
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, June 23, 1990                   TAG: 9006260388
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

QWERTY? MORE THAN A CENTURY OF TAPPING

A GERMAN named Johann Gutenberg is credited with being the first to print with movable type, in the 15th century. It took 400 more years for humans to perfect a way to put uniform letters and numbers on paper quickly without using a printing press. On this date in 1868, three Milwaukee men were granted an American patent for the typewriter. It would become the most widely used business machine in the world.

The device patented by Carlos Glidden, Christopher L. Sholes and Samuel W. Soule resembled a tiny piano. Six years later they had an improved version that looked very much like the models that would be used for the next century.

They succeeded where many others had failed. But the Milwaukeeans had trouble raising capital to produce and sell their machine. So in 1873 they sold the rights to the Remington Arms Co., which put it on the market the next year. From one corporation came both guns and opinion-facilitators. Not since then, perhaps, have those who defend the First Amendment and others who prize the Second Amendment been quite so close.

Over the years, the typewriter evolved. Portables appeared in the early 1900s, electrics in the 1920s. A couple of decades later, the electrics did away with the familiar type "basket" and substituted a rotating ball that had the same characters. The machines steadily became lighter, sleeker and easier to operate.

Today, typewriters remain in wide use, but they are being shouldered aside by electronics. The word processor is more flexible, allowing copy to be stored and duplicated many times; changes and corrections can readily be made, eliminating tedious retyping.

All fast, efficient and modern: the last word. But wait a second. A close look at a photograph of that 1873 typewriter reveals the QWERTY arrangement of keys laboriously learned by millions of typists over more than a century - and still in use on today's word processors.

QWERTY is notoriously outdated. Back in the 1930s, a University of Washington psychologist, August Dvorak, was demonstrating that with his different keyboard arrangement, a typist's speed could increase by as much as 25 percent. The Navy even ordered 2,000 such machines during World War II. But the war ended before the new system could gain a foothold.

People such as Ralph Nader see a conspiracy: The typewriter companies and secretarial schools don't want an increase in productivity. Others see the same resistance to change that's held back the switch to metric measurements. QWERTY is a monument to individual human inertia. Habit can be stronger, even, than technology.

by CNB