Chapter 8
One of the “quill drivers” or “pen pushers” from the nineteenth century was the title character of Herman Melville’s famous short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” Hired by a lawyer to copy legal documents as the third scrivener in a firm, he laboriously works his pen while holed up in his office day after day. He and his colleagues are latter-day monks in an industrial-era scriptorium. After an initial spurt of energetic copying, Bartleby stops doing any writing. Then he stops doing anything at all. He responds to every request, either passive-aggressively or in the spirit of civil disobedience, with the phrase “I prefer not to.” Eventually, Bartleby prefers not to write, move, or, eventually, eat. It is rumored, at the end of the story, that Bartleby’s job after the legal office was in that most moribund of places for the handwriter: the Dead Letter Office.
As with the Spencerian and Palmer Method manuals that instructed students to do handwriting drills for six to twelve hours a day, Melville’s story about the repetitive, dulling actions of the scribe’s work reveals both the importance and drudgery of pen and paper in mid-nineteenth-century America. Even after a boy finished school and went to work, if handwriting was part of his job description, it was anything but creative or expressive. Not only was the work unending, but it could not be hurried. Handwriting was—and is—slow. The year Melville’s story was published, 1853, the handwriting speed record was 30 words a minute.*1
Not surprisingly, many people in America and elsewhere were tinkering with prototypes of a “writing machine” that would allow letters to be stamped quickly, instead of being slowly formed using loops and curves. It would also allow letters, documents, and manuscripts to be read more quickly as well, because the writing would be uniform and more accommodating to the eye. By the 1860s several such machines had been invented; however, none of these proto-typewriters sped up the pace of writing. The first people to use “type-writers,” as they were immediately called, went slower than 30 words per minute when they typed. Nor were typewriters economical: the early models cost about $100, whereas pens went for about a dime.2
One inventor, Christopher Lapham Sholes, eventually developed a model for a writing machine with more potential, and sold it to E. Remington & Sons. In post–Civil War America, the demand for Eliphalet Remington’s legendary rifles was waning, so he decided to beat guns into typewriters. He and co-inventor Carlos Glidden marketed the new product, a heavy, loud metal machine mounted on a table with a treadle at the bottom, as the Sholes & Glidden “Type Writer.” It cost $125 and looked like a jury-rigged sewing machine.
It was no viral sensation. Not only was it costly, but it was also heavy, cumbersome, and noisy. In Jack London’s novel John Barleycorn, the protagonist has one of the early models and reports that “it sounded like distant thunder of someone breaking up the furniture … I had to hit the keys so hard that I strained my first fingers to the elbows, while the ends of my fingers were blisters burst and blistered again.” The only way you could see the letters you had written was by lifting the carriage up and peering inside.
Authors were early adopters of the typewriter. This was partially calculated. In the 1870s and 1880s, typewriter manufacturers marketed the machines primarily to novelists and clergymen, thinking they were the most likely to use them, as they generally wrote the most (in terms of volume of words) at the time. When the first Remingtons went on the market, only four hundred of the initial one thousand produced were sold. One of those four hundred was bought by a man always eager to get the latest gadget: Mark Twain. He saw his first typewriter in a shop window in 1874 and asked to see how it worked. As he remembered years later:
The salesman explained it to us, showed us samples of its work, and said it could do fifty-seven words a minute—a statement which we frankly confessed that we did not believe. So he put his type-girl to work, and we timed her by the watch. She actually did the fifty-seven in sixty seconds. We were partly convinced, but said it probably couldn’t happen again. But it did. We timed the girl over and over again—with the same result always: she won out. She did her work on narrow slips of paper, and we pocketed them as fast as she turned them out, to show as curiosities … I bought one, and we went away very much excited.
