker 1: raised up once ace or two spaces, depending on whether
14:01
Speaker 1: you're typing single space or double space. That's right. And
14:04
Speaker 1: you think, is there a small troll in there that
14:07
Speaker 1: is hitting a bell. No, that's it's all mechanical. It's
14:11
Speaker 1: wonderful that carriage return and you have your margin set
14:14
Speaker 1: so it knows when to ding uh, and it's it's
14:17
Speaker 1: it's just a wonder of mechanical engineering. I love a typewriter.
14:20
Speaker 1: There's a lot of like if you only just sort
14:23
Speaker 1: of see the outside and you're looking at the type
14:25
Speaker 1: bar that in it of itself is kind of cool,
14:28
Speaker 1: but when you open that thing up and really look
14:30
Speaker 1: at the mechanics behind it, it's just awesome. I love typewriters. Yeah,
14:34
Speaker 1: it is very cool. And also one of the other
14:36
Speaker 1: things that's neat about it. When you look over the typewriter,
14:39
Speaker 1: you see that all of the type bars, all of
14:41
Speaker 1: the um, the alphabet and the numbers are looking back
14:45
Speaker 1: up at you and like a semicircle, and so they
14:48
Speaker 1: just shoot up from their spot hey hey, hey, depending
14:51
Speaker 1: on what um what letter you're typing, but they always
14:54
Speaker 1: hit that same part, which is exactly where the carriage
14:58
Speaker 1: wants them to hit on the plan. So that's a typewriter.
15:02
Speaker 1: And I say, chuck um that we take a break
15:04
Speaker 1: and then come back and talk about some of the
15:06
Speaker 1: history behind it. Let's do it. So before we go on,
15:33
Speaker 1: I do want to say that as a rite of
15:34
Speaker 1: passage for any child, I went and when my daughter
15:37
Speaker 1: was a little bit younger, she probably still does it.
15:40
Speaker 1: For all I know, I would go into my office
15:42
Speaker 1: and see my typewriter type bars all tangled together, because
15:46
Speaker 1: the write of passage for any kid when they see
15:48
Speaker 1: emmanual typewriters just to smash all those keys at the
15:51
Speaker 1: same time, and they get into a little tangled mess,
15:54
Speaker 1: which we'll get to that has a lot to do
15:55
Speaker 1: with the eventual keyboard design. But yeah, just to throw
16:00
Speaker 1: that out there. Yeah, but that was a real problem,
16:03
Speaker 1: and they turned into like a little rats nest, right,
16:05
Speaker 1: little rats nests, So fingers of the thinkers of a
16:09
Speaker 1: little rat. Yes, And that was a problem that was
16:11
Speaker 1: faced by one Christopher Latham Shoals, who is widely considered
16:17
Speaker 1: to be the inventor of the typewriter, although as we'll see,
16:19
Speaker 1: he didn't work completely alone, but he and a pal
16:23
Speaker 1: of his um created the patent for the typewriter in
16:27
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty eight. There were the first people to get
16:30
Speaker 1: a patent for the first typewriter, but at least fifty
16:33
Speaker 1: people gave it a try before Shoals, uh perfected it,
16:37
Speaker 1: or I shouldn't say perfected, it came the closest to
16:40
Speaker 1: perfecting it the first time. How about that? Yeah, because
16:43
Speaker 1: you know day points out they you know, the printing
16:45
Speaker 1: press was invented in what the fourteen something fifteenth century,
16:50
Speaker 1: and it took a couple of hundred years, but then
16:53
Speaker 1: for about a hundred years people tried to figure out
16:56
Speaker 1: a typewriter of some sort. The first sort of working
17:00
Speaker 1: typewriter may have been this guy named Giuseppe Pellegrin no
17:04
Speaker 1: Touri Uh. He was obviously an Italian guy. He was
17:08
Speaker 1: an inventor, and in eighteen o eight he made a
17:11
Speaker 1: device for Uh. Either was Frinder's girlfriend, the Countess Carolina Fantoni.
17:17
Speaker 1: That's wow, that's quite and a beautiful name. It's very
17:23
Speaker 1: beautiful name. And this is a cool story because she
17:25
Speaker 1: had lost her sight. So the invention was so, you know,
17:29
Speaker 1: typing is something that you can do withoutside. In fact,
17:32
Speaker 1: that's the whole goal, is to learn to type without
17:34
Speaker 1: looking right. Um. So there's an alternate story that her
17:39
Speaker 1: brother Augustino actually invented it for her and Tourie improved it.
17:44
Speaker 1: But the upshot of it is whoever created this machine? Uh,
17:48
Speaker 1: It doesn't exist any longer, it doesn't survive, But some
17:51
Speaker 1: of her typed um letters did from eighteen oh, all
17:55
Speaker 1: the way back in eighteen o eight, undisputed first type
17:59
Speaker 1: letters were for Italy back then, that's right. Uh. And
18:02
Speaker 1: then there are another couple of guys who tried their
18:04
Speaker 1: hand at it. Uh. Just shout them out, because we
18:07
Speaker 1: always like to shout out detroitter's. A guy named William
18:11
Speaker 1: Austin Burt in the early eighteen hundreds invented a typographer,
18:15
Speaker 1: uh clunky, didn't work very well. And then another pre
18:19
Speaker 1: typewriter was built. It was called the Hansen Riding Ball.
18:23
Speaker 1: And this one is kind of interesting, and that he
18:26
Speaker 1: used electromagnetic energies and electromagnetic battery to actually power this thing.
18:32
Speaker 1: So it didn't work very well, but it was way
18:34
Speaker 1: ahead of its time. Actually, I saw that it did
18:37
Speaker 1: work really well. Um that well for manufacturing though, I think, okay,
18:41
Speaker 1: right true. And the the arrangement of the keys, it
18:43
Speaker 1: was like a pincushion, so you held both hands together
18:46
Speaker 1: like you were alien for Pete's sake typing. But the
18:51
Speaker 1: thing would work really well. It would respond as fast
18:53
Speaker 1: as you typed um in part because of those electro magnets.
18:57
Speaker 1: And he also spread the vowels to the left and
18:59
Speaker 1: the contint to the right, which made typing even faster.
19:02
Speaker 1: And I saw it also automatically advanced the paper too,
19:05
Speaker 1: so it didn't really resemble our earliest typewriters are our typewriters,
19:09
Speaker 1: but it was its own kind of neat thing that
19:12
Speaker 1: just didn't take off. Everybody's like, what's this pink Christian thing?
