AN AWFUL

STACK
OF WORDS

T Y P E ãÜ|à|Çz
in communications history

Kyle Simpson McCaskill

Copyright © 2004, 2010 by Kyle Simpson McCaskill
All rights reserved.

All images, including cover photo, © 1999–2010 Martin Howard, The

Martin Howard Collection, antiquetypewriters.com. Reproduced with
kind permission.

No part of this work may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by

any means without permission.
 Contents

The Keyboard as Writing Space ● 1

A Paperless World? ● 5
Early Writing Machines “An Awful Stack of
Words” ● 8
Is Typewriting a Linguistic Singularity? ● 18
Writers and the Typewriting Experience ● 24
Enchanted Writing ● 29
Writing Machines — or Thinking Machines? ● 34
Bibliography ● 36
 The Keyboard as
Writing Space

There have been historical and sociological studies

of typewriters in the office environment, particularly as
they affected the employment of women. Communica-
tions and media scholarship, however, seems to have
largely disregarded typewriters as a stage in communica-
tions history. This oversight may derive from the persis-
tent ubiquity of keyboards — the legacy of typewriters —
as adjuncts to personal computers. Keyboards are too
enmeshed in our culture for us to see typewriting tech-
nology as a unique stage. In the opening stages of the
twenty-first century, new forms of text input and man-
agement are being introduced, such as palm assistants,
scanners, voice recognition software and “digital ink,”
which leads me to speculate whether or not the key-
boards that have so shaped writing practices will still be
in use 20 years from now. Yet for the last 120 years, key-
boards have dominated business, academic, and even
creative writing. The twentieth century was surely the
age of the keyboard.

1
 There is a considerable amount of scholarship desig-
nating the personal computer as the successor to the
printing press in writing technology. For example, Jay
David Bolter, in Writing Space, discusses the papyrus roll
and the scribal manuscript as pre-mechanical writing
technologies, and asserts that “the printing press is the
classic writing machine.”1 In fact, I would argue, move-
able type was not writing technology. Presentation tech-
nology, yes — transcription and reproduction technology,
yes — but not writing technology (except for a few un-
usual cases of author-compositors who composed text as
they set type). To be sure, typewriters were also used as
transcription and presentation technology, in transcribing
dictation or handwriting, or reproduction technology,
with carbon paper. However, typewriters alone could be
used as authoring tools, whether in business and personal
correspondence, fiction writing or academia.
Thus, typewriters were the first writing machines.
Until the advent of the typewriter, all authors inscribed
original text compositions by hand. Whether they used
brushes, quill pens or pencils, each word, each letter,
was finger-drawn — individual, expressive. And while
typewriters were widely used in the transcription of dic-
tation to produce business letters and memos, as well as
books, many people, including authors, also adopted
them as composition tools, tapping letters out instead of
drawing them. Consideration of this elicits the question
of how composition method affects prose. Is the shift
from crafting individual letters to tapping standardized
ones accompanied by a shift in focus, cognition or struc-
turing process?

1
Bolter, 34.
2
 Indeed, media scholar Marshall McLuhan wrote that
“the typewriter fuses composition and publication . . .
composing on the typewriter has altered the forms of
language and of literature . . . .” McLuhan believes that
there should have been “studies of how the typewriter
has altered English verse and prose and, indeed, the very
mental habits, themselves, of writers.”2 Typewriting be-
stowed upon writing the “potential to be all over and all
the same, somewhere between manuscript and print.”3
Bolter examines computers and the hypertext envi-
ronment as writing tools. The space he refers to in his ti-
tle, Writing Space, is what we see on the computer
monitor: the scrolling, the endless page, the hypertextual
links.4 But I would contend that this is not writing space —
the place where humans create text — this is viewing
space. The keyboard is the real writing space. Curiously,
Bolter addresses neither keyboards nor typewriters in his
discussion. The fact that the keyboard, the typewriter’s
human interface, is still with us renders it invisible.
Bolter is not alone in this omission. A standard text-
book in college communications courses, Communication
in History,5 published in 1999, after 110 years of wide-
spread keyboard use, contains chapters on printing, the
telephone, the telegraph, photography, motion pictures,
radio, television and computers, but doesn’t even have
“typewriter” or “typing” in the index. How can such a
widely used tool be so universally overlooked, while even
today, the verb for what we do on a computer keyboard
is “type”?6

2
McLuhan, 228.
3
Gitelman, 5.
4
Bolter, 17.
5
Crowley & Heyer
6
Gilelman, 19.
3
 It seems to me that typing represents a unique proc-
ess and historical stage, significantly different from
handwriting, and perhaps also different from keyboarding
on a word processor or personal computer. Yet the act of
typing is still so much a part of our culture that it passes
without comment.