At the hotel we got out our slips and were a little disappointed to find that they contained the same words. The girl had economized time and labor by using a formula which she knew by heart. However, I argued—safely enough—that the FIRST type-girl must naturally take rank with the first billiard-player: neither of them could be expected to get out of the game any more than a third or a half of what was in it. If the machine survived—IF it survived—experts would come to the front, by and by, who would double the girl’s output without a doubt. They would do one hundred words a minute—my talking speed on the platform.3
Twain went home and “played with the toy, repeating and repeating and repeating ‘The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck’ until I could turn that boy’s adventure out at the rate of 12 words a minute.” But he used it only for show. After Twain was done playing, he “reverted to pen and paper for all other writing.” He kept the typewriter, but “only worked the machine to astonish visitors.”
Twain eventually determined what would be true for male professionals in the next century: the best way to use a typewriter was to hire a female type-writer to take dictation. Twain “hired a young woman, and did my first dictating (letters, merely) … The machine did not do both capitals and lower case … but only capitals. Gothic capitals they were, and sufficiently ugly.” 4
A boy wrote Twain a letter, hoping for a specimen of Twain’s handwriting and an autograph. Twain decided to foil him by sending him a machine-made response: “I furnished it—in type-machine capitals, signature and all. It was long; it was a sermon; it contained advice; also reproaches. I said writing was my trade, my bread and butter: I said it was not fair to ask a man to give away samples of his trade; would he ask the blacksmith for a horseshoe? Would he ask the doctor for a corpse?”
Twain would subsequently brag in his autobiography that he was “the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature.” He did not actually bang out the words but rather dictated parts of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. As he wrote, a “young woman … copied a considerable part of a book of mine.” 5 “Dictating autobiography to a typewriter is a new experience for me, but it goes very well, and is going to save time and ‘language’—the kind of language that soothes vexation,” he wrote.
Even with his hired help and the ability to have his words recorded for him, Twain soon tired of the awkward pedals, capital letters, and blind typing afforded by the first Remington model. When the company asked him to shill for the product, Twain refused.
Twain described the machine in 1905, remembering his first experiences with it decades earlier, as “full of caprices, full of defects—devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to [William Dean] Howells [the novelist and editor of the Atlantic Monthly]. He was reluctant, for he was suspicious of novelties and unfriendly toward them, and he remains so to this day. But I persuaded him. He had great confidence in me, and I got him to believe things about the machine that I did not believe myself. He took it home to Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered.”
Gradually, the machine improved. In 1896, Remington added a carriage return, a convenient feature, and in 1898, Underwood rolled out a new model whose keys struck the top of the page so the letters could be seen as they were made. Sales started to pick up as typewriters became more user-friendly. By 1905, when Twain first published those memories of his adventures with the typewriter, Remington again asked him for a product endorsement. This time he said yes. In Harper’s magazine Remington ran an ad featuring a picture of the 1875 model Twain made fun of, alongside Twain’s snarky review. Below it was a picture of the 1905 model accompanied by a more recent endorsement:
I have dictated to a typewriter before. Between that experience and the present one there lies a mighty gap—more than thirty years! It is sort of a lifetime. In that wide interval much has happened—to the type-machine as well as to the rest of us. At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about: the person who DOESN’T own one is a curiosity.