19:15
Speaker 1: This is not right. It's a kind of fun thing
19:16
Speaker 1: you see in a museum and you marvel at how
19:19
Speaker 1: advanced it was for the time. Sure, definitely if you
19:22
Speaker 1: want to get too real typewriters, though, we got to
19:24
Speaker 1: go back to Christopher lay them shoals. You mentioned, uh,
19:30
Speaker 1: Milwaukee in right, Yeah, and he got he was a journalist.
19:34
Speaker 1: He was a politician. Sometimes almost said a superman, a newspaperman.
19:40
Speaker 1: The superman was a newspaperman. Hey man. That was a
19:43
Speaker 1: heck of a connection. Uh. And he was a superman,
19:46
Speaker 1: I'll say it. Uh. And he had a side gig
19:49
Speaker 1: as an inventor. And he got together. He was smart
19:51
Speaker 1: enough to collaborate with people, and got together in eighteen
19:54
Speaker 1: sixty six with a couple of colleagues named Carlos Glinden
19:57
Speaker 1: and Samuel Willard Seul. Would you say so? All right?
20:04
Speaker 1: Soul with any And they went to work and designed
20:08
Speaker 1: um a typewriter at Klein Stuber's machine shop in Milwaukee,
20:15
Speaker 1: and then finally in eight sixty eight were able to
20:17
Speaker 1: apply for their and this is kind of fun. Always
20:20
Speaker 1: loved the early sort of UM when things are split
20:23
Speaker 1: up into two words, capital T, type dash, capital W
20:27
Speaker 1: writer a literal type writer. And it had a little
20:31
Speaker 1: it's fun to look up. Look this thing up. It
20:33
Speaker 1: had a little piano keys as the keyboard, which makes
20:37
Speaker 1: sense because it has a similar mechanical function, right, And
20:40
Speaker 1: apparently the ebony keys had one function. The ivory keys
20:44
Speaker 1: had another function. But if you look at it, there's
20:46
Speaker 1: only like four or five keys of each. And I
20:50
Speaker 1: cannot make heads or tails of how the thing worked,
20:53
Speaker 1: and apparently no one else can, because I've never found
20:56
Speaker 1: an explanation of actually how it worked. But it's just like,
21:00
Speaker 1: look at that thing. It looks like a piano moving on. Well.
21:03
Speaker 1: One thing I knew is that they lived together in
21:05
Speaker 1: perfect harmony. That's right. The other thing I found out
21:09
Speaker 1: about that too, is in their prototype, all I could
21:12
Speaker 1: type was W. But apparently type W really really well
21:16
Speaker 1: enough that they applied for the patent and they got it.
21:18
Speaker 1: They also did something else that was innovative that would
21:21
Speaker 1: come in UM. It was kind of one of those
21:23
Speaker 1: things that laid the groundwork for all typewriters to come.
21:26
Speaker 1: They had two spools that held an ink ribbon on top,
21:29
Speaker 1: and we talked about how the inc ribbon jumps up
21:31
Speaker 1: and gets in between the type bar and the paper
21:33
Speaker 1: to leave the the inked letter. Well, these guys invented
21:36
Speaker 1: it basically right out of the gate. Yeah, because you
21:39
Speaker 1: gotta have a spool, you gotta move that ribbon along,
21:41
Speaker 1: or you're just typing on the same section of ribbon
21:43
Speaker 1: over and over and that's no good, sure, uh. In
21:48
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy two, they sold UH their shares in this
21:52
Speaker 1: invention to a guy, an oil guy named James Dinsmore,
21:56
Speaker 1: who will factor in UH in a pretty big way
21:58
Speaker 1: in a minute. And but Shoals wasn't done. He was like,
22:01
Speaker 1: you know what, we sold this thing, but I'm gonna
22:03
Speaker 1: keep working. And later that same year, like that's how
22:06
Speaker 1: like dedicated he was to figuring this thing out. He
22:09
Speaker 1: teamed with another inventor named Matthias Schwalbach and made an
22:14
Speaker 1: improved typewriter within the same year that he sold the patent,
22:17
Speaker 1: which is pretty I don't know if that's shifty or
22:19
Speaker 1: just super smart. I saw that it was glitten and
22:23
Speaker 1: soul that Shoulder sold their shares and that UM Shoals
22:27
Speaker 1: may have kept his or invested. Yeah, so so schwall
22:35
Speaker 1: Back and Shoals. The thing that they came up with,
22:37
Speaker 1: there's no better way to describe what it looked like
22:40
Speaker 1: than Dave put it, which is a medieval pasta maker.
22:43
Speaker 1: It's really weird and ungainly and like just disproportionate, like
22:49
Speaker 1: real top heavy. Um. But it worked pretty well. But again,
22:53
Speaker 1: it was just one of those things that that um
22:55
Speaker 1: that Shoals was, he just kept improving and improving and improving.
22:59
Speaker 1: And then he said, Densmore really kind of comes in
23:01
Speaker 1: in a big way in a minute. And here he
23:03
Speaker 1: comes because after the Civil War, the Remington Company, which
23:08
Speaker 1: had built, uh manufactured tons of guns for the Civil War,
23:13
Speaker 1: found that their gun market had suddenly dried up and
23:16
Speaker 1: they were looking for new markets to get into, and
23:18
Speaker 1: Densmore said, I got one for you, that's right. They
23:21
Speaker 1: also made sewing machines, which will become evident here in
23:23
Speaker 1: a minute. But in eighteen seventy three Densmore pitched them
23:27
Speaker 1: and said this typewriter thing is pretty awesome. And Remingtons,
23:30
Speaker 1: like you said, was looking to make something literally, and
23:34
Speaker 1: they said give me a thousand and uh, I guess
23:37
Speaker 1: that was just the initial order and it really took off. Um.
23:41
Speaker 1: They manufactured them where they manufactured their sewing machines in
23:44
Speaker 1: upstate New York, and the what it was known as
23:48
Speaker 1: was the Shoals and Glinden typewriter. It's how it was branded.
23:51
Speaker 1: And it's it's you can look this one up to
23:53
Speaker 1: It's a very pretty, sort of Victorian era looking machine.
23:56
Speaker 1: It's actually decorative. They have flowers painted on the case.
23:59
Speaker 1: It's it's cool. It looks like an old timey sawing
24:02
Speaker 1: machine because apparently Remington's design team were one trick ponies. Um.
