Made In America - Bill Bryson [63]
Among such company, the typewriter, patented in 1868 by Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee as the Type-Writer, was unusual for preserving its original designation, though earlier models went by a variety of names, from pterotype to mechanical chirographer, and Sholes himself considered calling it a writing machine or printing machine. Sholes’s earliest models had some notable drawbacks. They printed only capital letters and the keys tended to jam. At first, the letters were arrayed in alphabetical order, an arrangement hinted at on modern keyboards by the sequences F-G-H, J-K-L and O-P, but the fact that no two other letters are alphabetical, that the most popular letters are not only banished to the periphery but given mostly to the left hand while the right is left with a sprinkling of secondary letters, punctuation marks and little-used symbols, are vivid reminders of the extent to which Sholes had to abandon common sense and order just to make the damn thing work. There is a certain piquant irony in the thought that every time you stab ineptly at the letter a with the little finger of your left hand, you are commemorating the engineering inadequacies of a nineteenth-century inventor.
To test the machines, a mechanic at Sholes’s Milwaukee factory reportedly took to typing ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party’ – no one knows why – which is apparently how this rousing sentiment became indelibly associated with testing a keyboard or limbering up the fingers.34 Mark Twain, incidentally, was the first person to write a book on a typewriter, or typemachine as he insisted on calling it. He claimed in an autobiographical note that it was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but his memory was faulty. It was in fact Life on the Mississippi.35
As the twentieth century dawned, still more terms designating wealth entered the language: to be on easy street (1901), high flier (1904), sitting pretty (1910). And inventors continued giving names to their processes that the world ignored. When a twenty-year-old recent graduate of Cornell named Willis Carrier developed the first modern air-conditioner in 1902, he didn’t call it that, but an ‘Apparatus for Treating Air’. The first electric stove was called a ‘fireless cooker’. The first ball-point pen was patented as a ‘non-leaking, high altitude writing stick’. Radio and television, as we shall see elsewhere, went by any number of names before settling into their present, seemingly inevitable forms. Chester Carlson invented xerography in 1942, but called it ‘electrophotography’. And the transistor, invented by three researchers at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1950, was described on the patent application as a ‘three-electrode circuit element utilizing semi-conductive materials’.36
Although America was unsurpassed at devising new conveniences, its constant bent towards practicality – or pragmatism, a term coined by William James in 1863 – meant that it wasn’t always so good at dealing with more complicated systems. Many of the great technological breakthroughs of the nineteenth century didn’t occur in America but in Europe. The car was invented in Germany and the radio in Italy, just as radar, the computer and the jet engine would later be invented in Britain. But where America couldn’t be touched was in its capacity to exploit new technologies, and no one was better at this than Thomas Alva Edison.
Edison was the archetypal American pragmatist. Latin, philosophy and other such esoteric pursuits he dismissed as ‘ninny stuff’.37 What he wanted were useful inventions that would make life more agreeable for the user and bring untold wealth to him.