4
 A Paperless World?

Lisa Gitelman points out that many current studies

of reading and writing technologies present the printing
press and personal computers as comparable milestones.
“The most schematic accounts,” she says, “simply jump
from the logic of print in the sixteenth century to a new
logic of digital communications in the twenty-first, as if
500 years had not happened . . .”7
She has a good point. Modern scholars of communi-
cations technology fail to consider the revolutionary late
nineteenth century developments that foreshadowed and
laid the groundwork for multimedia and hypertext.8
Gitelman also believes that many modern scholars
give far too much credit to technology as a simple causal
agent, and don’t acknowledge that technology and soci-
ety, indeed in this case, technology and human texts, are
reciprocal, mutually informing and changing. Culture is
both produced and consumed via textual technologies.
The evolution of writing and reading technologies is im-

7
Gitelman, 2.
8
Gitelman, 2.
5
portant, because what it signifies is the evolution of peo-
ple who write and read.9
The typewriter was greeted by late nineteenth cen-
tury society with the same contrary mixture of irrational
hopes and fears that greeted Edison’s phonograph. Many
people, Edison included, viewed the phonograph as an
aural textual device to record speech, not music. A sen-
timent familiar to our twenty-first century computerized
culture arose: it was thought that the phonograph would
usher in a paperless world. People envisioned listening to
newspapers and books instead of reading them, with an
underlying assumption that speech and hearing are more
“natural” than writing and reading. They imagined that
wax records would be sent and swapped instead of busi-
ness and personal letters. In his 1889 Harper’s story,
“With the Eyes Shut,” futurist Edward Bellamy predicted
the demise of written English in his portrayal of a society
in which reading and writing was no longer taught, be-
cause people went everywhere with phonographs at-
tached to themselves.10
What I find interesting is the persistence of paper,
then and now. We now know that none of the above pre-
dictions came true. Paper continued to be the medium
for books and correspondence. In our own age, people
have been predicting for more than 20 years that elec-
tronic data storage of one sort or another — big floppies,
small floppies, zip disks, CDs, DVDs, flash drives — can
and will be used instead of documents. Instead, our world
is overflowing with paper. It could even be said that in-
stead of reducing the need for paper, technology — first
typewriters and then computers, in conjunction with du-

9
Ibid.
10
Gitelman, 64-67.
6
plicators such as the “Xerox” — has had the unforeseen
consequence of producing an explosion of communication
on paper.

7
Early Writing Machines
“An Awful Stack of Words”

People in the second half of the nineteenth century

paid a great deal of attention to methods of inscribing
text. A wide variety of shorthand systems proliferated
beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, with
an accompanying volume of disagreement about the effi-
cacy and authoritativeness of each. “Shorthand was en-
meshed within a rhetoric of progress,” in which the
author/reporter was seen as a technician of sorts, a
“scribe.” Often those fulfilling this role were people who
were otherwise on the social fringe because of some kind
of difference such as religion or ethnicity. Their “scribe-
technician” role gave them an authority they would oth-
erwise lack. Increasingly, the method of inscribing
seemed to authenticate or discredit the content, and by
inference, the inscriber. It is significant that the early
typewriter was targeted at court reporters as a replace-
ment for shorthand. 11

11
Gitelman, 60, 198-203
8
 The typewriter was only the second intricate ma-
chine designed specifically to be used in nonindustrial
indoor settings — the first one being the sewing machine
— and it was the first complex machine intended for of-
fice use.12 The Whig view of technology that tends to pre-
dominate in our culture equates technological progress
with social progress. So as with most new technologies,
the typewriter was heralded as the solution to many
problems. But it was also feared as a foreign force that
would take away jobs and decrease the quality of life.
Many people were afraid that typewriters would elimi-
nate the need for printers. In reality, it was observed
that typewriters sent two jobs to the printer for every
one it took away.13
It is now hard to imagine the typewriter in any but
its present form. In truth a bewildering variety of writing
machines were developed before the Remington Standard
became, well, the standard. Even after this, models were
vastly different in function and appearance. Many con-
temporary observers likened the typewriter to “the liter-
ary piano to be played.” The was more than a metaphor:
a number of early inventors used a piano-style keyboard
design, but found that in practice there was too much
area for the fingers to cover, and too much force was re-
quired to press the keys.14 Typewriter historian Frank Masi
claims that somewhere between 52 and 112 people, at
disparate times and locations, each “invented” a type-
writer in the early years.15 The patent record shows 83

12
Masi, 9.
13
Mares, 13.
14
Mares, 13, 32.
15
Masi, 13.
9
patents awarded between 1840 and 1875 for writing ma-
chines in the U. S., England and France.16
As early as 1714, English engineer Henry Mill re-
ceived a patent for a machine “for the impressing . . . of
letters singly or progressively . . . so neat and exact as
not to be distinguished from print.” In 1829 an American
named William Burt was awarded a patent for a writing
machine, which a newspaper referred to as “Burt’s Fam-
ily Letter Press,” revealing that this was not viewed as a
contrivance with any commercial utility.17 There is also
evidence of a single writing machine invented in Italy in
around 1808 for a woman with visual impairment to use
to write letters. And in 1852, American John Jones manu-
factured 130 writing machines before his factory and all
the machines were destroyed by fire.
However it wasn’t until 1867 that development was
begun by Christopher Latham Sholes and his friend, Carlos
Glidden, of what became the first commercially mar-
keted writing machine, the Sholes and Glidden Type
Writer. Sholes’ interest had been piqued by an 1867 arti-
cle in Scientific American article about an invention by
Alabama journalist John Pratt called a “Ptereotype.” This
excerpt from the article provides a glimpse into the pos-
sibilities opened up in the public mind by typewriters:

