Keys to history – Ray Burke on the Qwerty keyboard

The quick brown fox and the lazy dog that it jumped over were not characters in a children’s fable but were instead the protagonists in an exercise that trainee touch-typists had to master to gain proficiency, and in the messages sent to avert nuclear war.

What was distinctive about the encounter between the two animals was that the words of the sentence that described their interaction used all of the 26 letters of the alphabet. The simple sentence was so useful that it came to be used every day in tests of the world’s first hotline, established between the heads of government in the United States and the Soviet Union to try to prevent accidental nuclear war after the Cuban missile crisis standoff of October 1962.

Telephone conversations between US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev were too risky because of language differences, but typed messages sent via underwater transatlantic cables were clearer and less liable to misunderstanding, while also allowing for consideration before response.

The first message from Washington to Moscow over the hotline, sent on August 30th, 1963, and used in daily tests thereafter, was: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’s back 1234567890″.

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The message used every letter and number key on the teletype machine in order to test if each key was in working order. “American teleprinter machines were installed in the Kremlin to receive messages from Washington, which were in English; Soviet teleprinter machines were installed in the Pentagon to receive messages from Moscow, which were in Russian”, according to Daryl Kimball of the Washington-based Arms Control Association. The two countries also exchanged machines to decode and translate the messages.

The hotline was used for the first time in November 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated. It was used again during the Six-Day Middle East War of June 1967 when the US sought to assure the Soviet Union that its naval fleet’s manoeuvres in the Mediterranean were not hostile.

The teletype keyboard used to send the US/USSR messages was based on the the Qwerty keyboard invented in the United States by a Milwaukee businessman, Christopher Latham Scholes, in the middle of the 19th century, some 400 years after Johannes Guthenberg had moulded the metal fonts of individual letters that created Europe’s first printing press.

After much experimentation Scholes consigned the letters used less frequently (Q,W,Z,X) to the keys that would be depressed by the small finger on the left hand and put the letters used most often under the index and middle fingers of both hands. The letters E, R and A are also commonly used, but he had to make choices. He spread the letters over three rows of keys, adding other keys for punctuation marks and, later, a top row for numbers. The machine became known as a Type-Writer and Scholes’s Qwerty keyboard design is still used universally today on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

The first manual typewriters did exactly what their name described. A finger had to depress each key with force sequentially to imprint the requisite letter on a sheet of paper on a roller behind the keyboard. The spacebar for the space between words was depressed by either thumb.

“I am trying to get the hang of this new-fangled writing machine, but I am not making a shining success of it”, Mark Twain wrote in a letter he composed on one of the first mass-produced typewriters in 1874.

By the turn of the century tens of thousands of people, women overwhelmingly, were working as full-time typists. Typing pools were created in government departments and large corporations.

The verb “to type” emerged. Spelling errors were called typos.

The invention by IBM in 1961 of electronic typewriters ended the dominance of manual machines. Individual letters and characters in a variety of typefaces were on a “Golfball” or “Typeball” instead of on the steel bars of manual machines, but the Qwerty keyboard was retained, proving its ergonomic worth. It was also retained by Steve Jobs when he produced the first Apple Macintosh computers in 1984 and the iPhones and iPads that followed.

Typing pools no longer exist. Today’s teenagers can “type” messages on their smartphones with both thumbs at speeds that nearly match those of touch-typists using all eight fingers and a thumb. The digital age, from the Latin word “digitus” for finger, may be spelling the end of the skill of typing with eight fingers, if not of the era of the quick brown fox and the lazy dog.