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THE TYPEWRITER
Change the alphabet and you must change the
typewriter. Few technologies are more in need of basic
reform. We have improved and modernized every part of the
typewriter except for the 26 letter keys, throwbacks to
the year 1867 when Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee
developed the first practical commercial machine, Attempts
to produce such a device date back to 1714. Sholes has
been referred to as "the fifty-second man to 'invent' the
typewriter."
How did the
conventional QWERTY keyboard arrangement, named for the first
six of
the top row of letters, come to be? Sholes
originally arranged the letters in alphabetical order. A
remnant of this system remains on the middle line of keys on a
keyboard with four rows of keys. He encountered serious
problems with jamming when adjacent keys were struck in
rapid succession. He and his brother-in-law rearranged the keyboard
to disperse the most frequently recurring letters, then
conned the public into accepting this as a scientific
advance instead of a non-technical answer to a technical problem.
The common keyboard is programmed for inefficiency. To
type almost any word in the English language, a maximum
distance has to be covered by the fingers.
There are
two roads out of Qwertyville: the keyboard can be entirely
eliminated, or it can be
reformed.
When the vocal cords can replace the
fingers as typing instruments, as promised by
voice-activated typewriters, now in the works. The keyboard will
ultimately be superfluous. We can make
voice-activated typewriters the hard way by employing our existing alphabet and forcing computers to deal with the more than
2,000 exceptions that are part of our spelling
system. Or we can get ourselves a proper alphabet (UNIFON comes to mind) with an unambiguous, one-for-one correlation
between sound and letter and create simpler and
cheaper voice-activated typewriters. Material typed or
printed in such an alphabet would also easily lend itself to
re-translation back into sound.
If, however,
we are to be burdened for a few more years with what I
affectionately call the stupid alphabet, we can still
improve on the fingering futilities of our current
keyboard (hereafter to be known I as the stupid keyboard). Sholes didn't know much about frequency counts and finger
movements when he produced his machine. By 1932, Dr. August Dvorak knew a great deal about both. As professor of
measurements and statistics at the University of
Washington, he studied letter frequencies and sequences
and the digital movements of typists for several years before
producing a new keyboard that reflected these facts. It is
known as the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (DSK) and, in a
slightly modified form, as the American Simplified Keyboard (ASK).
Smith-Corona manufactures a model using this
keyboard.
16-TO-1 ADVANTAGE
As Casey
Stengel, "the old professor" might observe: "The shortest distance
between two points is the shortest distance between two
points." Using this norm, we can report that for every 16
miles of "linear walking" on the QWERTY keyboard, lite ASK
typewriter requires only 1. All major international
records for typing are currently held by operators using
the ASK keyboard. The Guinness Book of World Records lists Barbara
Blackburn of Everett, Washington, as a record holder for
sustained rapid and accurate typing. She cruises at 170
words per minute, using a DSK typewriter. Her chief rival, Howard
Hudson of Decatur, Georgia, also uses this
machine.
THE CALENDAR
Compared with
the alphabet and the typewriter, the calendar is in relatively
good shape. It just needs a little fine-tuning. The Julian
and Gregorian reforms got the calendar calibrated
with the length of the solar year. Externally the year has been
tidied up, but internally things are a bit messy: the
weeks don't divide evenly into the months or the year, the
quarters are irregular, the months are uneven in length, the cycle
takes 28 years to repeat itself.
When the League of Nations solicited proposals for
calendar reform in 1923, it received 185 plans for a new calendar.
The most popular submission and the one that has endured as a
possible model for reform was that of Moses Bruines Cotsworth, an
English statistician. It was called the International Fixed
Calendar, or the Equal Month Calendar.
According to this scheme there would be 13 months of 28 days
each. Each month would be exactly the same beginning on Sunday the
first and ending on Saturday the twenty-eighth. This adds up to 364
days. The extra day ("Peace Day" or "World Day") would occur on
December twenty-ninth, but it would not be counted as a day of the
week and thus not disrupt the cycle of 13 equal and identical
months. In leap years, a similar "blank" day ("Leap Day") would be
intercalated on June twenty-ninth. The thirteenth month would be
inserted between June and July and would be named Sol, in honor of
the sun. If this plan were put into effect on January 1 of a year
that began with Sunday (1984 is the next such year), then the system
would be in place and the Equal Month Calendar would serve for every
month of the year forever.
Under the Cotsworth system, the
year can be divided evenly by weeks (but not by months) into half
years and quarter years. The quarter points are April 1, Sol 14,
September 21, December 28, each month begins on a Sunday and ends on
a Saturday (February 1981 was such a month). Without even referring
to a calendar, we would soon know the day of the week on which each
day of the month would fall: the thirteenth is always a Friday; if
today's the tenth, it must be Tuesday. The advantages are
obvious.
Everyone would be inconvenienced a little, and some
groups will be especially put upon: calendar manufacturers,
astrologers and thaidekaphobes (those who fear the number 13).
THE "BLANK" DAYS
PLAN
A more modest
proposal offered to the League of Nations, the World Calendar,
suggests that we maintain the current 12-month approach and arrange
the months in each of the four quarters in a 31-30-30 day sequence.
This plan would also use the "blank" days for the 365th and 366th
days of our inconvenient year.
To many,
the idea of reforming things as familiar as the alphabet, the
typewriter and the calendar is comparable to tampering with the law
of gravity or taking a referendum on the tides. We have a cultural
and psychological investment in these institutions that discourages
change. But as a planetary culture evolves and the interdependence
of people becomes more crucial, the reasons for simplifying English,
typing and the calendar will become even more compelling. We can't
inflict on the next generation an inefficient alphabet, an illogical
keyboard and an untidy calendar. We wouldn't fly an airplane with
the 20 percent efficiency rate of our alphabet, is human
communication any less important?
John M.
Culkin, Executive Director of The Center for Understanding Media
wrote substantially this article for the Science Digest,
August 1981. Kind permission to electronically re-create this
material has been given by his family to continue his kwest for an
augmented alfubet for future generations of English writers. In
his memory we dedicate this version of his article.
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The New Age
of Reason
(continued)