24:07
Speaker 1: It even had like a foot pedal too for the
24:09
Speaker 1: return Like when when the thing dinged, you didn't press
24:12
Speaker 1: the lever with your hand, you hit it with the
24:14
Speaker 1: foot pedal and it went the carriage returned back to
24:17
Speaker 1: the right. Um yeah. Um. So they were like, Okay,
24:22
Speaker 1: we're getting closer. Um, this is starting to kind of
24:25
Speaker 1: come around. And I think that Shoals and Glinten typewriter
24:28
Speaker 1: was the first one that Mark Twain had. If I'm
24:30
Speaker 1: not mistaken, I M think so. Yeah, But Shoals invented
24:34
Speaker 1: something else, Like this guy is just the inventor that
24:37
Speaker 1: keeps on giving as far as typewriters are concerned. In
24:40
Speaker 1: seventy eight he invented the shift key. And if you
24:42
Speaker 1: were like me and never realized why the shift key
24:45
Speaker 1: was called the shift key, then prepared to be amazed,
24:48
Speaker 1: because there's an actual reason for it. That's right, when
24:51
Speaker 1: you hit the ship, well, we should say that that
24:53
Speaker 1: initial shoals in glinten was all caps. Right, that's a
24:56
Speaker 1: good point. That was a problem everyone, you know. I
24:59
Speaker 1: think actually Twain handed in his manuscript on the Remington two,
25:03
Speaker 1: which we're talking about now, But if he had handed
25:06
Speaker 1: in the shoals and glint and they would have said,
25:07
Speaker 1: why is this guy shouting and everyone all the time?
25:09
Speaker 1: It's like life on the Mississippi should be a little
25:11
Speaker 1: more laid back life on the uh. So the shift
25:15
Speaker 1: key is something that literally shifted everything up. The whole
25:20
Speaker 1: carriage shifted up. And like you said earlier, there's the
25:24
Speaker 1: lower case letter and the upper case letter just right
25:26
Speaker 1: on top of each other. And that's all it took.
25:29
Speaker 1: You just it was a mechanical solution again that lifted
25:32
Speaker 1: it up where the appropriate uh case of letter would
25:37
Speaker 1: hint that ribbon. And that's why they call it the
25:39
Speaker 1: shift and they still call it that, which is hysterical.
25:42
Speaker 1: It is because you're not shifting anything on a computer,
25:45
Speaker 1: but you did physically shift the carriage up and then
25:47
Speaker 1: whatever letter was on top, I think the lower case,
25:50
Speaker 1: which is still the case. If you press shift, it
25:52
Speaker 1: goes to upper case. Right. Yes, well that's that finds
25:56
Speaker 1: its source back in the eighteen seventies and up the
26:00
Speaker 1: lower case letter at the top of the type bar
26:02
Speaker 1: would be too high up to hit the the letter
26:04
Speaker 1: or the paper. Now, I just think that's amazing. Yeah,
26:07
Speaker 1: it's interesting because we do have a caps lock on
26:09
Speaker 1: a computer keyboard. I wonder why they did didn't change
26:12
Speaker 1: shift to caps They used to call it shift lock.
26:17
Speaker 1: That's true. And also it does more. I forgot that.
26:19
Speaker 1: It also does more beyond capitalizing, does percentage and a
26:23
Speaker 1: person and all the number secondary functions. But so does shift.
26:27
Speaker 1: So caps lock makes even less sense. It should be
26:30
Speaker 1: shift lock. It should be shift lock. Yeah, somebody really
26:34
Speaker 1: screwed up along the way. No, wait, does cap cap
26:37
Speaker 1: slock doesn't do that for the numbers, does it. I'm
26:39
Speaker 1: gonna find out right now. I believe it does. Man,
26:43
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure I've literally never tried that. I know,
26:46
Speaker 1: I don't think I have either. Let's trust I'm demonstrating
26:49
Speaker 1: now capslock engaged. I'm gonna type of three, which is
26:53
Speaker 1: a pound sign. No is the three, So calock. We
26:58
Speaker 1: just did a live demo on air. I love that.
27:01
Speaker 1: There's probably about half the people that were on the
27:03
Speaker 1: edge of their seat and half the people are going
27:06
Speaker 1: these guys have had the show for how long? And
27:08
Speaker 1: they're this tim is the best generation. Uh. Let's talk
27:14
Speaker 1: about quirty, our old friend. Quirty is how you say it?
27:18
Speaker 1: Or do you say quarity quirty querty? I think I
27:23
Speaker 1: say both actually because they both sound right nowhere in
27:25
Speaker 1: the well. Querity, as everyone knows, is the style of keyboard,
27:30
Speaker 1: the arrangement of the letters on most Western typewriters that
27:36
Speaker 1: you'll see. As you'll see and maybe surprise, there are
27:38
Speaker 1: a lot of other different arrangements, but the quarty is
27:41
Speaker 1: the one that's stuck, and it is named after those
27:43
Speaker 1: first six letters on the top row of the typewriter. YEP,
27:47
Speaker 1: starting from the left right, that's right, that should have
27:49
Speaker 1: said English language, well, not just English language, any Latin alphabet.
27:53
Speaker 1: So the abcs those are considered the Latin alphabet. So
27:56
Speaker 1: like if you go to um, I don't know Italy,
28:01
Speaker 1: uh you you can find Quarity keyboards there too, right. Um,
28:06
Speaker 1: But the there's a legend, I guess with Quarity, A
28:09
Speaker 1: lot of people say that. Um, and it was Shoals
28:12
Speaker 1: who came up with the Quarity keyboard. Yet another amazing
28:16
Speaker 1: milestone that this man delivered to humanity. Um. Okay, not
28:20
Speaker 1: an amazing milestone, but something that's still around today and
28:22
Speaker 1: is mildly interesting to talk about. At least boy really
28:27
Speaker 1: cut him out, cut his knees out on that one,
28:29
Speaker 1: didn't you. So um he there's a lot of there's
28:32
Speaker 1: a legend that he created the Quarity keyboard because people
28:35
Speaker 1: were typing too fast. So he because he he originally
28:39
Speaker 1: had it alphabetized. And that's true, he originally had them
28:44
Speaker 1: the keyboard alphabetized. I think starting from the top left.
28:46
Speaker 1: Maybe I'm not sure, but apparently some I think some
28:50
Speaker 1: researchers at Kyoto University in Japan did some analysis on
28:55
Speaker 1: this legend and we're like, we think this is a myth.
28:57
Speaker 1: Apparently Scholz is the kind of guy who would have
29:00
Speaker 1: and like people are typing too fast, and my typewriters
29:03
Speaker 1: jamming up. He wouldn't have tried to slow the types down.
29:05
Speaker 1: He would have tried to have improved the typewriter. But
29:09
Speaker 1: more of the point, they think. Actually it was morse
29:11
Speaker 1: code operators whose input led to the Querity keyboard from Shoals,
29:16
Speaker 1: because if you if you're transcribing my morse code, querity
29:20
Speaker 1: layout makes a lot of sense. Really, do you know how?
