- Jason Puskar: The original prototypes
of all these typewriters
that the Sholes group made had piano keyboards.
[bright music]
- Kacie Lucchini Butcher: What are we even doing here?
Sergio seemed more excited than usual.
- Cat Phan: I have no idea.
All I know is he said to come to Milwaukee right away
for some big Wisconsin history news.
- Sergio González: Oh, guys, guys, guys,
I'm so happy you're here.
You're not gonna believe this.
I just learned about a Wisconsin invention
that's used all over the world.
It might be the most widely-used invention from Wisconsin.
- Is it cheese?
- I'm pretty sure cheese wasn't invented in Wisconsin.
- Yeah, but we perfected it. - Guys, it's not cheese.
It's something you have on you right now.
Take out your phones.
Okay, all right, now, look at the keyboard.
You see the Q, W, E, R, T, Y at the top there?
- Mm-hmm.
- The QWERTY keyboard was invented
right here in Milwaukee!
And they have an entire event
that celebrates the QWERTY keyboard and typewriters.
Guys, I'm going to QWERTYFEST.
- Ooh! - Let's go.
Molly, thanks for having us here.
Really appreciate it.
Where are we?
- Molly Snyder: We are at Turner Hall in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
and we are at the opening night party of QWERTYFEST.
- So, what are some of the things that people do
at QWERTYFEST?
- Molly: We have a lot of type-ins.
We also have a lot of live music.
We have the Boston Typewriter Orchestra here tonight.
They play their typewriters as instruments.
We have a retro gaming lounge.
We have a lot of vending, a lot of book sales.
- Tell me a little bit about who would come to QWERTYFEST.
What's the typical QWERTYFEST attendee?
- You would think it would just be a bunch of nerds like myself.
And there there are a lot of us.
It's also writers.
It's artists.
It's people who love history, Milwaukee history.
But it's also about taking all of this great stuff
that happened in Milwaukee
and moving it with us forward into the future
to keep that innovation going.
[typewriter keys clicking] - So, why is there
a whole festival dedicated to typewriters
and the QWERTY keyboard in Milwaukee?
Well, the typewriter as we know it today
was invented in Milwaukee.
Sort of.
If we look at the historical evidence,
there were lots of people who developed writing machines
during the 1800s.
The first known typewriter-like device dates back to 1808.
That's when the Italian inventor Pellegrino Turri built a machine
for his friend, the Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano.
The Countess was blind,
and Turri wanted to make her a machine
she could use for writing.
Dozens of other inventors in the 1800s
worked on their own designs.
Many of them were also trying to make machines
that could be used by people
with visual or physical disabilities.
But it was Milwaukee in the 1860s and '70s
where all the pieces really came together,
including the QWERTY keyboard.
Who is the inventor credited with creating the keyboard?
- In truth, it was a really big team effort.
The person who gets most of the open credit
is a man named Christopher Latham Sholes,
who was a newspaper editor and a printer
working with a colleague named Samuel Soulé.
And they were trying to make a new gizmo
that would number the pages of booklets.
Another man, Carlos Glidden,
was working on an automatic shovel system.
And Glidden said, "You know,
"if you can make a machine that numbers the pages of booklets,
"you can just make a machine that writes.
Why don't we all get together and do that?"
And they did.
- Christopher Latham Sholes may not have invented
the very first typewriter,
but he did play a major role in its history and modern form,
most notably in the development of the QWERTY keyboard
still in use today.
Sholes and other colleagues in a Milwaukee makerspace
worked on 25 or 30 or more designs
in the years from 1867 to 1873,
continually refining the original idea.
In early 1873, the businessman George Washington Newton Yost
negotiated a deal
with the arms manufacturer E. Remington and Sons.
They were looking to enter new markets
following the end of the Civil War.
Remington began manufacturing Sholes' design
in September 1873,
and the first models shipped early in 1874.
QWERTY, why did it end up with those letters
in that order?
How did the keyboard end up the way it was?
- I'll tell you why it's not.
And this is the most common myth of QWERTY
is that they scrambled the letters to slow down typing.
And if you think about it for a couple of minutes,
how long would it take you to master a new arrangement?
We've all done it, right?
It's not gonna slow you down for very long.
There are a couple principles that you can observe
in your QWERTY keyboard that you might not have noticed.
We think of the letters as scrambled,
but they're not as scrambled as you think.
If you look at the middle row, take out S,
everything's in alphabetical order left to right.
- Oh! - There you go.
- That's cool.
- You never noticed, right? - Pretty cool.
