Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity

by Edward Tenner

  It is equally surprising how the text keyboard has spread as a physical interface in less than 125 years. Within a few decades, the typewriter was replacing pens and pencils not only in commerce and government but in academia and literature, despite initially high prices. Nor were keyboards limited to typewriters. They took over typesetting, data entry, and a large part of telegraphy. Equally impressive has been their global reach beyond the lands of Roman and Cyrillic alphabets, especially in the twenty years since the introduction of the microcomputer. And despite massive campaigns for alternatives like speech and handwriting processors, the text keyboard, like its musical predecessor, seems to be increasing its domain. For hundreds of millions, if not billions, of the world’s people, keyboarding has become a body technique more natural and intuitive than writing by hand, which in the West at least is increasingly an onerous challenge rather than a graceful art. And while low platforms could make typewriters and computer keyboards perfectly usable in squatting positions, in practice modern equipment around the world is nearly always operated by people sitting in chairs—as, indeed, pianos are built to be played from stools and benches, and as many non-Western instruments are designed for performance by musicians seated or kneeling on mats and cushions. The keyboard is part of a relentlessly expanding set of body technologies and techniques. Yet there was nothing inevitable about it.

  WRITING AS A BODY TECHNIQUE

  There are few things more necessary, or difficult, for a growing child than writing. In many ways it is more troublesome than computation. Mental shortcuts make it possible to teach children and adults surprisingly fast and accurate arithmetic through paperless techniques developed in Asia, Europe, and North America. Market and securities traders, real estate negotiators, and even fences of stolen goods have developed exceptionally fast and accurate systems. But writing knows no shortcuts, and shorthand is the hardest form of all. In Japan, learning to make the kanji properly can be a lifelong effort. Even in the West, with only twenty-six letters, combining speed, accuracy, and legibility has never been easy.

  Medieval scribes faced many physical challenges. Parchment was dear, and paper became widely available only in the fifteenth century. Into the nineteenth century, writers had to sharpen their own quill pens, up to sixty times a day for a scribe. (Oboists still have to make their own reeds.) Parchment also had to be ruled. The surprise was how efficient writing could be given medieval conditions, especially in the late Middle Ages when private scriptoria flourished. Scribes worked with a pen in one hand and a knife in the other for steadying the parchment, sharpening quills, and erasing errors. Their technique of holding a writing instrument was different from ours: the light quill could be held almost effortlessly between the tips of the first two fingers and the thumb and moved by the whole forearm rather than the wrist, with the hand hardly touching the page. The text of a Book of Hours could be completed in a week, and— what will amaze anyone who has ever admired them in an exhibition— two or three of the miniatures could be finished in only a day. One reason for this speed was the ergonomic innovations of the Middle Ages. We have already seen that the Greeks and Romans had no desks or writing tables. Medieval scribes used slanted lecterns, still recommended for reading and writing, and especially convenient for keeping the pen at the optimal right angle to the paper. Their desks often had additional stands for propping open copy, a convenience lacking in many computer workstations today. It should not be surprising that some scriptoria were initially able to compete with early printers, at least in short-run production of high-priced books.1

  Of course, any attempt to build a writing machine even after Gutenberg would probably have been wildly expensive and produced crude results. But the manuscript was not just a reproduction of an author’s text. As the historian Henri-Jean Martin has observed, copying a manuscript gave the scribe “an almost kinetic memory” of its arguments and “an almost physical familiarity” with the writer’s argumentation. Bodily engagement produced a mental identification with the author. Errors could be corrected, or introduced. The scribe was an intellectual artisan, a collaborator. Professional copyists offered a variety of styles according to the purpose and formality of the text; a surviving document gives specimens of twelve. Each copyist’s hand was so distinctive that today’s experts on medieval manuscripts do not consider forgery a serious problem.2

