The "TYPE CASTING - QWERTY" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading a story in The Smithsonian titled "Type Casting."  Story was about the invention of the typewriter.  All began in 1866 when a fellow named Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper publisher, co-invented an automated machine to number coupons and tickets, a task that had always been done by hand in the past.  When Christopher first told a fellow inventor, Carlos Glidden, of his idea, Glidden said "Why don't you make a machine that will print letters as well as figures?"  Christopher shared Carlos's enthusiasm, as did a Milwaukee printer, S.W. Soule.  So, the three gentlemen set up shop on State Street in downtown Milwaukee and began work on the world's first commercially successful "Type Writer".  Wasn't long before Mr. Soule gave up and left the other two gentlemen to develop the machine.  Christopher and Carlos's first prototype had a semi-sequential keyboard layout, with all letters upper-case and the capital letter "I" doing double duty as the #1.  Seems there is some dispute as to why they came up with the letters QWERTY across the top row of letters.  Some historians believed it solved a jamming problem by spacing out the most common letters in English; others believe that it was designed specifically to help telegraphists avoid common errors when transcribing Morse code.  After about 30 test models, they settled on QWERTY...and changed the world!  Their typewriter came to market in 1874.  It was manufactured by E. Remington & Sons, which was then expanding its offerings after a lucrative spell of manufacturing firearms for the Union Army.  The first commercially successful typewriter was sold as the "Remington No. 1."  Now, even those with chicken-scratch penmanship and sloppy inkwells could share their work with the reading public.  Then in 1961, IBM introduced the Selectric typewriter which was followed by the first personal computer in the 1970s and then the first keyed Blackberry in 1999.  And...the QWERTY has not perished!!!  And now, our children learn how to type, just as we did, with the top row beginning with QWERTY.  Do you know how easy that is to type QWERTY on my computer??  It's like running my fingernail across the keys on a piano and enjoying it! Anyway...in 1925, the columnist Marian Tallman counseled a reader seeking a good, affordable typewriter.  "You want to be sure it's of standard make.  Look and see if the upper row of letters begins with QWERTY.  If so, you have a good typewriter!  And so it ends!!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.