The Anthropocene Reviewed(63)

As I got older, the Mountain Goats grew with me. Their songs were with me when my kids were born (“I saw his little face contract as his eyes met light”), and they were with me as I spiraled out of control with grief (“I am an airplane tumbling wing over wing / Try to listen to my instruments / They don’t say anything”). Sometimes, I need art to encourage me, as the Mountain Goats famously do in the chorus of “This Year,” with Darnielle shouting, “I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.” Other times, I only need art to accompany me.

The Mountain Goats have shaped the way I think and listen so profoundly that I don’t know who I would be without them, only that I wouldn’t be me. I don’t want to overstate it, but there are moments in Mountain Goats songs that are almost scriptural to me, in the sense that they give me a guide to the life I want to live and the person I wish to be when I grow up. Consider, for instance, this couplet: “You were a presence full of light upon this Earth / And I am a witness to your life and to its worth. “ That’s a calling to me—to present more light, and to better witness the light in others.

I give the Mountain Goats five stars.





THE QWERTY KEYBOARD



ON MOST ENGLISH-LANGUAGE KEYBOARDS, the three rows of letter keys are not arranged alphabetically or by frequency of use. Indeed, the two most common letters in English—e and t—aren’t among the so-called “home keys,” where your fingers rest when typing. You’ve got to reach for them up on the top row, where the letters, from left to right, begin Q W E R T Y. The reasons for this involve typewriter mechanics, a militant vegetarian, and a Wisconsin politician who belonged to three different political parties in the span of eight years.

I love a straightforward story of inventors and their inventions. In fifth grade, I wrote my first-ever work of nonfiction on the life of Thomas Edison. It begins, “Thomas Alva Edison was a very interesting person who created many interesting inventions, like the light bulb and the very interesting motion picture camera.” I liked the word interesting because my biography had to be written by hand in cursive, and it had to be five pages long, and in my shaky penmanship, interesting took up an entire line on its own.

Of course, among the interesting things about Edison is that he did not invent either the light bulb or the motion picture camera. In both cases, Edison worked with collaborators to build upon existing inventions, which is one of the human superpowers. What’s most interesting to me about humanity is not what our individual members do, but the kinds of systems we build and maintain together. The light bulb is cool and everything, but what’s really cool is the electrical grid used to power it.

But who wants to hear a story about slow progress made through iterative change over many decades? Well, you, hopefully.

The earliest typewriters were built in the eighteenth century, but they were both too slow and too expensive to be mass-produced. Over time, the expansion of the Industrial Revolution meant that more precision metal parts could be created at lower costs, and by the 1860s, a newspaper publisher and politician in Wisconsin, Christopher Latham Sholes, was trying to create a machine that could print page numbers onto books when he started to think a similar machine could type letters as well.

Sholes was a veteran of Wisconsin politics—he’d served as a Democrat in the Wisconsin state senate before joining the Free Soil Party, which sought to end legal discrimination against African Americans and to prevent the expansion of slavery in the U.S. Sholes later became a Republican and is most remembered today as a vocal opponent of capital punishment. He led the way toward Wisconsin abolishing the death penalty in 1853.

Working with his friends Samuel Soule and Carlos Glidden, Sholes set out to build a typewriter similar to one he’d read about in the magazine Scientific American, which described a “literary piano.” They initially built their typewriter with two rows of keys—ebony and ivory, just like the piano—and a mostly alphabetical key layout.

At the time, there were many typewriting machines using many different key layouts and design strategies, which speaks to one of the great challenges of our sprawling, species-wide collaborations: standardization. Learning a new key layout every time you get a new typewriter is wildly inefficient.*

The Sholes typewriter was a so-called “blind writer,” meaning you couldn’t see what you were typing as you typed it. This meant you also couldn’t tell when the typewriter had jammed, and the alphabetical layout of the keys led to lots of jams. But it’s not clear these jams were the driving force behind changing the key layout. Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka make a compelling argument in their paper “On the Prehistory of QWERTY” that the layout was not driven by jams but by the needs of telegraph operators translating Morse code.

Regardless, both telegraph operators and stenographers helped shape the eventual keyboard layout, as did a huge array of other collaborators, including Thomas Edison, who offered advice on the typewriter. Sholes, Soule, and Glidden also relied upon outside investors, most notably Sholes’s old friend James Densmore. Densmore was a passionate vegetarian who survived primarily on raw apples and was known for getting into arguments at restaurants whenever he overheard a stranger ordering a meat dish. He also cut his pants several inches above the ankle for comfort, and he happened to have a brother, Amos, who studied letter frequency and combinations in English. According to some reports, Amos advised the typewriter makers on the keyboard layout.