  Medieval writing had achieved such effectiveness that the rise of printing produced only gradual changes in the appearance of books. Paradoxically, print led not to experiments in the mechanical production of writing but to a new flowering of handwriting, just as railroads (as we have seen in Chapter Four) popularized walking, and motoring and aviation in turn stimulated the railroads to new peaks of technology and service in the mid-twentieth century. The proliferation of printed matter actually increased rather than reduced the need for writing as governmental, religious, and economic activity grew. Printed books still had to begin with manuscripts, and publishers found a ready market for writing guides after technical problems of engraving were overcome. Beginning in the 1520s, Italian writing masters like Ludovico Arrighi, Giovanantonio Tagliente, and Giovanbattista Palatino prepared manuals that went through as many as thirty editions. They spread the hand used by the papal bureaucracy, called Chancery and (in northern countries) Italic, throughout educated circles of Europe. Until the nineteenth century, this hand, based on the everyday writing of medieval people, remained a standard script. It was an intuitive ergonomic solution, like the musical keyboard of the same period.3

  The writing masters did not stop with Chancery. They were influential in developing Roman typefaces for printing, a number of which are still widely used. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they also brought the art of calligraphy to new technical heights, but their very artistry helped create a gap between the handwriting of formal documents and the script that people used in everyday correspondence. Among their achievements were the continuous cursive “round hands” that are the foundation of much formal Western handwriting to this day: elegant in expert use but difficult for others to learn properly Graphic technology also affected formal writing styles: the copperplate engravings that preceded nineteenth-century woodblock needed hand-incised captions. The pen began to imitate the engraver’s cutting tool, the burin. With the expansion of commerce in the eighteenth century came new prestige for round and copperplate styles in account books, bills of exchange, insurance contracts, and other commercial documents. Just as today’s office employee must be proficient with the complex formatting options of word processors and desktop publishing packages, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century clerk had to master textual presentation.4

  By the early industrial age there was so much business to transact, and so many children were enrolled in the developing school systems of Europe and North America, that a market existed for an inexpensive pen that would not need sharpening. Metallic pens had been known for hundreds of years, but they had been luxuries. By the 1830s Birmingham, England, enjoyed access to the metallurgy, markets, and machine-building skills that made metal nibs among the best-selling products of the early Victorian world. Jealously guarded equipment pressed Sheffield steel and split nibs. From a ton of steel, 1.5 million nibs could be made. At the beginning of the 1840s, a single Birmingham manufacturer, Joseph Gillott, was shipping more than 62 million a year. In 1874 the factories of the other leading pioneer, Sir Josiah Mason, were turning out 32,000 gross each week.5

  Like other Victorian technology, this industrial product soon captured the romantic imagination. George Pratt (1832–1875), Yale class of 1857, wrote:

  Give me a pen of steel!

  Away with the gray goose-quill!

  I will grave the thoughts I feel

  With a fiery heart and will…

  Actually, the early steel pen was, as the melancholy conclusion of Pratt’s verse acknowledges, easily “corroded day by day” by the inks of the nineteenth century, and the twentieth-century calligrapher and hist
orian Donald M. Anderson called the meeting of steel pen and bond paper “[as] icy cold and mechanical as the greeting of an iron lawn dog.” But despite these drawbacks and a tendency to splatter the indelible ink of the day the steel pen did for education what its distant metallic cousin the cast-iron-frame piano with steel strings was doing for music. It provided an instrument of impressive flexibility for the Victorian mass public. Nibs and pianos, kindred iron and steel technologies of the hand and arms, were among the great international metallurgical successes of the nineteenth century—along, as we have seen, with steel-sprung parlor furniture.6

  Just as the diffusion of the piano produced a wave of pedagogical methods and mechanical aids, so the steel pen helped make possible mass instruction in writing, which would otherwise have exhausted teachers as it tormented geese. Writing became an instrument not just for communication but for physical and mental discipline and character training. As Bernard Cerquiglini, director of the National Institute of the French Language, has remarked, “The blue ink spot on the finger is a badge of French education. It is the mark of the French flag on the body of the French student.” Into the twentieth century, little yellow Waterman ink trucks circulated in Paris, replenishing the reservoirs of pupils’ steel pens. Yet—especially in France—rigorously drilled youth somehow, or thereby became individualist adults: in 1885 a single French firm, Blanzy-Pour, offered five hundred different nibs, at prices ranging from 0.23 to 7.80 francs per gross, according to quality.7