29:26
Speaker 1: I don't. I'm just taking it on faith from the
29:28
Speaker 1: Kyoto researchers that that's the case. Yeah. Well, again, he
29:32
Speaker 1: made an improvement, and he found that they were more
29:35
Speaker 1: likely to jam with a more frequently used letters next
29:39
Speaker 1: to each other. So he did, uh. He did some
29:43
Speaker 1: thinking about it and decided that if I come, if
29:46
Speaker 1: I space these things out the most common two letter combinations,
29:49
Speaker 1: then in theory, we should be getting fewer jams. Sure
29:52
Speaker 1: it'll happen every now and then, but at least we
29:55
Speaker 1: can reduce the number of jams. And that was it.
29:58
Speaker 1: But that's not the only altern native, right, What the
30:01
Speaker 1: other kind of keyboard? Well, no, they're there are quite
30:03
Speaker 1: a few other alternatives to the Querity right. The the
30:07
Speaker 1: layout of it, right, yeah, okay, And by the way,
30:10
Speaker 1: what you just said was the legend. From what I understand, well,
30:14
Speaker 1: I thought he he did not look in the arrange
30:17
Speaker 1: them by two letter combinations. I I don't. I don't know. Again,
30:21
Speaker 1: I think it's because of the at least Okay, the
30:23
Speaker 1: Kyoto people say it's because of the Morse Code operators.
30:26
Speaker 1: Other people say no, it absolutely is true that it was.
30:29
Speaker 1: It was the he was trying to fix the jam
30:32
Speaker 1: We just don't know. It's just interesting to debate. See.
30:34
Speaker 1: What I saw was that he was trying to fix
30:36
Speaker 1: the jams, but he wasn't so concerned about fast typing.
30:42
Speaker 1: Oh okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's a really
30:44
Speaker 1: good point, and it was lost on me until you
30:46
Speaker 1: just said that. So, so he was making it so
30:50
Speaker 1: letters that were next to each other that you'd frequently
30:52
Speaker 1: use wouldn't be used at the same time, and so
30:55
Speaker 1: cut down on the chance of them jamming. That's what
30:57
Speaker 1: I've heard. But also, you know, maybe it was both. Okay,
31:01
Speaker 1: I think we should just spend the rest of this
31:02
Speaker 1: episode talking about the querity legend. I think we should
31:06
Speaker 1: move on from the quarity to the diet tensor. Yeah,
31:09
Speaker 1: you set me up, so there's other keyboard layouts. I
31:12
Speaker 1: hadn't heard of diet tens or have you? So a
31:15
Speaker 1: guy named George Canfield Blicksender for a wonderful name. He
31:20
Speaker 1: did some analysis all the way back in and figured
31:23
Speaker 1: out that there was an optimal way to design a
31:26
Speaker 1: keyboard UM and by by analyzing the English language, he
31:30
Speaker 1: found that if he put d H I A T
31:33
Speaker 1: E N, s O and R and I believe the
31:37
Speaker 1: middle row um, he the I think of all English
31:42
Speaker 1: words would use those letters. And the reason why the
31:45
Speaker 1: middle row is important is because were they Okay, Well,
31:50
Speaker 1: in other keyboard layouts to come, they usually put the
31:53
Speaker 1: most important letters in the middle row because that's considered
31:57
Speaker 1: the home row where the home um position right. Yeah, okay,
32:03
Speaker 1: but so he said to heck with that, I'm not
32:04
Speaker 1: including that. But regardless whatever row, the d H I
32:08
Speaker 1: in t E d h I A T E N,
32:11
Speaker 1: s O, R was in bottom row, I guess of
32:15
Speaker 1: all English words would use those letters, so you would
32:18
Speaker 1: be able to type most words without even leaving the
32:21
Speaker 1: bottom row, which would let you type way fast. Yeah.
32:23
Speaker 1: I guess he just had a different idea of where
32:25
Speaker 1: home was because he went bottom up. UM the diet
32:30
Speaker 1: in stars on the bottom in the middle row had
32:34
Speaker 1: of all English words use those letters, and then at
32:38
Speaker 1: the top row only two percent. So he really, uh,
32:41
Speaker 1: he really went all in on the bottom end, he did.
32:44
Speaker 1: And then there's another one called the Divorak simplified keyboard,
32:48
Speaker 1: and apparently this one is still popular. It was created
32:51
Speaker 1: in the thirties. Yeah, I think this one, if I'm
32:53
Speaker 1: not mistaken, and I didn't do much digging, but I
32:56
Speaker 1: think the Divorak is the one that really has a
32:58
Speaker 1: lot of very past and it proponents still UM and
33:03
Speaker 1: and like you can get Divorak keyboards, right, Yeah, I
33:07
Speaker 1: think it's I think it's it's a setting or an
33:10
Speaker 1: app you can download for your phone or your computer.
33:13
Speaker 1: At that time, I don't know if you could order it,
33:15
Speaker 1: maybe from like Alien where I could see them creating those.
33:19
Speaker 1: I don't even know what that is. It's like a
33:21
Speaker 1: gamer system computer. But the Divorak is the one that
33:25
Speaker 1: really has like a lot of people still out there
33:28
Speaker 1: saying puirty uh stinks And the Dvorak is what we
33:33
Speaker 1: should have done, uh, Dr August Divorac was the inventor,
33:37
Speaker 1: like you said, and I think it was six specifically,
33:40
Speaker 1: but UM also did a lot of studying of the
33:42
Speaker 1: English language. And also apparently this had a lot to
33:45
Speaker 1: do with um fatigue for your finkies, right, because he
33:52
Speaker 1: put I think the consonants the most used consonants on
33:55
Speaker 1: the right side and the vowels on the left, and
33:59
Speaker 1: you were a to type many more words staying in
34:02
Speaker 1: that home position. And again, I think home position is
34:05
Speaker 1: typically the middle of the middle row with the act
34:08
Speaker 1: the absolute middle two keys not touched, but the other
34:14
Speaker 1: the other eight keys are touched by your fingers, and
34:16
Speaker 1: then both of your thumbs are on the space bar.
34:19
Speaker 1: That's right now, Like I I think, Chuck, we should
34:21
Speaker 1: explain this, Like people are just left to pick up
34:24
Speaker 1: typing on their own today because it's so ubiquitous. There
34:27
Speaker 1: were classes in high school you referenced earlier, taking one
34:31
Speaker 1: I got out of it. I really didn't want to
34:33
Speaker 1: take typing, but they would teach you typing. They would
34:36
Speaker 1: take an hour out of the day to to go
34:39
Speaker 1: to typing class and you would learn to type. Right. Well, yeah,
34:42
Speaker 1: this is where I was going to ask you, like,
34:44
Speaker 1: what you're typing method is? Like I took the typing class.
