In June 2016, the Farmer’s Almanac honored inventor Christopher Latham Sholes for the patent he received on June 23, 1868, for the first “type-writer.” Being in my wiseapple mood that day, I commented, as follows:
Little did he realize the enormity of the Pandora's Box he was opening. First, the new invention put veteran scribes out of work. As if that wasn't enough, trees were chopped down to provide paper to roll over the platens of the confounded gadgets.
And, then, when it seemed as though both the economy and the forests had recovered from the shock of it all, another man invented another contraption known as the personal computer. With borrowed keyboard technology from the typewriter, the personal computer put the secretaries, bookkeepers, draftsmen, and others out of work. If any advantage came from the personal computer, it was that fewer trees were felled with the advent of the paperless office.
As I wrote those lines, it occurred to me that the invention of the typewriter must have been seen as an unwelcome intrusion into the lives of those 19th century citizens. In a day and age when beautiful penmanship was valued highly, along came a clattering contraption with irregular letters that were made more irregular by the varying strength of the fingers that typed them.
Similarly, the personal computer might well be said to have helped to foster the women’s liberation movement. No longer were support positions available for those who needed to work. Now, those working women were pushed into the professional ranks, where they still would have to type; albeit, their own reports. Women who came along before women’s liberation and had too many responsibilities of home and family to go back to school to study for one of those professions were left out in the cold – much as those 19th century scribes were a hundred years before.
A Pandora’s Box, indeed!
And, yet, we know that, besides death and taxes, the only thing that is constant in life is change. Today, even personal computers are passé. Except for a few of us who came up on typewriters and feel we can only type on full-sized keyboards, typists have come to use smaller and smaller computerized keyboards. Indeed, typing has reached the point where the touch typing method developed by Frank McGurrin is reserved for serious typing, while most daily typing is done with two fingers on hand-held, flat-screen images of McGurrin’s QWERTY keyboard.
Yes! The two-fingered method of hunting and pecking has returned!
Where will written communication go from here? We can only imagine, although one suggestion is the improvement of voice-activated typing. Instead of hunting and pecking or touch typing, one would simply speak into a microphone and leave the typing to a machine. The technology has been around for several decades, yet it remains grossly imperfect in its search for familiar words not necessarily the words spoken. The problem is that no two people speak alike, and the machine cannot discern the different enunciations. Until a system is devised that makes that distinction, it seems likely that voice-activated typing and its applications, including closed captioning, will not emerge from beta testing.
This article was typed using Frank McGurrin’s touch typing method upon a personal computer using a full-sized keyboard.
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