THOUGH I MEET up with the alphabet every day, it doesn’t come in alphabetical order. It is presented to me as QWERTYUIOP. Prior to the invention of the qwerty keyboard on the early typewriters, the word ‘alphabet’ meant two things at the same time: the letters that we use and alphabetical order or ‘the ABC’. Both physically and mentally, the alphabet was stored alphabetically. The peoples who used the alphabet didn’t really have another way of conceptualizing it.
Now, though, I sit down and select letters from a store that is arranged completely differently. One peculiarity of this is that I can recite the alphabet in a few seconds, I can touch-type, but I can’t recite qwerty. So I know these two methods of storing the letters in different ways. If you arranged a dictionary or register of people at a conference in qwerty order, most of us would be lost. Yet I can’t help feeling that qwerty, in its own way, subverts the orthodoxy of the alphabet. Day after day, for millions of people worldwide, it demands that we go to it and to its own special way of ordering literacy. The ABC alphabet has bitten back, though: the keyboards on our phones are in alphabetical order. As a qwerty-trained typist, I find it confusing to collect my pre-paid tickets from a machine on a railway station if the on-screen keyboard, looking exactly like a qwerty one, is arranged in alphabetical order. I can’t find the letters to punch in my code!
Qwerty people have a hidden side: we have had relationships with different machines all through our lives, sometimes loving, sometimes resentful, sometimes dominant, sometimes being dominated. Part of our biography is in the play of our fingers over keys.
The story of the qwerty keyboard is intimately connected to a man called Charles Latham Sholes, who was one of the forces behind the abolition of capital punishment in Wisconsin. In 1851, John McCaffary, an Irish immigrant, had been sentenced to death and before a crowd of some 2,000–3,000 people he was hanged from a tree. McCaffary remained alive for some twenty minutes before eventually dying. This spectacle gave added strength to the campaign to abolish the death penalty, led by Sholes, first as a newspaper man for the Kenosha Telegraph and then as a senator in the Wisconsin Assembly. When the abolition bill was passed on 12 July 1853, John McCaffary became both the first and the last person to be executed in the state of Wisconsin.
It was Sholes and his friends who first created a typing machine that could be exploited commercially and it was Sholes in conjunction with a business associate, James Densmore, who first came up with the qwerty keyboard in 1873. By then, the patent was in the hands of Remington and the world’s first qwerty typewriter – or QWERTY typewriter (it was upper case only) – appeared on 1 July 1874. It was the ‘Remington No. 1’, also known to aficionados as the ‘Sholes and Glidden’ after its designers.
Clearly, ‘qwertyuiop’ on a top row, ‘asdfghjkl’ on a second, and ‘zxcvbnm’ on a third, is a long way from ‘ABCDEFGHIJ’, ‘KLMNOPQRS’ and ‘TUVWXYZ’. This layout came about because the model of typewriter Sholes, Soule and Densmore were playing with, using ‘ABC’, caused the ‘typebars’ (the thin metal arms on the end of which were the letters) to collide and jam. Densmore figured that the problem lay in letter frequency, the number of times a letter was used in English writing. He asked his son-in-law, a school superintendent in Pennsylvania, to tell him which letters and letter combinations appear most frequently. The trick to avoid the clashing was to place the most commonly occurring letters (on the end of their respective typebars) as far apart as possible. The easiest way to make this happen mechanically, was to arrange the keyboard like this:
Remington adjusted this, so that by 1878 it was:
Mistakenly, some people have said the qwerty layout enabled people to type faster. In fact, it was designed to slow typists down, requiring them to use different fingers or different hands for letters which were likely to appear together. What’s odd is that it’s survived. An electronic keyboard won’t jam. There are no ‘typebars’. Given that most people’s quickest fingers are likely to be the index finger of each hand, one way to make typing faster would be to situate high-frequency letters within the orbit of those two fingers and the least frequent in the orbit of the third and fourth fingers.
If you can touch-type, you can expose yourself to a disconcerting experience by trying to touch-type on a keyboard with a slightly different arrangement. In France they use the ‘azerty’ keyboard which is arranged like this:
as opposed to (to remind you):
No one knows exactly why France adopted ‘azerty’ and any efforts to alter it have failed.