A machine by which it is assumed that

a man may print his thoughts twice as
fast as he can write them, and with
the advantage of legibility, compact-
ness, and neatness of print. . . . Le-
gal copying, and the writing and
delivering of sermons and lectures,
not to speak of letters and editori-

16
Russo, 8.
17
Zellers, 9-10.
10
 als, will undergo a revolution as re-
markable as that effected in books by
18
the invention of printing . . .”

As a former printer and editor, Sholes was capti-

vated, but it wasn’t until backer and promoter James
Densmore approached Philo Remington, the president of
gun-makers E. Remington & Sons, that the commercial
manufacture of a writing machine became possible.
Densmore argued that such a machine would simplify the
work of “editors, authors, clergymen — all who are
obliged to undergo the drudgery of the pen.” The Sholes
and Glidden Type Writer was a masterpiece of ornate Vic-
torian design, intended to be both functional and decora-
tive in homes or businesses.19, 20
Writer Mark Twain bought a Sholes and Glidden in
1874, the first year they were on the market. In a letter
typed on it to his brother, he wrote that he was “trying
to get the hang of this new fangled writing machine” and
thought that it would be able to “print faster than I can
write,” since it “piles an awful stack of words on one
page.” He wrote that the machine reminded him of an
old type compositor he admired who would compose
prose as he set type, “without previously putting them
[the letters] in the form of manuscript.”21 Twain is re-
puted to have written Life on the Mississippi on this
typewriter, but apparently went back in frustration to
handwriting after this experience.22

18
Mares, 41.
19
Russo, 12,
20
Masi, 13, 14, 23.
21
Russo, 20.
22
Zellers, 16.
11
 Although the creation of the Remington typewriter
company was the beginning of a new industry, the “type
writer” sold very poorly at first. For one thing, it was
costly ($125, equivalent to about $1,871 in 200423). It
tended to skip spaces or break down, and there was not
yet a network of typewriter repairmen. It looked like a
piece of furniture, but it acted like a factory tool, par-
ticularly in its noisiness. But more than any of these rea-
sons, what hindered the new machine was that it violated
certain social codes. Typewritten text appeared to be
typeset and thus standardized. Yet personal and business
conventions relied on the personal and confidential im-
plications of hand-written text. In such an environment,
beautiful penmanship was held up as an admirable virtue.
People strived to attain the most perfect letters, embel-
lished with flourishes and shading. Densmore’s attempt to
convince people of the “drudgery of the pen” may have
flown in the face of what was in fact an act of great
pride. Receiving a beautifully hand-written letter indi-
cated your importance to the sender. In contrast, early
typewritten output was not only impersonal; the young
stage of the technology rendered it downright ugly, with
nonuniform light and dark patches. Such a letter would
be construed as an insult.
The machine was clearly ahead of its time, and it
would be 10 or 15 years before people began to figure out
what to do with it.24 Another major drawback to many
was the typewriter’s clatter, which was said to have
“sent many typists and executives home with ragged

23
How Much Is That Worth Today?, EH.net Economic History Services,
http://eh.net/hmit/ppowerusd/ (retrieved 07/27/04).
24
Masi, 33-39.
12
nerves.”25 Reading such early anecdotes leads me to sus-
pect that the large number of vastly different machines
for automatic writing invented during the nineteenth
century is an outgrowth of the era’s tinkering, engineer-
ing spirit, rather than any perceived desire or need for
such inventions.
The first typewriters had only capital letters, and
people largely disliked the absence of lower-case letters.
In 1878 the Remington 2 introduced a shifting mechanism
for capital and lowercase letters. Nevertheless, only
1,000 Remington typewriters were sold in their first five
years on the market. Philo Remington finally sold his
typewriter division to three entrepreneurial salesmen,
Wyckoff, Seamans, and Benedict. Remington’s timing was
unfortunate. How was he to know how the juncture of
the growing “woman rights” movement and the type-
writer would play out? The hand-precision of typing
seemed perfectly suited to women. The shift in con-
sciousness around the status of women, combined with
the development of instruction in the “All Finger Method”
of typing (touch typing) around 1881, made a place for
female type writers in offices. Moreover, Frederick W.
Taylor’s “scientific management,” which stressed effi-
ciency and maximum output, was in the air. Articles in
the popular press began enthusing that “the typewriter,
as compared to the pen, saves forty minutes an hour.”
Cultural priorities were shifting. By 1890, 20,000 Reming-
tons a year were being sold.26
By 1894, over 53 makes of typewriters had hit the
market. Offices were becoming mechanized by the early
stages of what amounted to a “communications explo-