34:47
Speaker 1: It was typing shorthand and it was one of those
34:49
Speaker 1: classes where you did like three things in a quarter. Yeah,
34:52
Speaker 1: it was typing, shorthand or speedwriting, which I've talked about
34:55
Speaker 1: in another episode. I guess the shorthand episode, and I
34:59
Speaker 1: think the third one was like does classes. It told
35:02
Speaker 1: you like how to keep a bank account and right
35:05
Speaker 1: checks and stuff, which is funny now, like you can
35:08
Speaker 1: teach you that in a day. And yet we had
35:10
Speaker 1: like a third of a quarter. But I never learned
35:14
Speaker 1: to type properly, even though I took that typing class.
35:17
Speaker 1: I am a almost a no look typus now, but
35:23
Speaker 1: it's just from repetition, it is. I don't type correctly.
35:27
Speaker 1: I think I type with my my pointer in my
35:31
Speaker 1: middle fingers generally only sometimes I use the ring finger
35:34
Speaker 1: a little, never used the pinky I never used. Are
35:37
Speaker 1: you even supposed to use your thumb? I don't remember.
35:39
Speaker 1: I think for space for spacing, I don't use the
35:42
Speaker 1: thumb at all. So I'm a hunter and a pecker
35:44
Speaker 1: who just got really fast and memorized the keyboard. So
35:48
Speaker 1: you still generally hunting peck, but really fast. Well, hunting
35:52
Speaker 1: and pecking looks like you're seeking it, like I've memorized
35:54
Speaker 1: the keyboard. But what I mean to say, is I
35:56
Speaker 1: don't type properly, Like in typing class they would say, like,
36:00
Speaker 1: your pinky hits the p or whatever, and I was
36:03
Speaker 1: just my pinky. My pinky isn't that you know. My
36:07
Speaker 1: pinky is a bad finky. It doesn't do what I
36:09
Speaker 1: sell it to all the time. My pinky is my
36:11
Speaker 1: worst guitar finger. So it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I
36:15
Speaker 1: just I don't have a lot of dexterity with my pinky.
36:19
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's a lame duck personal issue.
36:22
Speaker 1: I never really thought. I'd never trained my pinky to
36:24
Speaker 1: do much. I've never really given that much thought to
36:27
Speaker 1: how I type either. But I started out as a
36:29
Speaker 1: hunter pecker and then now I'm a full typist. But
36:32
Speaker 1: I'm totally self taught, never never had a lesson. But
36:35
Speaker 1: do you type properly according to like the classroom instruction?
36:38
Speaker 1: I don't know. I see here we go, I think
36:41
Speaker 1: I start. I think, do you think a kind of
36:44
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't know where I start. I've got
36:46
Speaker 1: to pay attention to this. I've never stopped and thought
36:49
Speaker 1: about where I put it. But I think I generally
36:51
Speaker 1: start in the home on the home, Yeah, in the
36:54
Speaker 1: home position. I think I do. That feels natural, okay,
36:58
Speaker 1: so um, but yeah, it is kind of neat to
37:00
Speaker 1: be able to boast to be like a self taught
37:03
Speaker 1: type is because people out there did learning in class.
37:05
Speaker 1: I was talking to you me about it, and she's like,
37:07
Speaker 1: are you guys going to talk about the computer games
37:09
Speaker 1: that taught you typing? Not play those? So um. There's
37:14
Speaker 1: one I looked up that was really popular called type Master,
37:17
Speaker 1: where you would you were a UFO and there was
37:19
Speaker 1: like space invaders coming at you and each one had
37:22
Speaker 1: a word associated with it, so you type the word
37:24
Speaker 1: really fast before the alien got to stressful. Yeah, it
37:29
Speaker 1: would make typing stressful. Where's the laser? Right? Right? So
37:35
Speaker 1: they started typing, I think all the way back in
37:37
Speaker 1: the eighteen seventies they started teaching people typing. I think
37:40
Speaker 1: the y w C A of New York was one
37:43
Speaker 1: of the first groups to teach typing, and it just
37:46
Speaker 1: kept going on from there. Because this is not Typewriters
37:49
Speaker 1: were not an intuitive machine, like they didn't really they
37:53
Speaker 1: weren't laid out of alphabetically. We don't just normally use
37:56
Speaker 1: our fingers for such endeavors, Like it's something you had
38:00
Speaker 1: to learn. But they were able to teach enough people
38:03
Speaker 1: and get across the importance of it to enough people
38:05
Speaker 1: that typewriters like weren't just a passing fad like a
38:08
Speaker 1: lot of people initially thought they were. That's right, very
38:11
Speaker 1: cool and it, as we'll see after the break, it
38:13
Speaker 1: changed the workforce. Um. But before we break real quick,
38:17
Speaker 1: we do want to point out there are a lot
38:18
Speaker 1: of other keyboards in the world, their language specific keyboards.
38:23
Speaker 1: French keyboards say as ort and that home top row.
38:27
Speaker 1: I think Germans say set of querity quarts with a
38:30
Speaker 1: Z and they're brail keyboards. There are uh, there are
38:36
Speaker 1: cool Japanese typewriters. Man, those are complicated. Yeah, no kidding.
38:41
Speaker 1: Have you ever typed on one? No? I I can't.
38:45
Speaker 1: I can't figure it out. Like I I read descriptions
38:47
Speaker 1: on how to use them. I'm like, I don't understand
38:49
Speaker 1: this at all because they're in kanji, the Japanese characters,
38:52
Speaker 1: So there's thousands of characters. Yeah, pretty amazing. Have you
38:56
Speaker 1: ever used one? Oh? No, no, no, okay, yeah, they
38:59
Speaker 1: look pretty neat. Uh shall we take that break? Yeah,
39:02
Speaker 1: let's all right, We'll take that break and we'll talk
39:04
Speaker 1: about how typing changed everything right after this. Okay, so um,
39:31
Speaker 1: the Remington number two that I think you mentioned was
39:35
Speaker 1: Mark Twain's second typewriter. Um that was the first one
39:38
Speaker 1: to like really blow up. It came out and it
39:42
Speaker 1: was like the typewriter for a very long time, for
39:45
Speaker 1: at least a decade um. But one of the things
39:48
Speaker 1: about the Remington Number two and all the other typewriters
39:51
Speaker 1: at the time was you couldn't see what you were
39:54
Speaker 1: typing while you were typing because the type bars were
39:58
Speaker 1: striking the paper from underneath, so you couldn't watch yourself
40:03
Speaker 1: type at all. You just had to hope for the best.
