Martin Campbell-Kelly

Martin Campbell-Kelly
# Campbell-Kelly, Martin, et al. (2004). Computer: A History of the Information Machine. Boulder: Westview Press. ISBN 0813342643
# Campbell-Kelly, Martin (2005). "The User-friendly Typewriter". The Rutherford Journal (Canterbury: University of Canterbury) 1

The User-friendly Typewriter Martin Campbell-Kelly 2006年1月9日 20:00:00 The Rutherford Journal - The New Zealand Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology:
http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article010105.html

1. コンピューターの起源 (特集 「起源」に迫る)
Campbell-Kelly,Martin 日経サイエンス 39(12) 48〜56 2009/12 0917009X
2. Real Time : Reaping the Whirlwind
CAMPBELL-KELLY, Martin Computer : A History of the Information Machine 165-176 1996

1. コンピューター200年史 / M.キャンベルーケリー,W.アスプレイ[他]. -- 海文堂出版, 1999.10
2. ザ・コンピュータ・エイジ / M.キャンベルーケリー[他]. -- 共立出版, 1979.8

Computer : a history of the information machine （27）
Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray -- 1st ed. -- BasicBooks, c1996, ix, 342 p., [16] p. of plates.

The User-friendly Typewriter Martin Campbell-Kelly
http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article010105.html

