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?