As Sholes sold the patent to Remington he made very little money out of his contribution to typewriting and keyboards. He is recorded as saying: ‘Whatever I may have felt in the early days of the value of the typewriter, it is obviously a blessing to mankind, and especially to womankind. I am glad I had something to do with it. I built it wiser than I knew, and the world has the benefit of it.’ Densmore was more canny. He retained a royalty and died with half a million dollars to his name.
As with most technology, the typewriter and the keyboard can be seen as both emancipating and oppressing at the same time. It enabled millions of women to earn money independently, and to see worlds other than their homes. On the other hand, it put those same women into what used to be called ‘the typing pool’, where, all day and every day, they pounded typewriters to ‘write’ what wasn’t their own writing on the machines that weren’t theirs. I can now see the importance of my mother owning her own typewriter. It enabled her, in the 1940s and 50s, to write what she wanted to write and present it with the same quality as the best around.
The first typewriter I saw belonged to my mother. My mother was Mum, to my father she was ‘Con’, to friends she was ‘Connie’, to children and colleagues at her school she was ‘Mrs Rosen’, but in a disconcerting way, every so often she was a ‘typist’ and a ‘secretary’. She became this because of a locked black box stored in our ‘front room’ along with a furry square mat. This was her Remington typewriter, which she could sit at for hours, threateningly ignoring the rest of us, typing away without looking at the keys, at a rate of clacketty-clacks matched only by the speed she clacketty-clacked with her knitting. We could see that there was an inaccessible, unreachable part of Mum working away in there that wasn’t very Mum at all. It belonged to some earlier pre-Mum era when we didn’t even exist.
I liked to sit next to her and watch how her long fingers hammered away, how the metal letters stuck on their thin arms flailed to and fro, how the ribbon jumped up and down, and the ribbon’s wheels jigged round. I liked the way things got stuck every so often and she would hesitate for a moment, poke her finger into the jangled arms, release them and carry on.
And the page of type: how could it be so perfect, its titles underlined, the margins so neat, the lines of type spaced so evenly? She explained how the ‘return’ could be altered, how you could arrange it so that the margins were regular. She showed us how to change the ribbon and – best of all – she let us clean the metal letters with a toothbrush. The tiny metal flanges of the letters would get a build-up of ribbon fibre and ink, and the toothbrush would get them sharp and shiny again. I loved the keys themselves: each letter was printed on to the cream-coloured disc of the key, looking as if it was under glass, surrounded by its own circular ridge of metal. Then the noise would stop. She would put the machine back in its box and slot it back in the alcove.
We weren’t allowed to use it on our own. This was a special and expensive machine. For letters to appear on a page as cleanly and beautifully as this, she couldn’t risk my brother and me just playing about on it. It was too important. This way of producing letters on the page had its own black box. This kind of alphabet was under lock and key. This kind of alphabet was handled by someone extremely clever who had gone to a special college to learn how to do speed clacketty-clacking.
The mystique was dented when my parents found us an old typewriter. It had no case. There were one or two letters that didn’t type. The right-hand margin clip was broken. So? It was a typewriter and my brother and I spent hours on it. First as one-finger typers and then as two-finger typers, then as two-finger-and-a-thumb-for-the-space-bar typers. Because it didn’t have a case, it grew fluff. Fluff got in amongst the thin arms that held the letters and under the keys. Norman and Butt, the estate agents in the shop beneath our flat, threw their old typewriter ribbons into the dustbins in our yard. My brother and I went through the bins and found two-coloured ribbons – half black, half red – and we put these on our typewriter so that we could write in two colours. Our forefingers were learning qwerty. We could make pages of print – of a kind – just like a professional, just like Mum. Or nearly. We knew that it wasn’t as good as hers. But hers had to be better than good.
Once she wrote and typed a story about a girl she taught and sent it off to the BBC. The BBC said they liked it and she was on the Home Service reading it. I asked the head teacher if I could go to the Physics lab to listen to it. He said, ‘No.’ I was disappointed. He said, ‘No, you can listen to it with me in my study and I’ll get someone else to do assembly that morning.’ So I sat with the headmaster, on a chair old enough for Shakespeare to have sat on, he said, and we listened to my mum reading the story that she had typed on her typewriter. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘She was very good.’