25
Zellers, 15.
26
Russo, 21-28.
13
sion” when combined with tickertape, the telegraph, and
the telephone. The pace of commercial activity was in-
creased by these and other technologies, including trans-
portation technologies such as trains and steamships.
Businessmen could dictate systematized correspondence
into “talking machines” for typists to produce. Finally the
speed of typewriting became more important than the
beauty of handwriting. By 1900 it was acceptable, and
even expected, that all correspondence other than social
would be produced on the typewriter. Masi cites this as
an illustration of the “relationship between potential and
obligation” that typifies technological developments. It
wasn’t enough for Sholes to enable people to type; it had
to become both practically and socially necessary.27 Any
given technology exists in a discursive relationship with
society; such discourse takes time as well cultural and
technological accommodation, and the resulting direction
is nearly always unexpected.
When nineteenth-century culture began to incorpo-
rate the typewriter, the typewriter in turn began to alter
nineteenth-century culture. Once typewriting technology
advanced past its initial amateur stages, typewriting re-
sults were much clearer and easier to review, and thus
seemed more factual and objective than handwriting.
The clarity of typewritten text was unforgiving when it
came to spelling: unsure spellers could no longer use
handwriting to disguise possible errors. Sales of dictionar-
ies increased considerably as typewriters became more
common and a standard of uniformity in communication
was enabled and established.28

27
Masi, 71.
28
Mares, 41.
14
 Typewriters had the effect of standardizing the way
letters, signs, and symbols were formed. The following
story provides a compelling example of this standardizing
effect. Martin Tytell was a Manhattan typewriter repair-
man whose expertise was put to use while he served in
World War II. While assigned to the Army’s Morale Ser-
vices Division, which was responsible for information and
propaganda, he would often convert typewriters to dif-
ferent languages. Tytell was good at his trade, but while
fulfilling a rush request for conversions to 21 different
languages, one of which was Burmese, he made one mis-
take. He accidentally soldered on one of the Burmese let-
ters upside down. Upon finding out about his mistake
years after the war, he offered to fix that letter on the
typewriter of the language expert who had advised him
during the project. The expert told Tytell not to worry,
because over time other Burmese typewriters had been
copied from Tytell’s, and the upside-down letter had be-
come the standard!29
I was amazed to discover that the first electric
typewriter, a Blickensderfer, was introduced as early as
1902. The Blick electric incorporated advances that
wouldn’t become standard for another 50 years. It fea-
tured a typewheel, automatic carriage return and a key-
board with a light, consistent touch. Yet it was a
commercial failure. Typewriter historians speculate that
perhaps a lack of electrical standards was the problem,
or even more, a general apprehension about electrical
gadgets in 1902.30 The failure of the Blick electric demon-
strates that technology is not an agent that acts forcibly
upon society. Rather, technology must fit into a social

29
Frazier
30
Robert, Collection->Brands->Blickensderfer
15
environment that is ready to accept and then in turn fur-
ther shape the technology.
Typewriter historian Frank Masi believes that the
story of typewriter development provides a specific ex-
ample of the discourse between technology and our hab-
its of thinking and living. The typewriter is unusual in
that its use extends from early in the mechanical age all
the way into the electronic age. Through the study of
writing machines, and the technological milieu they rep-
resented, we can discern a certain style, “radical and
overwhelming,” of social change that occurred along with
this particular technological change, and perhaps expect
that as we progress further into an electronic, digital en-
vironment, a similar all-encompassing style of social
change will occur again.31

Why QWERTY?
One of the typewriter’s most visible legacies is the
QWERTY keyboard. It has been proven inefficient and im-
proved upon countless times, most notably by August
Dvorak in the 1930s, and yet it persists. The first Sholes
model had keys in a two-row alphabetical arrangement.
Evidence of this arrangement can still be seen with the
“FGHJKL” sequence in the QWERTY middle row. How-
ever, the keys of this imperfectly machined model tended
to crash together and jam if an operator typed too
quickly, which slowed the typing down. Sholes got around
this problem by commissioning a letter-pair frequency
study, and rearranging the keys so that the most common
letter pairs (i.e. “PH”) did not hang too close together.32

31
Masi, 4.
32
“Why QWERTY”
16
Improved machining technology soon prevented keys from
jamming, and until the mid-teens, companies continued
to introduce different keyboards. But the four-row
QWERTY keyboard had been employed on the earliest
widely sold typewriters, the Remingtons and the Under-
woods, and people were accustomed to it. “Thus it is,”
writes Masi, “that even the most efficient of electronic
typewriters,”[and now computers] “is burdened with one
of the worst features of the Sholes & Glidden, because
Sholes had a sticky typewriter.”33
Many attempts were made to improve upon the
QWERTY design. The Crandall, patented in 1879, had only
two curved banks of keys.
Crandall keyboard:

