QWERTY or not QWERTY?

The first typewriter that was ever officially “mine” was a rather beautifully designed and styled one, a genuine “thing of beauty” which used to belong to a friend of my father, an elderly blind lady called Miss Frieda (or possibly Freda) LePlait (or possibly Le Plat) who used to run “The Kindness Club”. This was a club for children who liked animals and from which we used to get regular newsletters when I was very young, although the club itself was probably so small and obscure that it now seems to have been erased from history.

I presume that at some point she got herself a new typewriter and was throwing this old Remington away, but, for whatever reason, at about the age of eight I acquired a second hand typewriter to type my bits and pieces on, and, maybe, surreptitiously be taught to write and learn to spell rather better at the same time, although judging by Word’s insistence on putting red zig-zags under my words, perhaps that didn’t work out too well after all.

I’ve always liked typewriters and still have a fondness for their old-fashioned lo-tech (and battery-free) mechanical action even in this modern age, even though it’s probably years since I actually sat down and used one. I think that there’s something rather comforting about that systematic “clack-clacking” as the keys hit the paper. Perhaps it’s because it takes me back to hearing my father writing his sermons when I was very young, or maybe it’s because I really am some kind of retrograde when it comes to embracing new technology, but, whatever it is, they remain rather fascinating machines to me.

I still have three of them. Miss LePlait’s Remington, my father’s last Silver-Reed, and another which predates them both and belonged to my grandfather but which I was unable to extricate from the loft recently as it had got itself seemingly inextricably lodged behind something, but this one has always remained a favourite, even though I seem to have “vandalised” it by etching my name onto it at some point.

That’ll have been my dad, again, letting me loose with one of those pens with a metal nib that would let you mark things by scratching into the surface in one of those strange theories of theft prevention that we all sometimes go through.

If you look at the picture carefully, you’ll notice something “odd” about the keyboard because it’s not a standard QWERTY but some other, more arbitrary layout. I was once told that this was because it was meant for use by blind people and so all of the more “useful” keys (in the best Holmesian “Adventure of the Dancing Men” tradition) were put on the bottom row for easier access. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but it might explain why I got it rather than the office typing pool, as it might have been pretty much useless to anyone who was a trained touch typist.

It’s interesting to me that, despite having used a QWERTY keyboard pretty much every day for over two decades I still struggle to think where each key is. I mean, obviously I know where they are, otherwise these pieces would be a heck of a lot shorter, but, if I have to think about it, well, I can obviously give you QWERTY and I’m pretty sure I could point out the OPASNM, but the rest just remain a little vague, even though I don’t have to think about it all that much when I’m rattling out these single-digit monstrosities for you to read.

Still, it’s interesting how QWERTY has become the “standard” international keyboard layout of choice (well, for English and most of the European languages anyway…) when there were so many others about. Apparently we have to thank Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin for the QWERTY layout which was designed, despite myths to the contrary, to speed up typing by preventing jams as the letter bars of the early typewriters used to get tangled up with each other.

There are others, of course; the Dvorak, the Colemak and the Neo to name but three, but it is the QWERTY that seems most likely to prevail and, as for Miss LePlait’s much loved keyboard, well it still seems to be rather unique and might be part of the reason that I never learned to type properly…