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A Blog's Life: This American Keyboard
April 3, 2007
Maybe it's because I know that I'll face a blank page each morning that I spend a lot of time contemplating my keyboard (sound familiar, fellow writers?). What's it doing there? Why is it laid out like that? WHY DOES IT KEEP STARING AT ME? Oh, whoops, sorry... will try to keep those personal demons under wraps...
Joan Acocella's article in the latest issue of The New Yorker about
The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of the Typewriter by Darren Wershler-Henry (Cornell) answers at least the first two of those questions. The QWERTY keyboard that you and I and countless others face each day at work, school, and home was the brainchild of Christopher Latham Sholes, who was searching for a way to prevent frequently used typewriter keys from sticking together. As Acocella writes:
A problem with early typewriters was that the key arms kept getting stuck together. As the arm of the letter that had just been typed was falling back into place, it would jam against the arm rising to type the next letter, and the typist would have to stop and pry them apart. Reportedly, Sholes’s partner delegated his son-in-law, the superintendent of schools for western Pennsylvania, to draw up a list of the most common two-letter sequences in the English language. Sholes then designed the keyboard so that these pairs were separated, thus introducing a tiny delay between the activation of one letter and the next. Wershler-Henry quotes an early history of the typewriter, Bruce Bliven’s “The Wonderful Writing Machine,” to the effect that the QWERTY keyboard was in fact “considerably less efficient than if the arrangement had been left to chance.” Nevertheless, people got used to it, and it was never replaced.
The last line says it all: we get used to things and never replace them. (Acocella, of course, addresses not just the blank page but also the effect of personal computers and their very different keyboard feel on modern writing; but here I am simply concerned with the keyboard.) In getting used to the QWERTY setup, how have we affected composition? How does the connection between brain and fingers become changed once the fingers have been trained and tamed to reach for Qs with pinky fingers and spaces between words with thumbs? (Acocella does wonder briefly how the keyboard on his typewriter might have caused Henry James to write ponderous sentences, but no one knows for sure.)
What do you think? How does typing affect your writing? (Of course, that assumes that you have some experience writing in longhand, which probably also assumes that you are over the age of 30.)
Posted by Bethanne Patrick on April 3, 2007 | Comments (2)