My brother broke through a barrier. He got an Olivetti. It was slim and sleek. It didn’t clacketty-clack, it puttered. It was made of a serene dark green metal. The keys were like flat dice: black, square, plastic, with white letters. Everything worked. And when he finished, he could slot it into a case and carry it about with him. It was a ‘portable’. With his Olivetti, my brother threw out the pre-war heaviness of qwerty and brought in something as neat and as hard-edged as Bridget Riley’s art and Mary Quant’s hairdo. If I typed on it, he would tell me not to type so hard. You don’t bang down the keys, like Mum has to, he said.
I spent my twenty-first birthday money on a portable too. I went German. It was an Adler: black and cream. Here the keys were like chunky cream lozenges. It wasn’t metal. It was bendy plastic. It didn’t putter. It clucked. What was I thinking of? I had foregone style for lightness. This was a writing machine I could take anywhere. It wasn’t much thicker than a Dickens novel. I moved up a notch. I was doing two fingers on each hand and two thumbs now. I remember sitting in the dressing room of the Nuffield Theatre, in Southampton, dressed in my costume of Obadiah for a production of Tristram Shandy, with my Adler. I had a deadline for an article to write for the student magazine, Isis. If I could bash it out, while waiting to go on stage for the matinée, get it into an envelope and into the post on the way home after the show, it would meet the deadline and get into the magazine. Cluck cluck cluck. I knew then that I was in charge of qwerty. Qwerty did what I told it to do.
Even better, in the student magazine office was a big Olivetti. Like a real professional one. As big as my mother’s old Remington but as stylish as my brother’s. Over the summer, the news was that the office was closing, and we were moving to a new office that someone had kitted out. There was a rumour that Robert Maxwell was involved. The Olivetti went into the back of a car and found its way home. It sat on the desk I got for my twenty-first birthday, and I sat upstairs in my parents’ house in the holidays back from college, typing the poems that would end up in my first book for children, Mind Your Own Business. I used triple-carbonated paper, three copies in one go. Even my mother was impressed. She had never liked the mess of the old carbon paper you had to slot in by hand between the sheets.
And wasn’t the typeface rather snazzy too? Didn’t my mother’s seem rather quaint? Even as she was sending off her scripts to BBC Schools Radio, didn’t it make her writing seem old too? I was Olivetti qwerty man.
Someone mentioned electric typewriters. What’s the point of that? It doesn’t make you type any faster. Someone mentioned that you didn’t have to go back over a mistake and whack it with an ‘x’. You now pressed a delete button and the letter disappeared. What! You could make a letter disappear? There’s a ribbon, and it lifts the letter off the page. The letters aren’t ink. They’re more like Letraset. They’re like . . . stuck on to the page. So the little ribbon unsticks them. I was up for it. By making qwerty less permanent, it was making qwerty look perfect on the page. Scripts, articles, poems would have no more mistakes. I had to upgrade myself. This four-finger, staring-at-the-keyboard thing had to end. I had to learn how to touch-type.
So I enrolled for a two-week typing course at a typing college in an upstairs room in Camden Town. All day, I sat with young women who had just left school, sixteen-, seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. All day we did the exercises, ‘frf’, ‘juj’, ‘kik’, ‘ded’. Hours and hours forcing my mind, fingers, keys and letters to work along in synch. I loved it. And in the evenings, after school, I came home and forced myself to type what I had to type using what I had learned. Qwerty started to disappear from being something I stared at. Now it was something that my fingers knew. Because I did so much typing in the evening, I found the daytime class easier and easier. I became annoying. At least two people in the class stopped talking to me. I didn’t mean to sound like a qwerty show-off though it must have looked that way. I’m sorry.
The electric typewriter was supposed to be portable. Like a suitcase is portable. And, like a fat black plastic suitcase, it stayed put. The letters it made were strangely thin and weaselly. People said I had to get a golf-ball. Everyone was talking about golf-balls. I was going to get a golf-ball, when someone else said that it was going to be computers. What you’re going to be able to do now, they said, is type something and store it in the machine. Then you can call it up again, change it as many times as you like and only when you’re happy with it do you have to print it. You get this printer where you put in these sheets that are all joined up, press a button and it prints it all out in a great long sheet, which you tear into pages.
