THIERRY GUITARD

Many of the early inventors of the typewriter thought that what they were inventing was a prosthetic device for the blind. Why would ordinary writers need a writing machine? They had pens. Eventually, it became clear that such a mechanism could benefit the seeing, too, but, as we find out in “The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting” (Cornell; $29.95), by Darren Wershler-Henry, a professor of communication studies in Ontario, almost two centuries, roughly the eighteenth and the nineteenth, passed before that hope was realized. There was no single moment of discovery, no lone inventor crying “Eureka!” in a darkened laboratory. On the contrary, historians estimate that the typewriter was invented at least fifty-two times, as one tinkerer after another groped toward a usable design. One early writing mechanism looks like a birthday cake, another like a pinball machine. One was almost eight feet tall; another, a Tyrolean entry, was whittled largely from wood. Until about the eighteen-thirties, all typewriters lacked a keyboard, and when they got one it was usually modelled on that of the piano. Nor did they have a ribbon. That didn’t make its appearance until 1841; in most earlier machines the keys were inked by rollers or carbon paper.

As with all inventions, however, people want to know who the “father” was, and that title is usually awarded to Christopher Latham Sholes, from Milwaukee. It is strange and pleasing that a machine famed for its cold efficiency issued from the hands of this modest and distracted man. (“He wore battered hats,” one historian says. “His trousers were inches too short.”) Sholes was apparently trying to invent a mechanical paginator—a device that would number the pages of a document sequentially—when he read an article on the typewriter in Scientific American and switched to that instead. The design he came up with was in many ways no better than previous ones, and he had little part in the typewriter’s later history. He soon disowned the machine—refused to use one or even to recommend its use. Nevertheless, his model was the first to be successfully marketed. In the eighteen-seventies, the arms manufacturer E. Remington & Sons was looking for a new product line; the Civil War was over, and rifles were less in demand. Sholes’s typewriter seemed a good bet. In 1873, Remington put it on the market, attached to a sewing-machine table, and made a bundle.

Sholes was also the author of the so-called QWERTY keyboard, which, with a few modifications, is still in use on our personal computers. (Look at the top row of your letter keys.) A problem with early typewriters was that the key arms kept getting stuck together. As the arm of the letter that had just been typed was falling back into place, it would jam against the arm rising to type the next letter, and the typist would have to stop and pry them apart. Reportedly, Sholes’s partner delegated his son-in-law, the superintendent of schools for western Pennsylvania, to draw up a list of the most common two-letter sequences in the English language. Sholes then designed the keyboard so that these pairs were separated, thus introducing a tiny delay between the activation of one letter and the next. Wershler-Henry quotes an early history of the typewriter, Bruce Bliven’s “The Wonderful Writing Machine,” to the effect that the QWERTY keyboard was in fact “considerably less efficient than if the arrangement had been left to chance.” Nevertheless, people got used to it, and it was never replaced.

Wershler-Henry follows the fortunes of the typewriter into the twentieth century, with special emphasis on the role of women in the story. In the beginning, few people imagined that anyone would compose at the machine. The user of the typewriter would be an amanuensis—in other words, a secretary—taking dictation from another person. Accordingly, in the early days the word “typewriter” was used to mean not just the machine but the person plying it. That person, the Remington folks assumed, would be a woman. (The flowers printed on the casing of the early models were to make the mechanism seem friendly to the weaker sex.) Remington’s prediction was correct. It was often as typists that women poured into the professional workforce at the turn of the century. By 1910, according to the Census Bureau, eighty-one per cent of professional typists were female. Guardians of the social order warned that this development would have baleful consequences. It would unsex women; it would spell the end of the American family. They were right, in part. Together with other social changes, the availability of typing jobs no doubt did weaken the family’s hold on women. As for unsexing them, the effect was the opposite. Wershler-Henry documents the entry of the “typewriter girl” into the iconography of early-twentieth-century pornography. He also gives us illustrations, from the so-called Tijuana Bibles, dirty comic books produced in Mexico, starting in the nineteen-thirties, for the American market. In one panel, a three-piece-suited executive, staring at his secretary’s thigh, says, “Miss Higby, are you ready for—ahem!—er—dictation?” Such a situation did not lead swiftly to Miss Higby’s empowerment, but for a woman to have a job, any job, outside the home was part of the humble beginnings of twentieth-century feminism.

Wershler-Henry covers these matters in the first half of his book. But he is a scholar of the postmodern persuasion, and, as he soon tells us, his interest is not in the typewriter’s history but in its “discourse.” In the postmodern vocabulary, this means the web of assumptions that collect around a cultural fact, with heavy emphasis on notions that have been unmasked as naïve and ridiculous by French theorists. The names of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard come up frequently in the book, and Wershler-Henry has a couple of propositions, consistent with those men’s theories, that he wants us to agree with. First, he says, in the age of the typewriter—the twentieth century, more or less—there was a mythology that what was typewritten was true, that the machine somehow caused writers to bare their souls. This is a central idea of “The Iron Whim,” and it calls forth some of Wershler-Henry’s most atmospheric prose: “The typewriter has become the symbol of a non-existent sepia-toned era when people typed passionately late into the night under the flickering light of a single naked bulb, sleeves rolled up, suspenders hanging down, lighting each new cigarette off the smouldering butt of the last, occasionally taking a pull from the bottle of bourbon in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet.” Wershler-Henry’s second big point is that people believed that what was typewritten was dictated, by a voice separate from the person typing; even people composing at the typewriter thought they were receiving dictation from elsewhere. Both these ideas are surprising—furthermore, they seem to contradict each other—but Wershler-Henry never really tries to prove them or reconcile them. He just asserts them, repeatedly. Never mind. They make him think of good stories to tell us about the typewriter.

Nietzsche used a typewriter. This is hard to imagine, but in the effort to stem his migraines and his incipient blindness—symptoms, some scholars say, of an advanced case of syphilis—he bought one of the new contraptions. So did Mark Twain, and he was the first important writer to deliver a typewritten manuscript, “Life on the Mississippi,” to a publisher. Henry James also had a typewriter, and a secretary, to whom he dictated. That is a famous fact; it is said to have contributed to the extreme complexity of James’s late-period style. (But why would oral composition make a writer’s prose more complex, rather than more simple? Again, Wershler-Henry does not address the question.) James got used to the sound of his Remington; when it was in the repair shop and he had to use a loaner, the new machine’s different sound drove him crazy. For many years after his death, his devoted typist, Theodora Bosanquet, claimed that she was still receiving dictation from him. Indeed, through her spirit medium she was informed that Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and John Galsworthy, all as dead as James, also wanted to use her stenographic services.