Twain was not the only novelist who was an early adopter of the typewriter. Henry James acquired the typewriter in the 1880s and became addicted to it: “He … reached a state at which the click of a Remington machine acted as a positive spur … During a fortnight when the Remington was out of order he dictated to an Olivetti typewriter with evident discomfort, and he found it almost disconcerting to speak to something that made no responsive sound at all.”6
By the 1890s, James began dictating all his novels to a secretary, who typed the author’s words as he said them aloud. At first James found it hard to find such an amanuensis who would understand his words. As he put it, “The young typists are mainly barbarians, and the civilized here are not typists,” he declared, noting that hiring a woman was “an economy” over his previously male secretary.7
Dictating to a female type-writer alleviated the problem of James’s poor handwriting. As he wrote in a letter to George Bernard Shaw:
I have been rather sharply unwell and obliged to stay my hand, for some days, from the pen. I am, thank goodness, better, but still not penworthy—and in fact feel as if I should never be so again in the presence of the beautiful and hopeless example your inscribed page sets me. Still another form of your infinite variety, this exquisite application of your ink to your paper! It is indeed humiliating. But I bear up, or try to—and the more that I can dictate, at least when I absolutely must.8
Some claim that the difference between James’s “early” and “middle” styles stems from this move to dictation in the 1890s enabled by the typewriter. By 1907 he was doing it for all his work. As his secretary later remembered, once he started dictating, “its effects [became] easily recognisable in his style, which became more and more free, involved, unanswered talk … It all seems, he once explained, ‘to be much more effectively and unceasingly pulled out of me in speech than in writing.’ ”*9 Typewriter manufacturers began marketing their machines as alleviating some of the physical ills that ensue from the hours of handwriting that people like Bartleby, whose job involved creating documents, had to endure. The typewriter was advertised as a faster way to get work done that would also “guard against pen paralysis, loss of sight, and curvature of the spine.”
This pitch initially failed to win over many businesses, because even if it was better for worker health, typewritten correspondence was deemed insulting and unprofessional. Nor did private individuals respond to the machine, as most assumed a typewritten personal letter had been dictated to a third party, and this was perceived as an invasion of privacy. Others felt receiving a typewritten letter indirectly implied the writer thought they were too uneducated to read longhand.10
In Jack London’s 1909 fictionalized autobiography Martin Eden, the eponymous hero is a self-made writer who sends handwritten manuscripts of his short stories to magazine editors. Most are unceremoniously sent back to him, the rejections all typewritten. Frustrated by being turned down everywhere, Martin reads in a newspaper that “manuscripts should always be typewritten,” rents a typewriter, spends a day learning how to use it, and begins to type up the handwritten stories. Some are accepted. Martin realizes only typewritten manuscripts will be taken seriously by literary editors, but he is often broke, and typewriters are expensive. He starts a cycle wherein he buys a typewriter, then hawks it when he needs money for food, and then buys it back again after he makes a sale.
To Martin, however, typewritten correspondence is off-putting because it is overly mechanical. He imagines editors as “cogs in a machine,” echoing Bartleby’s discomfort with being a slave to the quill. And Martin’s writing becomes more mechanical as well when he follows the advice of writers’ magazines to produce “machine-made storyettes.” London’s novel shows the transition from typewriters as a novelty to typewriters as the primary technology for writing.
To ease that transition, some companies offered “bridge” technologies not unlike what Apple, with its many print-based features, such as “copy and paste,” did for early adopters of personal computers. For instance, one company offered an automatic form-letter typing machine that would produce a document indistinguishable from a handwritten letter. Another marketed—unsuccessfully, it appears—a typewriter whose letter keys were formed from handwriting of the buyer.
Eventually, most reservations were overcome, and typewriting became acceptable for business and personal correspondence. By 1910, two million typewriters had been sold.11
Although one would expect outcries against the typewriter from penmanship proponents, the early response from educators to the typewriter was largely positive. It helped with spelling and punctuation, teachers claimed: “Teachers had noticed, early in the game, that the clarity of machine writing forced people to improve their spelling and punctuation. The penman, in doubt about whether the ‘i’ should proceed the ‘e,’ had usually written an ambiguous ‘ie’ that could be taken for ‘ei.’ Or had made the entire word a snakelike ripple that could be understood only from context.” Others believed the typewriter helped children learn to read early: Entranced by the machine, they would start playing with it and, by default, learn their letters.12 Researchers found that “familiarity with the typewriter makes students better penmen, not worse. The typewritten word seems to set a standard for neatness.”13
That enthusiasm aside, after typing had become common, some groups began to lament the loss of proper penmanship instruction. “Since the introduction of the typewriter in our junior high schools, there is a tendency to minimize the importance of the teaching of handwriting,” wrote a Pittsburgh school administrator in 1924.14 In 1938 the New York Times published an article, “Of Lead Pencils,” that warned, “Writing with one’s own hand seems to be disappearing, and the universal typewriter may swallow all.”15
The placement of the keys on the typewriter greatly influenced the speed of the typist. The letters were arranged into an idiosyncratic pattern—that, despite it being inefficient and of no purpose to us today, remains: the QWERTY keyboard. QWERTY was invented in 1873 in order to separate common letter pairs, preventing type bars from sticking together when struck sequentially. But QWERTY keyboards did not come with any instruction manual for how best to use them. Most people used either two or four fingers to type.
