THE UPPER AND LOWER CASE FOR (TYPEWRITTEN) LETTERS

VISITORS to the typewriter museum invariably express astonishment when the origin of the “Shift” key on a computer keyboard is demonstrated to them. I point it out by shifting the carriage on my 1878 Remington No 2 standard typewriter, the first model capable of producing type in upper and lower case letters. Of course, hardly any of the hundreds of millions of people who press a “Shift” key dozens of times on an hourly basis ever stop to wonder: “Why is it called a ‘Shift’ key? It doesn’t shift anything.”

The carriage shifting demonstration invariably leads to another conversation - one about the origin of the terms “upper case” and “lower case” letters. And that, in turn, offers an opportunity to explain the layout of the QWERTY keyboard – yet again using the 148-year-old Rem 2, in this case to show the circular typebasket, with which typebars can’t jam. (It’s interesting to note that in its 1911 tribute to Byron Alden Brooks, the one-time higher maths teacher who perfected the Rem 2’s carriage shifting device, ‘Typewriter Topics’ referred to the Remington No 1 as teaching people “the possibilities of speed on a writing machine …” So much for the numbskulls who claim QWERTY was designed to slow down typists!)

But let’s get back to the “upper and lower case letters” conversation. Having haunted a printing works from the age of 10, in 1958, I’ve been familiar with typesetter’s cases for going on toward 70 years. Yet it’s still difficult to explain, especially to people who have never seen such a case, why these wonderful creations offer the answer to the enigma of QWERTY. (Mark Twain, once himself a newspaper typesetter, picked up the clue the first time he ever used a QWERTY keyboard – on a Sholes and Glidden typewriter back in 1874.) Latham Sholes’s son Louis told ‘Typewriter Topics’ in May 1909 that he and his father “went to work to study out an arrangement by which the ‘printers’ lower case’ could be adjusted to the use of both hands and all fingers, resulting in the keyboard [QWERTY] now universally adopted by the standard makers.”

Last week, I came across what I’ve long felt the need to use when trying to describe where the terms “upper case” and “lower case” letters come from – an old wood engraving. On a research trip to Uralla in the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, my wife and I came across one of those bookshops one usually only gets to see in dreams. It’s called Burnet’s Books and it’s run by a former Eton College teacher on Bridge Street in Uralla. On the footpath outside, night and day (at night only honesty payments are possible), Ross Burnett had a stack of volumes of the 1880 ‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge for the People, Illustrated with Maps and Numerous Wood Engravings’. I choose Volume XI, because it included entries under the general heading of “Type”, and left my $5 beside the stack.

Here, then, is the description of typesetting. It explains exactly what Louis Sholes told ‘Typewriter Topics’ about the origin of QWERTY, in New York City 29 years after this volume was published. “In the lower [case], no alphabetical arrangement is preserved; each letter has a larger or smaller box allotted to it, according as it is more or less frequently required; and all those letters most in request are placed at the nearest convenient distance to the compositor. By this ingenious and irregular division of the lower cases, much time is saved to the compositor, who requires no label to direct him to the spot where lies the particular letter he wants. To a stranger, nothing appears so remarkable as the rapidity with which a compositor does his work; but habit very soon leads the hands rapidly and mechanically to the letter required.”

Remind you of anything?

(Typewriter) Screw Loose

It’s coming up this month to the 91st anniversary of Jesse Owens’s remarkable achievement of establishing six world records on the one afternoon at Ferry Field in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His long jump record of 26 feet 8¼ inches (8.13m) stood for a quarter of a century. Later, Bob Beamon soared through rarified air to 29 feet 2 inches (8.9m) at the Mexico City Olympic Games, a record which stood for 23 years. In the insect world, fleas can leap 13 inches (35cm), a feat second only to jumps made by the superfamily of froghoppers.

But no human, nor any flea, nor any froghopper, can jump astonishingly long distances and then simply disappear into thin air.
A tiny typewriter screw can …
I can’t say I wasn’t warned. Way back - when, as I recall, Yahoo hosted the No 1 typewriter forum on the web - one of the pioneer American collector-restorers wrote an hilarious article about spending the best part of a year down on his knees searching for a missing Corona 3 screw on his workshop floor. (If memory serves, it was Ed Peters, but I can’t be certain about that.)
Being forewarned didn’t stop me – unhappily – from taking an armoury of screwdrivers to a multitude of unsuspecting typewriters. And, yes, over almost 30 years many dozens of tiny screws have been lost forever. One does often get a vague idea about the general direction the recalcitrant screw has taken in its flight, but more often as not the hunt in this area proves utterly fruitless. I’m sure this is a mystery experienced by all those who’ve failed to resist that inevitable temptation – “I’ll just loosen this one screw …”
There is, nonetheless, another side to these screwy sagas. And that is the barely controllable joy at actually finding a missing screw. Down on the workshop floor on all fours, straining the eyesight, looking fore and aft, when suddenly there’s the slightest glimmer of a slightly silvery screw. A stretch, a touch, and … yes, triumph! Except sometimes, as happened to me yesterday, same said found screw immediately went walkabout again. Damn! The hunt resumes …

RIP David Malouf (1934-2026)

 

A Tale of Two Brother Typewriters

There was I preparing to write a post in praise of Japanese-made typewriters. Then up turns a man who is opting out of this mad, mad, mad world and heading off to an overgrown paddock in Fiji. So he needs his typewriter put in working order. No computers where he's going. He found the Brother in an op-shop some years ago, all of $35 worth, and has never been able to use it.