  (The graphite pencil was also prominent in the international rise of mass education in the nineteenth century. America’s more forgiving, free-form contribution to writing was the mini-eraser attached by a metal ferrule, introduced a year after George Pratt was graduated from Yale. Many European teachers still cling to the prejudice that attached erasers encourage errors, overlooking the big stand-alone chunks of rubber their pupils use instead. And what is wrong with making and correcting mistakes?)8

  France retained a distinctive cursive script that probably originated in the late seventeenth century; it is still visible on some restaurant menus. Germany developed its own angular script counterpart of its black-letter Fraktur type. But it was the United States that turned handwriting into a form of drill that was only a short step from the actual mechanization of writing. While the early master Platt Rogers Spencer (whose style survives in the logotypes of Coca-Cola and the Ford Motor Company) was inspired in his flowing script by the curves of nature, instruction was no aesthetic reverie. Writing masters claimed to develop habits of manly self-discipline from which women were excluded—however feminine the graceful letter-forms of Spencer and his competitors appeared.9

  In the last two decades of the nineteenth century a new technique, still influential today was developed for the steel pen: the Palmer method. Impatient with Spencerian curlicues, the master penman A. N. Palmer dominated American handwriting instruction with his call for no-nonsense efficiency. Where Spencer had extolled aesthetic contemplation, Palmer taught what we know today as muscular memory: drill and repetition of motions that would make possible rapid and unconscious production of correct letterforms. Perhaps because women were a rapidly growing proportion of the white-collar workforce, Palmer taught writing as a virile, assertive command of the whole forearm rather than the wrist and fingers. In place of meticulous copybook exercises, Palmer’s disciples invoked industrial efficiency. In 1904 one manual described the body as “a machine on which writing is done.”10

  The history of script suggests that typewriting was not just the miraculous unfolding of a mechanical marvel but the logical outcome of a social drive to discipline the body. Cultural historians from Michel Foucault onward have seen the rationalization of labor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as baleful, exploitive manipulation. They have often oversimplified, but it is true that to generations of schoolchildren, writing exercises could be physically painful. The steel pen also produced some of the first cases of what are now called cumulative trauma disorders: a report on “scrivener’s palsy” by a Dr. Samuel Solly appeared as early as 1862, and “writer’s cramp” had been more casually observed even earlier.11

  FROM THE LITERARY PIANO TO THE TYPE-WRITER

  In the realm of the late-nineteenth-century office, the typewriter was not a revolution but a revelation. If the ideal worker was to be a tireless and efficient machine, was not the pen—blotting, needing to be dipped—a weak link? The logical direction of standardizing technique was finding a technology that put information onto paper with the least manual effort. The keyboard began to challenge not only the pen but other information technologies: the telegraph key and the type case.

  From at least 1714, inventors in Europe and the United States had proposed dozens of systems for imprinting letters. But until the mid-nineteenth century few of the designs were suitable for replacing handwriting in everyday commerce, literature, or education. Some, like William Austin Burt’s “Typographer” or “Family Letter Press” of 1829, produced attractive text but used dials and levers that made the process too cumbersome for longer copy, like today’s hand-held plastic tape embossing machines. Others were conceived less as general-purpose machines than as prostheses, extensions of the body for those unable to write efficiently or legibly with a pen. The best known in North America was Charles Thurber’s device, patented in 1843, for marking letters on paper mounted on a traveling and rotatable cylinder. The keytops, arranged around a wheel, bore raised letters for the blind. Other American and French inventors introduced systems for embossing letters for the blind; none appears to have been commercially successful.12