• The User-friendly Typewriter:36:The Remington typewriter was the first machine to combine acceptable print quality with acceptable speed. The machine was invented by Christopher Latham Sholes, a retired printer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who was inspired by an article on writing machines he read in the Scientific American in 1867. 7 Sholes took out <b>patent</b>s on his invention, and in exchange for a quarter share of these he obtained what we would now call angel funding from James Densmore, a prosperous retired printer. It is said that Sholes produced dozens of prototypes before achieving a satisfactory design. Densmore did not have sufficient funds to manufacture the machines, however, so he negotiated with Philo Remington, an Ilion, New York, manufacturer of small arms, to make them. Remington accepted the offer because his business was in the doldrums following the end of the Civil War and he had already diversified into peacetime manufactures, including sewing machines. More development work followed and the Remington No. 1 was introduced in 1874?its visual design owing not a little to the sewing machine (Fig. 2).8
• The User-friendly Typewriter:40:Most of these improvements were registered in the 2600 typewriter patents that had been issued by 1905.9 Unfortunately there is no history of typewriter patents, so we do not know in detail how patent pools operated. However, a great deal of patent sharing between manufacturers clearly took place, which is why all typewriters came to look and feel pretty much the same. Most patents protected features that directly or indirectly affected usability. Many innovations may have appeared to be mere tweaks?such as the bell that warned the operator that the end of line was approaching?but their impact on usability could be profound. It was the accretion of scores of tiny improvements that made the typewriter so superbly suited to its task. It is not possible in this paper to describe all of the usability innovations. Instead I will focus on a handful of major issues:
• The User-friendly Typewriter:50:The original Remington No. 1 was known as an “up strike” model, because the type bars struck the underside of the carriage. This meant that the line being typed was out of sight of the user, and in fact did not emerge until a further four lines had been typed. This would have made insuperable demands on the operator’s memory, and it was therefore possible to lift the carriage so that the operator could peek at the work in progress. It is not known whether Sholes was conscious of the visibility problem when he designed the up-strike mechanism. It seems likely that he just opted for the mechanically simplest solution. At all events, this design deficiency left the door open for dozens of non-patent-infringing improvements (most of which vanished into obscurity).
• The User-friendly Typewriter:52:For an operator seated at a desk, the optimal printing position was a front strike mechanism, so that the printed line directly faced the operator. The first machine on the market with a front-strike mechanism was the Columbia Bar-Lock, patented in 1889-91.10 The first commercial models enabled the operator to peer above the type bars to see the work in progress, but the line of sight was obscured if the operator sat too far back in his or her chair. Nonetheless, for several years the Columbia Bar-Lock “stood alone in the visible writing field.”11 A wholly satisfactory front strike mechanism that did not interfere with the line of sight was extremely difficult to achieve, and would not be realised until the Underwood No. 1 came into production in 1897. In the interim, a number of down-strike models, which printed on top of the carriage, were produced.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:56:A much more successful down-strike mechanism was designed by the Reverend Thomas Oliver, who applied for a patent in 1892 and founded the Oliver Typewriter Company of Chicago in 1894.13 In this very distinctive machine the inverted-U shaped type bars were stacked either side of the printing point (Fig. 4). This left the full page clearly visible, a marked improvement over previous designs. The Oliver machine was particularly robust and was bought in large numbers by the military, although it did have the disadvantage of a rather restricted character set. (It was difficult to stack many more than a dozen type-bars on top of one another. The machine had a three-row keyboard instead of the usual four rows. The basic design remained in production with very little major modification until the 1940s.14
• The User-friendly Typewriter:58:Nonetheless the front-strike mechanism remained the best ergonomic design for a seated operator. A successful design was finally produced, some 15 years after the first front-strike models appeared, by the inventor Francis X. Wagner. It was the most important typewriter patent of all time.15 The patent was assigned to a New York typewriter-supplies manufacturer John Underwood, and the Underwood Typewriter Company was established for its manufacture in 1895. With the Underwood No. 1 (Fig. 5) the typewriter took its modern form, establishing the dominant typewriter design until the advent of the IBM golf ball typewriter after the Second World War. In the Wagner design, the type basket was set low, out of the line of sight, and the ribbon did not obscure the current line. When a key was depressed, the ribbon rose and interposed between the type bar and the paper; both then instantly retracted to their original position to reveal the full line of print. It was an extraordinarily elegant mechanism. The Underwood No. 1 went on the market in 1897 and was rapidly further perfected.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:74:The most important way of reducing noise was to eliminate the percussive action of the type bars on the platen. In 1894 an inventor, Wellington Kidder, applied for a patent for a printing action that pushed the type bar onto the platen rather than striking it.19 Kidder and his partner C.C. Colby formed a development company and “expended about $500,000 in developing the Noiseless typewriter, during the years 1904-1909.”20 The Noiseless Typewriter Company was established and a machine was placed on the market in 1910; besides the non-percussive printing action it was fully enclosed and surmounted by an acoustic cowl, characteristic of all subsequent noiseless typewriters. The machine was not a commercial success, probably because the typing mechanism was rather sluggish. Several improved machines were placed on the market, but it was only with the model 4 in 1917 that definite technical and commercial success was realised.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:76:Given the long, costly, patented development of the noiseless typewriter, competitors could only respond with hoods and baffles. Underwood produced a soundproof cabinet in 1922, as did Continental, Ideal, and Olympia.21 In 1923 Remington introduced a quiet version of its model 12, marketed as the Q12, which reduced noise by means of a completely enclosed frame.22