40:06
Speaker 1: That's right. They were called up strike or understrike or
40:09
Speaker 1: blind typewriters, And you had to lift that carriage up
40:13
Speaker 1: that was on a hinge to see what you had done,
40:15
Speaker 1: to see if you had made a mistake or not,
40:17
Speaker 1: or whether or not that's what you wanted to say.
40:19
Speaker 1: And along comes the Underwood. I wanted to Underwood. I
40:23
Speaker 1: got a Royal, that's fine, my mom did a great job,
40:25
Speaker 1: but I kind of wanted to Underwood because that's the
40:26
Speaker 1: classic old mechanical typewriter in my mother. That was the
40:30
Speaker 1: first front stroke visible typewriter to hit the market. Invented
40:35
Speaker 1: by France Xavier uh Wagner or Wagner, I'm not sure.
40:40
Speaker 1: And John T. Underwood, you're psychic? Is it called the Underwood?
40:43
Speaker 1: He was Office Supply magnate and he bought that patent.
40:46
Speaker 1: He said, I'm gonna call it the Underwood as if
40:48
Speaker 1: I invented it. And it was that was That was
40:52
Speaker 1: kind of it. That was a big change, game changer,
40:54
Speaker 1: and everything moving forward was front facing. Yeah, it's set
40:58
Speaker 1: the design stand until the IBM Selectric came out in
41:02
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty one. Basically, you know, seventy the sixty five
41:07
Speaker 1: years later, I guess um. And the Underwood was different
41:10
Speaker 1: because you could see what you were typing. The type
41:13
Speaker 1: bar struck the platin in front of you rather than
41:16
Speaker 1: from underneath. There was one shift key keyboard was in
41:19
Speaker 1: four rows. The numbers and the symbols were at the
41:22
Speaker 1: very top row. Basically everything you kind of think about
41:25
Speaker 1: as a keyboard today was that Underwood that came out
41:29
Speaker 1: way back in eight Yeah, we talked about the workforce changing,
41:35
Speaker 1: and this is one of those things where we'll just
41:38
Speaker 1: tell it how it happened. It was a time when
41:42
Speaker 1: women did not work in the office world. They weren't
41:46
Speaker 1: part of that workforce. And from the very beginning the typewriter.
41:51
Speaker 1: There was a book in the eight called Manual of
41:54
Speaker 1: the Typewriter where it's writer, author John Harrison, talks about
41:59
Speaker 1: it being especially really like fit for feminine fingers. It's
42:02
Speaker 1: like they seem to be made for women. Uh, you know,
42:05
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of hard labor involved, and a
42:08
Speaker 1: lot of women play piano and that's a similar skill
42:10
Speaker 1: as that. And in eighteen seventy, Uh, this is a
42:15
Speaker 1: stat that's really revealing. Two point five of the clerical
42:18
Speaker 1: workforce were women in eighteen seventy and in nineteen thirty,
42:22
Speaker 1: thanks to the typewriter, that rose to fifty two point
42:25
Speaker 1: five per cent man and plus also the clerical workforce
42:29
Speaker 1: itself grew because of the typewriter, because before that you
42:33
Speaker 1: had like Bartleby the scrivener types where they were copying
42:36
Speaker 1: by hand, like legal documents and stuff like that. There
42:39
Speaker 1: just wasn't as much paperwork because it was so so
42:42
Speaker 1: much more time consuming and difficult. But Shoals the typewriter
42:46
Speaker 1: hero of the century UM or millennia, really, if you
42:50
Speaker 1: think about it, um He was very proud of his, um,
42:54
Speaker 1: his uh invention because he saw that it allowed it
42:57
Speaker 1: was an entrance for women into the world place. They
43:00
Speaker 1: came out of the home. And it's it's not it's
43:03
Speaker 1: incorrect to say that the typewriter is what got women
43:05
Speaker 1: in the workplace. Actually was a civil war in the
43:07
Speaker 1: federal government hiring women for clerical positions. But it gave
43:11
Speaker 1: women a completely different type of um life and salary
43:16
Speaker 1: and um much more I don't want to say equal footing,
43:19
Speaker 1: but it got a foot in the door into the
43:21
Speaker 1: office world, um thanks to the typewriter because people I
43:24
Speaker 1: saw it described as secretarial work was associated with typewriters,
43:28
Speaker 1: and women were associated with secretaries. And it just took
43:30
Speaker 1: off from there, right and again we're not saying that,
43:33
Speaker 1: you know, and before you know it, they were CEO
43:36
Speaker 1: s like there is still uh so much work to
43:39
Speaker 1: be done on that front, but just getting inside the
43:43
Speaker 1: room is a big, big deal, and that got more
43:45
Speaker 1: and more women inside the room. Uh. They were kept
43:49
Speaker 1: apart for a little while late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
43:52
Speaker 1: They didn't think men and women could like work in
43:55
Speaker 1: the same rooms as one another. Uh, So they had
43:57
Speaker 1: what was called typing pools, which was lit really where
44:00
Speaker 1: all these women type, these these huge rooms with like
44:03
Speaker 1: you know, a hundred typewriters that you've seen in movies
44:06
Speaker 1: and these women just typing away. That was the typing
44:08
Speaker 1: pool and then they would integrate the offices in that
44:11
Speaker 1: way before too long, right, And also the whole idea
44:14
Speaker 1: of like, well, women's places in the home, why are
44:17
Speaker 1: we trying to get them into the workplace? This is wrong?
44:20
Speaker 1: Like that's the process of modernization unfolding, like like we
44:24
Speaker 1: talked about in the Fundamental Fundamentalism episode, Like that is
44:27
Speaker 1: a perfect example of modernization happening. Um again though it's
44:33
Speaker 1: it's like you said it was. It was something, but
44:35
Speaker 1: it definitely wasn't everything, and it wasn't like throwing a
44:37
Speaker 1: switch because you had to be UM single, typically young
44:42
Speaker 1: and UM well educated to be a typist in the
44:46
Speaker 1: business world, especially early on UM and when you were
44:51
Speaker 1: married then your role was definitely back in the home.
44:54
Speaker 1: So you would get married. Oftentimes you would meet some
44:57
Speaker 1: somebody at work and marry them and they'd be like, Okay, congratulations,
45:02
Speaker 1: you're fired, and that was that, you know, and then
45:04
Speaker 1: you went off to become a homemaker. So yeah, there's
45:06
Speaker 1: still a lot of work to do, but there was
45:08
Speaker 1: a lot of work that had been done from you know,
45:11
Speaker 1: the twenties and the thirties up to today. That's right. Uh,
45:15
Speaker 1: we need to skip forward in time a little bit
45:18
Speaker 1: because we've been talking about manual typewriters this whole time.