  If the keyboard was not yet viable for the disabled, it appeared far more promising for another market: the growing number of businesses with substantial telegraph traffic. In the nineteenth century, telegraphy was an advanced technology, one that attracted many ambitious young men and a growing number of women. The men, but not the women, were initially encouraged to develop themselves scientifically and technically. They formed a network of avid tinkerers, proud of their skills, simultaneously competitive and cooperative like today’s programmers. Thomas Edison’s genius emerged in this milieu, and New York City’s thriving financial community keenly rewarded innovations offering users a competitive advantage.13

  While only a few of the operators became inventors, this elite workforce was a challenge for employers. Wages were high and proficient operators in demand. Because messages were generally received by electromagnetic sounders, each telegrapher had a recognizable rhythm, called a fist, and a proficient operator could “rush” a neophyte by sending letters faster than the recipient could transcribe them. At the other end of the marvelous new apparatus there were, after all, just ears, a brain, a hand, and a pen. Employers sought alternatives promising more speed with less skill. The musical keyboard was a familiar interface, and the increasing durability and dynamics of pianos must have suggested that keyboards could control text as well as sound fluently and reliably. In the early 1850s, Sir Charles Wheatstone, a professor of physics at King’s College, London, devised a series of typewriters using a keyboard like a piano’s, except that black and white keys alternated evenly. Wheatstone’s machines were not designed for message transmission, but since they produced letters on tape, they probably were intended for transcription. In 1855 and 1857, respectively, the Italian Giuseppe Ravizza and the American Dr. William Francis used similar keyboards to imprint paper on a roller, giving their inventions the charming names of Cembalo Scrivano and Literary Piano.14

  The crucial step probably was not a device but a manifesto. Ten years after the Francis patent, Scientific American described yet another “type writing machine” that John Pratt, an Alabaman, had shown in London. What was notable was not the design of Pratt’s invention but the sentiment the editors expressed: that the technique of handwriting had become a torture, and that it was time to replace it with a modern technology. The “laborious and unsatisfactory performance of the pen” would be replaced in law
offices, newspapers, and the studies of the clergy in a “revolution” comparable to that begun by the printing press. The “weary process” of school penmanship lessons could be limited to “writing one’s own signature and playing on the literary piano.” Apparently for the first time in a widely circulated periodical, the article also held out the possibility that a machine could write not just more neatly and easily than the pen but also more rapidly15

  The first invention inspired by this article continued to take the musical metaphor. The patent demonstration model produced by Christopher Latham Sholes and Carlos Glidden, two Milwaukee amateur tinkerers who haunted a local machine shop, had six white keys alternating piano-style with five black keys. Sholes and Glidden were soon joined by two others: Samuel Soulé, a technical man who had worked with Sholes on other inventions, and James Densmore, a former newspaper publishing colleague. The invention took another turn. Sholes and his collaborators abandoned the piano-style keyboard for an array of circles; this was to remain the definitive arrangement. But the inspiration of musical keyboard instruments was still evident. Each key indirectly activated a hammer that forced the paper against a ribbon, much as a piano key transmits a force through the parts of its own action to make the felt hammer hit the strings.

  The technical details of the Sholes typewriter’s history interest mainly collectors and other specialists, but the fact that it went through many versions in the 1860s and 1870s was part of the reason for its triumph. The Sholes-Glidden-Soulé design was inelegant. For decades after its introduction, users could not see their work as they typed; the paper had to be removed. Hammers (typebars), clashing frequently, had to be untangled. The machine was limited to a single typeface. While many rival designs were mainly attempts to get around the Sholes patents, others had major advantages. At about the same time, James Bartlett Hammond was developing a writing machine that used a replaceable circular typewheel, permitting multiple fonts. Text produced on the Hammond could be read with the paper still in the machine. Perhaps best of all, the Hammond type-wheel not only made jamming impossible but assured an even impression. The typewheel was fixed. Pressing a key triggered a hammer that struck the paper through the ribbon against the typewheel with unvarying force. Hammond was not the only inventor to use such a principle. Thomas Edison, too, after examining and rejecting the Sholes machine for his employers at the Automatic Telegraph Company, invented an alternative machine with a small rotating wheel against which the paper was pressed.16