Z P R C H M I L F E S D B K
J V X U N W . , T O A G Y Q

In 1893 the first popular, low-priced machine was in-

troduced, the Blickensderfer. Its keyboard was heralded
as “purely scientific,” because “no less then 70 percent
of the letters in any ordinary piece of composition may
be written by means of the bottom line.”
Blickensderfer scientific keyboard:

Z X K G B V Q J
& P W F U L C M Y
D H I A T E N S O R

However, these nonstandard or “special” keyboards

were often seen as handicaps, and QWERTY continued to
be preferred.34

33
Masi, 95.
34
Mares, 148-150
17
 Is Typewriting a
Linguistic Singularity?

Linguistic scholars have generally treated printed

language as a variant of written language, but linguistic
scholar Josef Vachek believes that there are deep linguis-
tic differences. Vachek differentiates among the charac-
teristics of speech, writing, and print. Spoken language is
acoustic and dynamic. Its function is to address both the
emotional and intellectual aspect of facts. Written lan-
guage is graphic, nonurgent, independent of time —
static. Its function is full comprehension of the intellec-
tual aspect of facts. Yet speech and writing share a great
deal, including one attribute: they both reflect the indi-
viduality of the originator, in both content and form. In
speech, the speaker’s unique voice, rhythm and speed
are expressive. Vachek cites the theory of Karl Bühler,
that “any linguistic utterance is charged with a treble
function . . . air . . . appeal . . . and reference.”35 By
“air,” Bühler means individual expression. Similarly, an

35
Bühler, Karl, as quoted in Vachek, 11.
18
individual’s handwriting has a unique slant, joining pat-
terns, ratio between large and small letters, and pres-
sure.36
Print differs from both speech and writing in a sig-
nificant way. Print alone is devoid of individual expres-
sion. While vision or sound can identify the originator of
writing or speech directly, meaning must mediate in the
identification of a print author, according to Vachek. He
points out that, according to the function of written lan-
guage he identified — a static and clear statement of the
facts — print is better suited than handwriting, since
print is inherently more legible, impersonal, and seem-
ingly objective. Handwriting, he says, always carries a
“personal tinge.” He points out that in doing the job of
written language better than handwriting, print is “an
intensified variant of written language in which most of
the features characteristic of written language have been
pushed to the extreme.”37
Vachek makes an interesting observation about the
ways in which spoken and written language have histori-
cally been reproduced. In the case of spoken language,
the technologies of reproduction — the phonograph or the
radio — relatively faithfully reproduce individual expres-
sion or “air.” The chief technology for reproducing writ-
ten language, however — printing — doesn’t exactly
reproduce the language, but rather transfers it into
something simplified, altered in style, devoid of “air.”
The only way to reproduce writing in all its original ex-
pressiveness would have been via photographic reproduc-
tion. Yet even though we have long had the technology to
do this — with the additional ease in more recent years of

36
Vachek, 9-10.
37
Vachek, 12.
19
copier and scanner technology — we haven’t. Why? Be-
cause the function of written language — clear, static,
intellectual statement of facts or arguments — is actually
enhanced by print. Lisa Gitelman essentially agrees that
“inscriptive method validated inscribed content.”38 And
for the same reason, no attempt has been made to re-
move the individual expression from reproductions of
spoken speech, because it is that very expressiveness that
is integral to the function, the purpose, of spoken
speech.39
Interestingly, in 1897 Henry James, as a result of
pain that had developed in his wrist from handwriting,
hired a typist to whom he could dictate his work. His
writing style at this time shifted; “his syntax became
more elaborate, and his diction became more slangy, de-
velopments perhaps related to a change in his method of
composition.”40 Henry James, by speaking his writing to a
typist, combined speech and print, preserving in stasis a
more dynamic, expressive speech.
In contrast to Vackek’s 1989 comparison of printing,
writing and speaking, a 2002 study by Thomas Berg in Ap-
plied Psycholinguistics attempted to discover the simi-
larities and differences in representation and processing
of typing, writing, and speaking. Berg observed that “in
general terms, typing appears to be more similar to writ-
ing than to speaking,” since both methods require us to
use our hands, need to be learned, and “create a visual-
spatial code.” He did, however, note some significant dif-
ferences. Where a keystroke is a distinct activity, both in
terms of the creation and the appearance of the letter,

38
Gitelman, 198.
39
Vachek, 13.
40
Fogel
20
handwriting is a “continuous activity with linkages, over-
lap, and fuzzy boundaries between adjacent letters,” as
is the case with speaking.41 In order to clarify the psycho-
logical processes underlying writing and typewriting, Berg
examined the errors that occurred during each, reasoning
that similar errors would indicate similar processes. He
found the nature of typing errors and writing errors to be
almost exactly the same, and so deduced that the psy-
cholinguistic processes used in typing and writing are
alike. Berg concluded that the differences noted regard-
ing the formation of letters did not affect processing on a
high level. The similar psycholinguistic processing be-
tween writing and typing he attributed to these common
characteristics: “their common use of a spatial code,
their similar speed of execution, and their freedom from
articulatory constraints.”42
In 1869, in a pretyping-era view of spoken versus
written language, Alexander J. Ellis published his funda-
mental reference for the development of spoken English:
On Early English Pronunciation, with Especial Reference
to Shakespeare & Chaucer. He observed that “a spoken
sound once written ceases to grow,” describing words as
snapshots of living things at given stages of growth.43 In-
deed, technology historically has standardized textual
forms: consider the standardization of writing with the
early modern inception of moveable type, and the tena-
cious hold of the QWERTY keyboard design on typewriters
and computers. In some respects, “printed English seems
to have frozen in its tracks” at Shakespeare and the King