No thanks, I said, I’ll stick with the electric. I’m loving erasing my misdemeanours with the delete button. I can even put up with thin, weaselly qwerty. My fingers know everything now. I rule qwerty like the King of Ruritania rules the peasants. Every letter does just as I tell it to. Well, mostly. ‘Z’ and ‘X’ give me bother. That quick change from the little finger to the third finger of the left hand. Don’t ask me to do it quickly. And another thing, I didn’t do a third week, when I would have learned how to touch-type the numbers. I have to look. But apart from all that, I’m Mr Qwick Qwerty Guy now. My electric typewriter sounded like jazz: te tutter, ta ta ta tutter, tutter te ta ta ta. The bebop of qwertyuiop.
I bought an Amstrad. Why were the letters green? Not when they were printed. On the screen. The screen was green, the letters were green. And with whopping great big serifs. No one does serifs like that any more. But now, I had joined the era of letters on a screen. The page was starting to lose its dominance. Where once writing had been that permanent thing I did with something that made marks, now the mark was temporary. Everything was postponable. OK, if there was a deadline, something had to be fixed. Everything else could be changed. And I loved it that you could leave something for a year and then decide to change it. The imperfect screen page had only ever been seen by me. So where qwerty had once been permanent, as with my mother’s typewriting, and where it had been semipermanent, with pages of writing with the electric typewriter, it was now, potentially, forever provisional.
I was loyal to Amstrad. I stayed with it long after people were writing documents and playing that weird-coloured ping-pong game on the Apple, and after PCs came in and you could store thousands of documents and obliterate the universe or battle to the death in Japanese. I got an Apple. It was called a ‘duo-dock’. You had a laptop which you docked into a loading bay which turned it into a desktop. Qwerty was now portable and office in one. One moment, I could type small on a tiny laptop keyboard and the next I could be big and old-style on the PC-like keyboard. It was like slipping from recorder to saxophone. The fingers just knew what to do.
And that’s how it is for me now, promiscuously moving from laptops to PCs, taking my portable qwerty skill with me. Typing with my eyes shut works as a party trick for five-year-olds. Talking about one thing while typing something else is one of the most annoying things you can do with your friends and loved ones. It still seems incredible that my mind and fingers can own a knowledge which enables me to produce pages of perfect script.
There is a drawback. Of course there is. There is always a drawback. If I write on to paper, the scribblings-out stay there. Bad for looking good. Good for staying in sight just in case I want to use something that I didn’t want before. Corrections on the screen disappear. The delete button was invented by employers who wanted their secretaries to produce perfect documents. If these machines had been invented by writers, there would have been a ‘correct’ button which would turn the word red and bung it in the margin. Yes, I know there’s an application like that that’s been invented, but I want a key. I want ‘correct’ to be of the same status as qwertyuiop. Just something that my right-hand little finger could learn. Bebop and dop on, Correct!
Today, there are millions of keyboards and printers in homes, schools and libraries. ‘Qwerty’ still reigns in the office but it has escaped. Many more people than there were in my mother’s time have the means of producing documents and writing of all kinds in a form that looks and feels professional.
I am curious about one thing, though. There is still enormous emphasis placed by governments and education departments on the presentation of correct writing. Schools spend millions of hours teaching children handwriting, spelling, punctuation and general orthographic neatness – with a pencil or pen. Quite a bit of time is spent doing ‘IT’, none of which involves learning ‘qwerty’. If ‘qwerty’ was on the curriculum, millions of children would be able to write nearly as fast as they think, and go back and edit pages of their writing so that they could present them immaculately. Instead of learning spelling and grammar as something that exists only in textbooks, they could learn how to use the spell- and grammar checks. They’re not failsafe but they are a modern data-bank on which we can base our work. It’s only a modern way of using a reference book. I have a feeling that in fifty years’ time, people will look back with bemusement at this era in which electronic ‘qwerty’ was so dominant, while schools still spent so much time on pen and paper.