- Jason: All the vowels went to the top row,
except for A, which starts the second row,
and on the bottom row, except for C and B,
everything is in alphabetical order from right to left.
And the reason for that
is that the original prototypes of all these typewriters
that the Sholes group made had piano keyboards.
[hosts murmuring]
And the letters of the alphabet went on the black keys,
A through M on the black keys, and on the white keys,
they went back the other way, N through Z.
So if you look on your QWERTY keyboard to this day,
A is on the left, is right above Z,
exactly as it would've been on these old piano keyboards
that were the prototypes up to about 1871.
- So, how did we go from piano keys
to the more familiar shapes we know today?
It's probably linked to the story of the telegraph
and telegraph operators.
- Nobody knew who a typewriter was for
when they started making typewriters.
Who's gonna use this?
Sholes thought maybe telegraphers would use it
to transcribe incoming Morse code messages.
There was a peculiarity of Morse code
back at that point, American Morse code.
And as a result, there were ambiguities.
A sequence of two letters [beeping]
might seem exactly the same
as another code for one letter. [beeping]
And so, if you're doing an incoming message,
you actually have to wait a little bit to decide,
what does the context tell me?
Is that the single letter,
or is it these two different letters?
And some of those ambiguous combinations
are on the left side of the keyboard,
are all grouped together.
The transcriber can have his finger poised,
listening for what the word is
before he commits to two letters or one letter,
which will sound very similar in Morse code.
And one of the reasons we know
he was thinking hard about Morse code
is very early typewriters have a special key.
It's three dots vertically,
and that is the Morse code symbol for paragraph break.
- Oh! - Oh!
Whoa. - That's cool.
- What made Milwaukee the perfect place
for this to happen? - You know, there's no reason
why it necessarily had to happen in Milwaukee,
but I think the reason it did happen in Milwaukee
is we got very lucky.
We had a post-Civil War economy
with a lot of surplus American tinkerers
who needed something to do.
And then you had German Milwaukee,
with all of these really expert, skilled craftsmen.
And neither of those could have done it on their own.
- Many early typewriters were created
to address physical and visual accessibility needs.
But what about typing and accessibility needs today?
I'm here with my friend Kate to talk about it.
Hi, Kate. - Kate Melber: Hi.
Nice to be here.
- Tell me about all these cool tools that you brought.
- Of course.
Okay, so collectively,
these are all tools that you would use
to read and write in Braille.
This first thing here is a stylus and slate.
And these are, this is an early tool for writing in Braille.
Another thing that I have here
is a refreshable Braille display.
This is kind of like a Braille computer.
And then finally, I have a brailler, a Perkins Brailler.
It was developed at the Perkins School for the Blind.
Can I show you what typing on it looks like?
- Yeah! - Okay, cool.
So, let's type the word apple.
Braille works on a matrix of six dots.
And that's how you determine every letter,
every piece of punctuation, everything that you wanna type.
When you wanna type, each letter is its own cell,
is its own grid.
And you have to press all the keys at the same time
for whatever dots you're creating.
For the letter A, that's simple.
We're just gonna type dot one.
Easy peasy.
Typing the word apple, then we're gonna move to a P.
You have to press dots one, two, three, and four
all at the same time.
- Kacie: Whoa! - Yeah, okay.
P, do another P.
L, dots one, two, and three.
- Kacie: Okay. - And then E, one and five.
And then, I don't know if you can see,
but there, you can actually feel it if you want to,
written over here on this piece of paper.
- Oh, yeah! - Kate: Yeah.
- So, basically this functions like a typewriter,
but to type out Braille. - Yes, that's right.
- So, I have to ask, who is your friend here?
- This is Nora, and she is my guide and mobility dog.
And she just goes everywhere where I go. [chuckles]
[typewriter keys clicking] - Christopher Latham Sholes
may not have invented the typewriter,
but he and his fellow Milwaukeeans
did play a major role in its history and modern form,
most notably in the development of the QWERTY keyboard,
still in use today.
Milwaukee in the 1860s and '70s
had the right combination of curious tinkerers
and skilled engineers to give us an invention
used by billions of people all around the world.
The story of QWERTY and the typewriter is an example
of how lots of people kept reworking their ideas
in the quest for better designs.
And even if QWERTY isn't the perfect keyboard,
we're happy to have it
and don't think it's going away anytime soon.
[typewriter dinging]
- Oh, I'm gonna pronounce the Italian wrong, I just know it.
Countess Carolina van Tony Da...
It's...
Pellegrino Too-reek. [all laughing]
You guys are always throw--
There's a lot of Italian in here, you guys.