41
Berg, 186.
42
Berg, 204.
43
Ellis, 17.
21
James Bible, compared to spelling before the printing
press.44
I would venture to say that typewriting is a kind of
intermediate method — a hybrid — between handwriting
and print for both writer and reader, as a composition
technology. Every manual typewriter types letters a bit
differently, and every typist uses the machinery differ-
ently. The individual is still present, albeit less so, on a
typewritten page, and very much an expressive part of
the typing process. Consider this statement from novelist
Kevin McGowin:

Manual typewriters seem to me to have

their own personalities. . . . I use
different machines for different kinds
of writing. . . . For correspondence .
. . I use a 1935 L. C. Smith upright —
I love the way it forms numerals, and
the click, the brisk action with which
it forms its letters, which are larger
than those of the Royal. People like
to get letters typed on the Smith . .
45
. “

There is a school of thought that digital-keyboard

writing inhibits the contemplative, creative aspect of
writing, shifting the process from craft toward logic and
manipulation. To digitize writing is to change it from lan-
guage, which is formative and generative, to information,
which can be managed according to the relationships of
its parts. Digital writing is forever changeable, never fin-
ished.46 There is a lack of friction in digital writing that

44
Gitelman, 38.
45
McGowin
46
Heim, 84-86.
22
makes it practically instantaneous.47 Typewriting and
handwriting are both closed, linear, fashioned with a be-
ginning and an end. They share a requirement that we
overcome some mechanical resistance — giving us time,
in the process, to reflect.

47
Heim, 152.
23
 Writers and the
Typewriting Experience

During the early years of typewriter history, the ma-

chine and the operator bore the same name: typewriters.
And indeed, many writers over the years have chosen
typewriters as writing tools, over either pens or elec-
tronic keyboards.
Marshall McLuhan noted that poets like E. E. Cum-
mings used the typewriter as a personal printing press,
and compared the typewritten poetic composition proc-
ess to a musical performance or a public address system.
The poet “can shout or whisper or whistle . . . .” 48By al-
lowing the poet to compose a kind of free-form printed
page, the typewriter facilitated the conveyance of the
effects of speech, and thus “brought writing and speech
and publication into close association.”49 It is hard to
imagine this poem by E. E. Cummings composed by hand:

48
McLuhan, 260.
49
McLuhan, 262.
24
Buffalo Bill’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
50
Mister Death

What other instrument could so perfectly construct

“the breath, the pauses, the suspension, even, of sylla-
bles, the juxtaposition, even, of parts of phrases . . . “51
Surely this supports Gitelman’s claim that the typewriter
could be considered an early form of desktop publishing.52
Yet I would note that desktop publishing is possessed of a
further remove between letter formation and page that
typewriting does not present — the difference between a
mechanical device that impresses letters and an elec-
tronic input device that codes text in ones and zeros.
Poet Charles Olson asserts that the typewriter is to
the poet what stave and bar are to a musician.53 Poet
Anne Sexton referenced herself in a poem called Iron
Hans with a sensory description of “drumming words out
like a typewriter.”54
In The Writer’s Handbook, James Michener admires
the swiftness with which word processors and computers
do “what I laboriously do with ruler, knife and pastepot.”

50
cummings, 7.
51
McLuhan, 227.
52
Gitelman, 229.
53
Apsel, 555-587.
54
Parr, 669-700.
25
He also observes, however, that in working electronically
each change wipes out the prior version, and “the record
of brainwork is lost, so that memories of how the writer
worked, what he did with material of poor quality, and
the steps he took to correct it are gone.” He describes
the creation of a first draft, which he does on a manual
typewriter, as “fierce work and often frustrating, for
composition goes neither swiftly nor accurately and dis-
appointments are many.”55
Writer Sy Safransky is one of many who compares
writing on a manual typewriter to playing the piano. “My
piano is inanimate too — but when I touch it, it touches
me. Do I distinguish the longing that music awakens in me
from the music itself?”56
Could such an experience be replicated on a com-
puter or word processor? Joyce Carol Oates relates how
she wrote on a word processor for a time. She reports
that she was “hypnotized. . . . I felt I could probably
work forever, like one of those rats whose brains has
been stimulated in a particular place. I needed to get
back to a more old fashioned way of writing.” For her, it
was handwriting.57
Novelist Kevin McGowin admits that he used to rely
on computers and word processors for all of his writing.
Of handwriting he says that “it took too much time, and I
lost too much, as I thought faster than I could legibly
write.” Once he shifted to a computer, he found that he
could write greater volumes, with good formatting and
fewer misspellings, cutting and pasting, moving text
blocks, “always recycling.” He eventually decided that it