I’m not surprised. It’s a beaten-up JP-3, second variant, serial number D8925202, more familiar as a Montgomery Ward Signature 510D. The D stands for Dire. This is the worst typewriter I’ve ever worked on. Worse than the mind-blowingly crappy Chinese-made Olivetti MS 25 Premier puss, or the almost equally inferior Brazilian-made Olivetti Lettera 82.
Is it possible the Japanese made a typewriter this bad? Apparently so. I also happened to have on the workbench an Akio Kondo-designed JP-1. A reliable, highly functional machine, the original flagship of the Brother fleet. Can you believe this? The JP-1 has 13 screws holding together the full mask, the JP-3 has 37!!! What the … ? Badly designed, over engineered, just a complete mess.
It’s working now, just. The carriage ball bearings had “frozen” with corrosion, the alignment was all over the shop, the touch control switch impacted on the ribbon movement. The saga went on and on. So glad it’s gone now.

He Used His Noodle - And His Typewriter

ON THE day I was born – 78 years ago yesterday – a young man in Detroit, Michigan, turned his life around. He did it with a battered old Underwood typewriter and 40 cartons of noodle soup. Of course this all happened 8733 miles from where I entered the world, but who knows how far positive vibes can reach? And how long it takes for them to find their target?

Joseph Purdum Waitz, then a 26-year-old unemployed ex-army air forces officer, living with his wife Carolyn at 5903 Maryland Street, just off the Edsel Ford Freeway (1-94), was down to his last four cents on April Fool’s Day 1948.  But he had invested $11.56 to buy 40 cartons of Lipton’s “old-fashioned chickeny noodle soup”.

That enabled him to enter the Lipton’s limerick competition 40 times – and one of those entries came up trumps.

Joseph’s “investment” paid off “about 1000 to one”, according to the picture story on page five of the April 6, 1948, issue of the Detroit Free Press. One of Joseph’s entries won the competition and earned him $11,000 in prizemoney (just under $150,000 in today’s money).

Carolyn (née Zynda) told the Free Press, “Just before the contest closed on February 29, he [Joe] bought a whole case of soup for $11.56. We had less than $100 to our name and needed other things worse than soup. But I’ve learned 67 ways to serve it.”

Mrs Waitz had also decided where the prizemoney was going. “We want a log-built house out in the country some place near Detroit where everything is green,” she told the Free Press.

Joe Waitz, who had grown up dreaming of becoming a successful writer, went on from his limerick success to get a job with General Electric Carboloy as a technical copy writer. Mrs Waitz said, “Some people thought when we were married [18 months previously] that Joe was just a writer who didn’t have a job. But I believed in him. He hasn’t sold any stories yet, but he’s had some awfully nice rejection slips.”

Lipton’s got plenty of free publicity out of Joe’s win, with a United Press story appearing in newspapers across the US. Yet Joe’s winning limerick was never used. The UP piece had described Joe as an “unsuccessful free lance writer who was down to his last nickel.”

Joe had, however, won a washing machine in a similar contest in 1947, and he and Carolyn had 30 pounds of coffee left in their kitchen after an unsuccessful bid in another limerick competition. Carolyn told UP the couple would “use up” the noodle soup cartons “just like we did with the coffee”.

In the 60s Joe went on to become vice-president and creative director of Maxon Inc and then creative director in the Detroit office of Geyer-Oswold. The couple settled in Aurora, Illinois, and Carolyn died there, aged 82, in July 2008.

Olivetti Typewriter Ad “As She Recalled It”

So pleased to see that Margaret Talbot, a 22-year veteran staff writer for The New Yorker, has taken the trouble to check the facts laid out in my ozTypewriter blog posts of September 2020. Talbot devoted a lengthy "A Critic at Large" article to Shere Hite in the March 9 issue of The New Yorker. Fittingly, Talbot's piece appeared under the headline "Doing It Right", for that is exactly what Talbot did. She checked and she worded things correctly.

Following Hite’s death in London in September 2020, I corrected the story about the Olivetti typewriter advertisement which allegedly propelled Hite toward the women’s movement. In obituaries for Hite that were published around the world, a false claim was repeated ad nauseam, unchecked and unsubstantiated. A few minutes’ research would have confirmed the truth. Surprisingly, the supposed fact-checking New York Times was among the many guilty parties.

Hite appeared in "Olivetti Girls" ads in 1971 to help her pay college fees while at Columbia University. Her recollection of the wording of the ads, some 10 years after they appeared, was faulty. Talbot doesn’t fall for the same trap as Hite’s obituary writers did – not quite, anyway. She wrote that the words contained in an “advertising campaign for Olivetti electric typewriters, in which she was cast as a fetching secretary” were those “as she recalled it” and "something like". These six words are critical, for the issue I had raised back in 2020 was about accuracy in reporting. What Hite said in 1982 was not what the ad said. A few people said it didn’t matter. They were wrong. It did matter. Accuracy is everything. Accuracy is the truth.

Most if not all of the ads were sexist in the extreme. But that wasn’t the point. The point was what they actually said, not what anyone thought they said

Richard Polt commented on my 2020 posts: “This topic has stirred up a bit of friendly controversy in the typosphere. It's always good for us to keep thinking both about the documented facts of history, and about the more elusive question of the meaning of those facts … In any case, this is fascinating material for cultural interpretation, and it's a very successful advertising campaign inasmuch as we are still paying close attention to it, decades later.”