History worth knowing
The Gunmaker and the Typing Pool
17 min
How a Civil War arms dealer and a Wisconsin politician turned a mechanical glitch into a global standard.
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Show notes
The QWERTY layout was engineered to prevent mechanical jams by separating common letter pairs like S and T.
Early typewriters were manufactured by a gunmaker using sewing machine foot treadles for carriage returns.
Salesmen used the top row of keys to quickly spell the word typewriter during product demonstrations.
Telegraph operators influenced the keyboard design to resolve ambiguities in Morse code signals.
The shift key was introduced in eighteen seventy-eight to allow for compact, multi-layered interfaces.
High training costs and muscle memory turned QWERTY into an unbreakable industrial standard by eighteen ninety-three.
In this episode
- 1Intro1 min
- 2The Milwaukee Workshop3 min
- 3From Rifles to Ribbons4 min
- 4The QWERTY Evolution3 min
- 5The Feminization of the Office3 min
- 6The Ghost in the Smartphone3 min
- 7Outro1 min
Sources
- The Woman and the Typewriter: A Case Study in Technological Innovation and Social Change
- The QWERTY Keyboard Will Never Die. Where Did the 150-Year-Old Design Come From?
- Sholes and Glidden typewriter
- Christopher Sholes | Lemelson
- Wisconsin 101
- Christopher Latham Sholes
- The Origins of ‘QWERTY’: Milwaukee’s Most Visible Contribution to the World
- E. Remington & Sons
- Inventing The Typewriter – The Retrospectors
- How QWERTY conquered the keyboard, and why the myths won't die · Newsparlor
- Production on the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer Began - This Month in Business History - Research Guides at Library of Congress
- Sholes & Glidden ‘Type Writer’
- First Practical Typewriter | Wisconsin Historical Society
- Invention of the Typewriter | Wisconsin Historical Society
- Sholes & Gildden Type Writer
- On the Prehistory of QWERTY
- US 207559 — How the QWERTY Keyboard Layout Was Originally Designed | PatentBrief
- On the Prehistory of QWERTY
- Carbons to Computers: Typewriters
- Inventors
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