55
Michener, 18.
56
Abbe, 39.
57
Moseley
26
wasn’t an effective method of writing. “I became care-
less, sloppy, hasty and complacent.” He turned to the
typewriter as a better composing tool. By the time he
wrote about this he had collected ten manual typewrit-
ers, maintaining that “the aesthetics of my small collec-
tion and of my fiction writing are intertwined . . . .”58
Author David McCullough composes his first drafts on
a Royal manual, and retypes his second draft on the
typewriter as well. He likens the writing process to a
journey: “Writing is thinking . . . arriving at insights, con-
clusions, revelations, that you never could have obtained
otherwise.” McCullough says that he does not start out
with a theme in mind, but rather finds out what it is
through the “adventure” of writing . . . on a typewriter.59
Oliver Sacks, who writes variously with a pen or
typewriter (manual or electric), relates, “I really don’t
know what I think and what I feel until I write. It’s not
planned out beforehand; that realization comes with the
act of writing.”60 Writer Roger Rosenblatt points out that
writing with a typewriter or pen is ultimately faster than
writing on a computer, because “when something is
wrong with a piece, it is usually all wrong. A writer needs
to start from scratch, not transpose paragraph 19 for
36.”61
In contrast, Jay David Bolter, in his celebration of
digital text, Writing Space, believes, “To write is to do
things with topics — to add, delete, and arrange them.”
Bolter opines that the computer simply makes it easier
for us to visualize this manipulation of topics, by structur-

58
McGowin
59
Kovach
60
Sacks, 66.
61
Rosenblatt, 22.
27
ing our writing space into changeable hierarchies. By
wrapping text in a “formally operative structure,” com-
puters ease writing work.62
The contrast between the process described by pro-
fessional fiction and biography writers and scholar Bolter
is jarring. In the first case, prose is imaginative discovery,
facilitated by a mechanical inscriptive tool such as a pen
or a typewriter. For Bolter, prose is a “manipulation of
topics” constructed via a digital computer. Compare Sy
Syfransky’s allusion to writing as a musical awakening, or
Michener’s forceful description of writing as “fierce
work” to Bolter’s lifeless depiction of writing as “manipu-
lating topics.” In this comparison, typewriting surely
comes across as a more emotive, involved mode of com-
municating compared to the digital keyboard. Are these
just examples of different writing styles, or are these
technologically induced shifts in cognitive processes?

62
Bolter, 19.
28
 Enchanted Writing

If typewriting has become, for some, a more emo-

tive and involved alternative to keyboarding, it is inter-
esting to note that in the early days of “type writing,”
typing was often referred to as “automatic writing.”
Gitelman explains that “the connections between author-
ship and writing became attenuate and obscure when the
latter became newly ‘automatic.’ ” As the typewriter be-
came more accepted and less conspicuous, with the strik-
ing of the keys an unthinking, almost mechanical process,
both the machine and its operator “faded from view.”
Many popular psychics of the same period who manifested
“automatic writing” from spirits, points out Gitelman,
elicited tapping sounds, “spelled out communications be-
tween the living and the dead.” She argues that the phe-
nomenon of typewriting and the phenomenon of
spiritualism in the late nineteenth century are connected
by more than just coexistence in time. They both re-
flected a cultural disquiet around “visuality and textual
evidence.” People feared that without handwriting to
reveal an author’s identity and character, typewritten
documents would be suspect. In popular literature such
29
as the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, typed material often
had identifying flaws that revealed the identity of the
typist. In this way popular literature addressed and reas-
sured such anxieties.63
Other stories played upon cultural fears. In 1899,
Harper’s magazine serialized a story by Maine-born hu-
morist and editor of Puck, John Kendrick Bangs, called
The Enchanted Typewriter. This story was part of a
three-part parody featuring Sherlock Holmes as a central
character, which played upon the popular fears about
identity, authority and authorship that typewriting in-
spired. This story tells of Holmes’ “relic” of a typewriter,
an 1870s model, the operation of which fascinates him
although he prefers to compose prose by pen. Having re-
cently rediscovered the machine in his attic, he has over-
hauled it, fitted it with new ribbon and installed it in his
library, only to find that when he tried to type on it,
nothing but a “jumble” of letters came out. Then he
tried to type his name, and “William Shakespeare” ap-
peared on the paper instead. He came home from his
club on night after midnight to be startled by a clicking
sound coming from his library. More clicking ensued, fol-
lowed by the bell of a carriage return. Upon mastering his
fear and investigating, he found the machine with its
empty chair before it, “clicking merrily and as rapidly
along as though some expert young woman were in
charge . . . rattling off page after page . . .” He spoke
aloud, and a dialogue of sorts ensued:

"This beats the deuce!" I observed.