In 1888, Frank McGurrin created a system that all people could use, one that would be the most efficient. His system is what we now call touch-typing. He went on the road, showing off his speedy new method, shocking people that he could hit keys without looking at them and using all ten fingers.
McGurrin challenged anyone to beat his speed. Louis Traub, a typewriting teacher in Cincinnati, took the bet. Traub was dismissive of the ten-finger system, asserting that four were enough. McGurrin and Traub dueled in Cincinnati in 1888, racing to see who could more quickly and accurately complete forty-five minutes of direct dictation and forty-five minutes of copying from an unfamiliar script. McGurrin, with his ten fingers and the “home keys” method of placement, won decisively.
The media and public were fascinated by the spectacle of typing contests. Going fast was becoming a cultural phenomenon in an increasingly industrialized America, and typing speed contests fit perfectly into this general speedup. Over the next few decades, typing races were a craze, and highly competitive.
Charles E. Smith had developed the Underwood Speed Training Group on Vesey Street in New York City. There, dozens of typists practiced eight hours a day. They had custom-fit racing typewriters: souped-up machines built for speed that they took to matches, exhibitions, and the world championships. Inside the warehouse on Vesey Street the training was intense, with each typist aware of how fast fellow competitors were going by the sound of the keys clicking.
Smith constantly tinkered with his system, introducing a new technique, the speed paper insert, that would take a second off a typist’s time for each page; the typist had to take out a completed page and insert a new one while simultaneously moving the carriage return to the right.
Competitions were tense, with rows of people sitting at their machines. When the race started, the sounds of the machines typing about 140 words a minute was cacophonous. Each mistake penalized the competitor 10 words on his average. Mistakes included “writing more than seventy-six or less than sixty-one letters in a line,” “if a letter failed to strike exactly in the middle of its space, or if the margin was not perfectly even, or if the escapement jumped a space.”16 Hitting the wrong letter, missing words, or misspelling were also mistakes.
Smith recruited a secretarial student, Stella Willins, who developed the capacity to type 264 words per minute when she was able to memorize in advance and type for one minute only.17 At the peak of the “sport” of touch-typing, Willins won the world championships in 1926.
Being a fast typist—like having good handwriting in the early days of the Renaissance—was a pathway to social mobility. One of the champion speed typists, Cortez Peters (141 words per minute of unfamiliar script), would go on to found one of the first black-owned business school franchises. Eventually, touch-typing made it into the educational curriculum and was taught in newly established high school courses in typewriting.
Only once typing became the de facto method to conduct business correspondence and keep records did handwriting assume the associations we have with it today: a way to express one’s uniqueness and personality. It is only in the twentieth century that handwriting becomes evidence of—and a way to analyze—the individual psyche.
* To illustrate this speed, going at the rate of 30 words per minute—the very fastest anyone could write—you would not finish copying the first sentence of this paragraph in one minute. The average pace was even slower.
* Contemporary author Richard Powers is a latter-day James in this regard. He has used voice recognition software for years and defends the practice as aiding his creativity: “Writing is the act of accepting the huge shortfall between the story in the mind and what hits the page … For that, no interface will ever be clean or invisible enough for us to get the passage right.” As Socrates knew, writing can never be unmediated in the way speech is. It always requires a technology.