45:21
Speaker 1: And you know, we said the word game changer a lot,
45:24
Speaker 1: the real game changer because they were you know, electric
45:27
Speaker 1: typewriters starting in like the nineteen twenties where things were motorized,
45:33
Speaker 1: but it wasn't until the nineteen sixties with the introduction
45:37
Speaker 1: you mentioned it earlier of that IBM S electric typewriter
45:42
Speaker 1: and the type ball that was what really changed everything.
45:46
Speaker 1: If you look at an old electric typewriter, I mean,
45:50
Speaker 1: this is what we learned on in high school. Like
45:52
Speaker 1: that was the sort of the go to before the
45:54
Speaker 1: word processor. And Dave described it and it's pretty appropriate.
45:57
Speaker 1: It's about the size of a golf ball, but some
46:00
Speaker 1: boss with all the letters all the way around it.
46:02
Speaker 1: And there is this you need to check out this
46:04
Speaker 1: video on YouTube of how the selectric actually works. It's
46:09
Speaker 1: an amazing marvel of engineering. There are actual cables that
46:13
Speaker 1: spin super super fast, I think seven tenths of a
46:16
Speaker 1: second to get the right uh character into place to
46:21
Speaker 1: meet with that ribbon, or I guess it wouldn't even
46:23
Speaker 1: a ribbon at that point, was it. I think the
46:27
Speaker 1: ribbon does come up still, but it's the ball um,
46:30
Speaker 1: the spin and the tilt. It's just got really impressive
46:34
Speaker 1: y'all control. Yeah, and you didn't have to wind the
46:37
Speaker 1: ribbon anymore. I think that was the deal. Was just
46:39
Speaker 1: all uh electrifide and all that video you're referenced UM.
46:44
Speaker 1: You can look up engineer guy on YouTube and IBM
46:48
Speaker 1: S electric and he does a really great job of
46:50
Speaker 1: explaining it UM and how it uses UH some a
46:54
Speaker 1: series of levers called a whiffle tree, but basically your
46:57
Speaker 1: your mechanical input from your your finger triggered a series
47:02
Speaker 1: of motors that would make this thing happen again in
47:04
Speaker 1: like seven tenths of a second. It's it was really impressive.
47:07
Speaker 1: It's still impressive to see UM. And that changed everything
47:11
Speaker 1: because before, when you were typing on a manual type
47:13
Speaker 1: or you had to press really hard, and if that's
47:16
Speaker 1: all you're doing for eight hours a day, your hands
47:19
Speaker 1: started to hurt. Probably by midday Tuesday, I'm guessing, UM,
47:23
Speaker 1: this was totally different. You just kind of barely pressed
47:25
Speaker 1: the button and all of a sudden the thing would
47:26
Speaker 1: just respond fully to your to that to that button press,
47:31
Speaker 1: so that really helped. It also made everybody a lot faster.
47:34
Speaker 1: And there was some other like cool components that were
47:36
Speaker 1: added later, Like I think this electric was the first
47:39
Speaker 1: one to use basically UM disk drives. I think onboard
47:44
Speaker 1: disc drives to store you know, a whopping, you know,
47:47
Speaker 1: thirty words at a time or something like that. UM.
47:51
Speaker 1: But that was huge because it means it meant you
47:53
Speaker 1: could type a letter once and then you could recall
47:56
Speaker 1: the letter and print it again. You could edit it,
47:59
Speaker 1: you could you all sorts of neat things. So that
48:01
Speaker 1: made this electric also the first word processor, right, and
48:04
Speaker 1: these are electric, there's a difference. There are also electronic
48:07
Speaker 1: typewriters that came along and that was sort of the
48:11
Speaker 1: next evolution in the game. And they used circuit boards,
48:14
Speaker 1: silicone chips and everything to control those motors and memories. Uh.
48:19
Speaker 1: Because the electric was UM while powered by electricity, was
48:22
Speaker 1: still a very sort of mechanical machine in the in
48:25
Speaker 1: the insides, in the guts, UH, and the electronic typewriters
48:29
Speaker 1: came around in nineteen eight, and I guess that's what
48:33
Speaker 1: I was using in high school actually, but they were
48:35
Speaker 1: still electronic. Yeah, yeah, but they were still IBM s.
48:39
Speaker 1: I don't know. I could see public schools still having
48:42
Speaker 1: the old typewriters by the time you were in school.
48:45
Speaker 1: I don't think so. From the sixties, well maybe, yeah,
48:48
Speaker 1: because I mean the electronic typewriters arrived in seventy eight.
48:51
Speaker 1: You know that IBM was still making electrics then, yeah,
48:54
Speaker 1: that's true, So it's possible you were using this selectric
48:57
Speaker 1: I mean, was there like a little l c D
48:59
Speaker 1: screen on your on your typewriter? Well, then, my friend,
49:03
Speaker 1: that was an IBM Selectric brand. Oh did all the
49:07
Speaker 1: electronics have those? I think most of them did. I
49:09
Speaker 1: think it was a pretty quickly introduced thing that you
49:12
Speaker 1: had the little l c D print out so you
49:14
Speaker 1: could see what you had just typed before the typewriter
49:18
Speaker 1: actually typed it up onto the paper, So I think
49:21
Speaker 1: you could edit it and rearrange it and do all
49:22
Speaker 1: sorts of stuff, which is the definition of word processing. Yeah,
49:26
Speaker 1: that's what mean, that's what I ended up getting in college,
49:30
Speaker 1: and I think mine might have been a brother. But
49:32
Speaker 1: they looked you know, day makes a good point. They
49:33
Speaker 1: look better than printing something out from your computer at
49:37
Speaker 1: the time because not matrix printers uh stunk. And this
49:42
Speaker 1: looked way better. This looked like you typed it out
49:44
Speaker 1: by hand. Uh, well, because you did. Um. I think
49:49
Speaker 1: the Xerox Memory Writer six thirty was a big game changer,
49:54
Speaker 1: and it had twenty lines of display, which was a
49:58
Speaker 1: lot um but it also ca in today's dollars more
50:01
Speaker 1: than ten grand. Yeah, it was like a major piece
50:05
Speaker 1: of office equipment in there's I didn't have any money
50:09
Speaker 1: back then. I bought something used and it was not this.