The machine stopped for an instant.

The sheet of paper upon which the im-

63
Gitelman, 187, 210-215
30
 pressions of letters were being made
flew out from under the cylinder, a
pure white sheet was as quickly sub-
stituted, and the keys clicked off the
line:

"What does?"

I presumed the line was in response to

my assertion, so I replied:

"You do. What uncanny freak has taken

possession of you to-night that you
start in to write on your own hook,
having resolutely declined to do any
writing for me ever since I rescued
you from the dust and dirt and cobwebs
of the attic?"

"You never rescued me from any attic,"

the machine replied. "You'd better go
to bed; you've dined too well, I imag-
ine. When did you rescue me from the
dust and dirt and the cobwebs of any
attic?"64

The typewriter proceeded to tell the man that it

was, in fact, Samuel Johnson’s biographer, “Jim Bos-
well.” The pages that came out of the typewriter ex-
plained, “I’m not the machine. I’m the man that’s using
it,” Jim Boswell, “editor of the Stygian Gazette,” doing
type-writing for acquaintances in Hades, “and as this ma-
chine of yours seemed to be of no use to you I thought I’d
try it.” Boswell extolled the unique qualities of the ma-
chine:

64
Bangs
31
 It has several very remarkable quali-
ties which I have never found in any
other machine. For instance, singular
to relate, Mendelssohn and I were
fooling about here the other night,
and when he saw this machine he
thought it was a spinet of some new
pattern; so what does he do but sit
down and play me one of his songs
without words on it, and, by jove!
When he got through, there was the
theme of the whole thing printed on a
sheet of paper before him."

"You don't really mean to say--" I

began.

"I'm telling you precisely what hap-

pened," said Boswell. "Mendelssohn was
tickled to death with it, and he
played every song without words that
he ever wrote, and every one of 'em
was fitted with words which he said
absolutely conveyed the ideas he meant
to bring out with the music. 65

Bangs was fond of using famous deceased people as

characters in his work, and copyright law did not keep
Victorian writers from occasionally borrowing characters
such as Sherlock Holmes from one another. What strikes
me most about this story is Bangs’ characterization of the
typewriter as Boswell’s agent, but also as much more.
Bangs’ humor depended upon his acute cultural insight,
and with this story he hit a jugular vein in the cultural
consciousness, targeting all of those unnamed imaginings
about the degree of humanity injected into certain com-
munications technologies. The anecdote about Mendels-

65
Bangs
32
sohn is particularly telling, because it assigns an agency
and intelligence to Holmes’ typewriter aside from that of
the inhabiting spirits of Boswell and Mendelssohn: the
typewriter, on its own, supplied words that “absolutely
conveyed the ideas he meant to bring out with the mu-
sic.” Here, the typewriter appears as interpretive author.
This was exactly what people suspected all along! (How
did anyone know what all of those office typewriters did
after everyone went home?)
For many years, both writing machines and the peo-
ple who operated them were known as “type writers.”
The shared label infers a kind of blurring between, or
blending of, humanity and machine. In some senses, in
the late nineteenth century, certain kinds of technolo-
gies, particularly technologies that seemed to exhibit au-
thorship and authority, and walked the line between
creation and presentation, seemed alive, animate . . .
enchanted.

33
 Writing Machines —
or Thinking Machines?

Lisa Gitelman observes that the invention of type-

writers did not produce the breach between the process
of authoring and the process of inscribing. It did, how-
ever, change the character of the breach, make people
more aware of it, and perhaps even widen it.66 As the
number of inscription modes increases, it is increasingly
clear that inscription modes can support or undermine
the authority of the inscriber, and perhaps even shape
the nature of the content.
The only thing predictable about the consequences
of technological developments is their unpredictability.
The QWERTY legacy illustrates this. So does the failure of
wax phonograph disks to replace books and letters. The
tales of the phonograph, the typewriter, and the com-
puter are instructive in their revelation of our preference
for words we can touch, for the tactile experience of
reading and writing on paper. All technologies seem to

66
Gitelman, 218.
34
somehow “rewire” our brains, but none so much as com-
munications technologies. The tale of the typewriter in
particular forces questions about the way technology
modifies our ways of working and, in so doing, our ways
of thnking. The change from carefully drawing letters to
drumming out standardized versions had to have been,
not caused by or causative of, but accompanied by, a
cognitive shift of monstrous proportions. While some
writers report significant differences between using a
typewriter and using a computer, surely the typewriter
fostered a cognitive state in which we still function, to a
degree, in the early 21st century, tapping away at our
keyboards.
To speak of a written language evolution that sees
computers as the first significant technological develop-
ment since Gutenberg reveals a deep cultural bias. There
is over a century of keyboard technology, still in exis-
tence today, that has been the locus for fundamental
shift in the nature and content of human communication.
In fact, it was the mechanical age, rather than the digital
age, that produced the first writing machines.

35
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