• The User-friendly Typewriter:78:In 1924 Remington acquired the Noiseless Typewriter Company (one of a series of mergers that resulted in the formation of the Remington Rand conglomerate in 1927).23 Remington sold the machine as the Remington Noiseless, and gradually refined the technology by incorporating innovations from its mainstream products. Underwood made a patent deal with Remington to acquire the noiseless technology, and then introduced a noiseless version of its standard machine in 1930. Underwood advertised the machine extensively, promoting its “cushioned typing” with the slogan “Quiet as a Mouse?in a Barrel of Flour” (Fig. 6).
• The User-friendly Typewriter:90:The origins of the QWERTY keyboard are well known, although accounts differ slightly in their detail. Prior to Sholes patenting his typewriter in 1873, there had been many commercially unsuccessful typewriters, and these used two main types of keyboard. One type, exemplified by Samuel Francis’ “Literary Piano,” used a piano-style keyboard.29 In this machine, 26 white keys were provided for the letters, and the black keys supplied the punctuation and other characters. In the other type, exemplified by Beach’s Type-Writing Machine of 1856, the keys were arranged in three rows.30 In both machines the keys were arranged alphabetically.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:106:With the rise of time-and-motion studies around the turn of the new century, there was increasing interest in both keyboard layout on scientific principles and on efficient operation (see next section). For example, the Perry typewriter (1896)39 included extra keys for common words and syllables (such as as, is, and and). A keyboard design by Rowell (1909)40?one of the first patents for a keyboard rather than a complete typewriter?placed the most used letters at the centre of the keyboard (this was really a variant on the Ideal arrangement). It is not known whether these inventions found their way into products, but probably not and certainly not on any scale. Considerably later, a keyboard design by Hoke (1923)41 used a layout optimised for the 1000 most common words determined by the educationist Leonard P. Ayres.42
• The User-friendly Typewriter:108:On the whole, the few novel keyboards in the patent literature (and perhaps a few more that were not patented) are not very convincing proof of network effects and user lock-in. More likely, the keyboard designs lacked any systematic testing or real scientific evidence of major benefits that might have convinced manufacturers or users to switch. The one real exception is the Dvorak keyboard, which was in a class of its own in terms of scientific justification and user testing.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:110:Augustus Dvorak was a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Washington, and a disciple of the time-and-motion expert Frank Gilbreth.43 Gilbreth had made studies of touch typing using the Universal keyboard, but he had not addressed the issue of keyboard layout. This Dvorak did, filing a patent in 1932 (Fig. 8) and publishing a book Typing Behaviour in 1936.44
• The User-friendly Typewriter:192:8 C.L. Sholes, “Type-Writing Machine,” U.S. patent 207,559, Aug. 27, 1878.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:200:12 John N. Williams, “Type-Writer,” U.S. patent 442,697, Dec. 16, 1890. Williams’s first patent was issued in 1875, but he had financial difficulties establishing his business.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:202:13 Thomas Oliver, “Type Writing Machine,” U.S. patent 528,484,337, Oct. 30, 1894.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:206:15 H. L. and F. X. Wagner, “Type writing machine,” U.S. patent 559,345, Apr. 28, 1896.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:214:19 Wellington P. Kidder, “Key-Action for Type-Writing Machines,” U.S. patent 567,241, Sept. 6, 1896.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:234:29 Samuel Francis, “Writing Machine,” U.S. patent 18,504, Oct. 27, 1857.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:236:30 A. E. Beech, “Printing Instrument,” U.S. patent 15,164, June 24, 1856.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:240:32 James B. Hammond, “Type-Writing Machine,” U.S. patent 224,183, Feb. 3, 1881. Lucien S. Crandall, “Type-Writing Machine,” U.S. patent 251,338, Dec. 20, 1881. Eugene Fitch, “Type-Writing Machine,” U.S. patent 345,836, July 20, 1886.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:242:33 William H. Robertson, “Type-Writing Machine,” U.S. patent 439,689, Nov. 4, 1890. The machine was probably never put on the market.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:244:34 O. Mergenthaler, “Machine for Producing Printing Bars,” U.S. patent 317,828, May 12, 1885.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:246:35 George C. Blickensderfer, “Type Writing Machine,” U.S. patent 472,692, Apr. 12, 1892.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:254:39 Horace G. Perry, “Type-Writing Machine,” U.S. patent 552,774, Jan. 7, 1896.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:256:40 Sidney W. Rowell, “Type-Writer Keyboard,” U.S. patent 943,466, Dec. 14, 1909.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:258:41 Roy E. Hoke, “Typewriter-Keyborad Arrangement,” U.S. patent 1,506,426, Aug. 26, 1924.
• The User-friendly Typewriter:264:44 August Dvorak and William Dealey, “Typewriter Keyboard,” U.S. patent 2,040,248, May 12, 1936.

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