50:13
Speaker 1: There's no way. I mean, they just got a lot
50:16
Speaker 1: cheaper obviously over that six years. I remember having one
50:19
Speaker 1: at home and it must have been eighty nine something
50:23
Speaker 1: like that. So yeah, I think it came down in
50:25
Speaker 1: price really quickly because my parents weren't shelling out ten
50:29
Speaker 1: grand for a word process right, no way. So um,
50:33
Speaker 1: Dave dug up. This New York Times article from was
50:36
Speaker 1: really prescient. It was cool. It was really wonky article
50:40
Speaker 1: about the state of the typewriter and word processor market.
50:44
Speaker 1: But there's parts of it where they were saying, like,
50:46
Speaker 1: analysts say that by the end of the eighties you
50:48
Speaker 1: won't be able to distinguish a typewriter from a word
50:51
Speaker 1: processor from a personal computer, which are these new fangled
50:54
Speaker 1: things coming online, and that the secretaries of the future
50:57
Speaker 1: will sit down at one machine that will be able
51:00
Speaker 1: to do all these functions, and what they're doing will
51:03
Speaker 1: just depend on what software they choose to be working on.
51:06
Speaker 1: And in ninety four they're like, hey, here's the PC
51:09
Speaker 1: of the future. They nailed it. I love it. They
51:11
Speaker 1: actually put in quotes, a secretary of the future will
51:13
Speaker 1: sit at the keyboard of a piece of quote hardware,
51:17
Speaker 1: with this function to be determined by the choice of software.
51:20
Speaker 1: Analyst's say, yeah, that's pretty nat. They had it for sure.
51:25
Speaker 1: You got anything else about the typewriter? I got nothing else.
51:29
Speaker 1: I got nothing else about this typewriter either, which means everybody,
51:32
Speaker 1: if you want to know about typewriters, go look them
51:34
Speaker 1: up and you can buy them for a lot of
51:36
Speaker 1: money depending on the type. Ye get it. Uh, that
51:41
Speaker 1: was an unintentional pun, as always. Uh. And since I
51:44
Speaker 1: said unintentional punt, that means it's time for a listener mail.
51:50
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call this We're gonna come up with this
51:52
Speaker 1: guy's personalized plate. Hey, guys, love the recent episode on
51:56
Speaker 1: license plates. At the beginning of the up, one of
51:58
Speaker 1: you mentioned that you thought the topic was kind of boring,
52:00
Speaker 1: but I really loved it. Also love license plates. I'm
52:03
Speaker 1: particularly fond of personalized license plates, and recently try to
52:06
Speaker 1: get one for myself for the first time. Despite the
52:09
Speaker 1: talk of First Amendment rights, there are some rules in
52:11
Speaker 1: my state about what you can and can't have. For instance,
52:14
Speaker 1: nothing vulgar, of course, which we talked about. The plate
52:18
Speaker 1: I applied for spelled out farting f A R T N.
52:22
Speaker 1: I know it's childish, but I think that it's funny
52:25
Speaker 1: and the right amount of vulgar. Let's got that right. However,
52:29
Speaker 1: the state of Utah disagreed No surprise there uh and
52:33
Speaker 1: thought it was too vulgar because I was denied. Now
52:35
Speaker 1: that my first choice has been denied, I need some ideas,
52:40
Speaker 1: so help me out. This is Matt, So I thought
52:43
Speaker 1: on the fly, maybe we could think of something that's
52:45
Speaker 1: just the right amount of vulgar. What about tuting is
52:49
Speaker 1: pretty good? Or um? I mean? Is it? Is it
52:55
Speaker 1: all gas centered? Well? I mean that kind of thing.
53:00
Speaker 1: All right, let's go a different direction. So Tuton is
53:02
Speaker 1: our our our replacement for farting. How about that? Okay,
53:05
Speaker 1: tutings a replacement for farting. What about cruise in c
53:09
Speaker 1: R U z N that'd be pretty boss. Yeah, not
53:13
Speaker 1: vulgar about I don't know if I could say this
53:19
Speaker 1: on our family friendly show. How about b A L
53:23
Speaker 1: z O U t R. Yeah, sure, that might be
53:28
Speaker 1: the right amount of vulgar. That's also that's not a
53:32
Speaker 1: good look these days either. I don't know. Guys have
53:36
Speaker 1: testicles hanging from their truck? Did they still do that? Oh? Sure,
53:40
Speaker 1: drive out in the country in Georgia and testicles all
53:42
Speaker 1: over the place. Um, what about to the medal? But
53:49
Speaker 1: m d L we just need to figure out how
53:51
Speaker 1: to shorten the as as in he has the pedal
53:55
Speaker 1: to the metal. Oh well, you could do the number
53:57
Speaker 1: two or m t L not m d L number
54:00
Speaker 1: two h m t L to the medal. That's the
54:04
Speaker 1: most amazing way. Well, no, and that's what I was saying.
54:07
Speaker 1: We we've got too short and we need to shorten
54:09
Speaker 1: D to the medal, like with the how do you
54:12
Speaker 1: shorten th h G? Well in speedwriting. You would make
54:15
Speaker 1: a downstroke like an L and then a line to
54:19
Speaker 1: the right. Can you get that on a license plate?
54:21
Speaker 1: I don't think so. How about two DUH D A
54:26
Speaker 1: M T L. I think we've landed on it. That's
54:29
Speaker 1: pretty good. Oh and also, real quick, I lost the email.
54:32
Speaker 1: I don't know how we missed this, but somebody sent
54:34
Speaker 1: in an email saying, just go check out the license
54:37
Speaker 1: plate for the Northern Territories, Canada. It is a metal
54:42
Speaker 1: plate that is bare shaped. Yeah, it's really neat looking.
54:46
Speaker 1: I want to get one for the camp wall. I'm
54:48
Speaker 1: trying to buy one on eBay as we speak, not
54:50
Speaker 1: right in the second, but I've been I've been looking around.
54:53
Speaker 1: Who was that letter from. I don't know. Well, this
54:56
Speaker 1: was Matt, but I don't know who's sent in the
54:58
Speaker 1: the Northern Territories. But Matt's the guy that we just
55:02
Speaker 1: helped out. Yeah, he's to the metal. Okay, hopefully we
55:05
Speaker 1: did help somewhere in there. Matt. And by the way,
55:08
Speaker 1: every time I hear utah now, I can't help but
55:10
Speaker 1: think of um NBC Peacocks, a friend of the family,
55:14
Speaker 1: weird o mini series that my niece Mila is on fantastic. UH.
55:20
Speaker 1: If you want to get in touch with us like
55:22
Speaker 1: Matt did and asked us to help you out, We'll
55:24
Speaker 1: do what we can. UH. You can send us an
55:26
Speaker 1: email to stuff podcast at i heeart radio dot com.
55:32
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.
55:35
Speaker 1: For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
55:39
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.