“The day’s discovery felt like a miracle. Had I not driven to Figueres, had I not spotted the sign, had I not decided to check out the third floor, had the owners of the museum not chosen to open it that day (not a regular opening day!), this book might never have existed.”

“But no one, including me, noticed what was probably the most incredible aspect of the whole discovery. On that day in October 2016, I pressed the Q key of the first real keyboard almost 150 years after its conception. And then, that same evening, I wrote about the whole encounter on the newest keyboard made: the one that came with my iPhone.” … “The two keyboards couldn’t be any more different. One was realized in an old language of metal and wood: loose, big, awkward, problematic in many ways. The other was infinitely more ephemeral, but also much smarter, made out of software and pixels, showing up only on demand, constantly changing to accommodate me, and then disappearing in an instant. The first required an entire desk; the other could be hidden in my pocket. The Sholes & Glidden printed text on a roll of paper, but what I wrote on my iPhone keyboard could be sent to the entire world within minutes – and the world could (and did) respond via their keyboards, with similar alacrity.”

“Sholes worked in a relative vacuum of technology. There were no tall buildings, and the few business offices that existed were coarse. Weller described them as having “rough, bare floors, box wood stoves, sawdust cuspidors and Windsor chairs and smoke-blackened walls.” The most complex object in most people’s homes was a manual sewing machine. The main source of entertainment at home was typically a piano; home radios were still half a century away, with television to follow twenty-five years after them. The telegraph allowed the flow of Morse code across continents, having crossed the Atlantic a few years earlier. But the first successful test of a telephone was nine years away, the Edison lightbulb another twelve, and electrification of cities and factories decades ahead.”

“The most complex part of designing it was the issue of sturdiness and precision. The device had to be reliable enough to withstand hours and hours of pounding, but it also had to be light, precise, and fast. All of its operations were initiated by the touch of a fingertip — uneven, imprecise, and often unpredictable — but its parts could never fall even a bit out of alignment. Reliability in those times was usually achieved by making things big and heavy, but that approach would make speed and precision impossible. The writing machine was a technical contradiction, demanding processes and technology that simply did not yet exist.”

“Some of those had their keys color-coded per finger. In the 1930s, popular typewriter maker Smith-Corona took that idea even further. They painted their typewriter keyboards not just with colors but also with pictures of animals, and distributed nine rings to be worn on fingers that matched them. “A birdie is flying on your pinkie and a rabbit is nibbling your middle finger,” if you were curious, all in the service of helping “little fingers guide eager young minds.”

“Stapenell’s Adjusting job came after Aligning, Carriage Assembly, and Plating, and was the last step before a typewriter could be packed and sent on its way to the customer. Stapenell needed to inspect all the mechanical devices of the typewriter. They were tested once before, by previous departments, but all in isolation. Stapenell’s job was to make sure two-thousand-plus parts worked perfectly well together.”

“Stapenell, like thousands of other Final Adjusters working at this or similar factories in the area, was the last bulwark to ensure the pinnacle of mechanical perfection of typewriting. For every typewriter assigned to him, he would embark on a twenty-stop tour of precise manufacturing and human ingenuity. As we will see, every fine detail counted, because a typewriter wasn’t only typebars expertly striking a ribbon onto paper. It was so much more than that, and so much more that every typist took for granted.”

Stapenell said once: “People don’t understand about typewriters. I often explain about my job; how sometimes one machine goes through like a shot, and other times I fiddle around all afternoon before I’m finished. Some people jump to the conclusion that the difficult machine is a lemon. Not true. You have to understand that typewriters are like watches. They need regulating.”

Scientific keyboard layout unveiled in 1893 at World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago by Blickensderfer

“Paul David argued that the continued omnipresence of QWERTY is a perfect example of path dependence – decisions continuing on prior historical paths rather than an objective, dispassionate look at what’s out there – leading to lock-in. We standardized on the wrong system too early; Blickensderfer’s layout should’ve won over QWERTY, and Dvorak should’ve conquered DHIATENSOR.

“Ask someone in another country for their equivalent of “hunt and peck,” and expect a delightful answer. The Dutch call it “poking.” In Portuguese, it’s “key-per-key typing.” Germans have the most complicated word, of course: Adlersuchsystem, which translates as “an eagle search system,” imagining an eagle circling above the keys, striking from up high once in a while. In Hebrew it’s not uncommon to refer to casual typing as “doctor’s typing,” and in Slovak as “the police method,” singling out the professions apparently unable to learn touch typing. In Colombia, touch typing comes with a beautiful term, mecanografia, which for simple typing mutates into the colloquial chuzografia: “poke-o-graphy.” Some languages recognize even non-touch-typing technique as something to admire. Brazil’s catar milho can be translated as “collecting corn.” The Swedish call it pekfingervalsen – or, the index finger waltz. And then there’s the Japanese 雨だれタイピング、which means “raindrop typing.”

First commercial electric typewriter invented by James Fields Smathers and released in partnership with Remington in 1925, which was short-lived and then IBM partnership in the 1930s

Electric typewriters slow to be adopted: Edison’s AC power scaremongering, high prices, added complexity

Beginning of 1950s, electrics only 10% of American market; 50% by 1965