![]() Businesses employed thousands of typists. Practicing phrases like “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” were helpful because they were a way to train your hands to correctly hit all the right keys without looking (which would slow you down). Training programs similar to the one Bruni attended proliferated. Instead of handwritten letters or contracts, in which penmanship might lead to errors or legal issues, the cleanly written pages that flew out of typewriters greased the wheels of commerce.Īs typewriters became essential in the business world, the demand grew for fast, accurate typists. Typewriters took off in the business world. Now someone could sit at a typewriter, insert a blank piece of paper and perfectly formed letters would appear on a page as you pressed each key against an inked ribbon inside the typewriter. It took more than four centuries for that to change, but eventually it did with the development in the late 1800s of the first successful typewriters. Still, someone had to write the text in the first place which required putting pen or pencil to paper. Books and pamphlets began to fly off the presses, helping to usher in the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment or really the world as we know it today. A Bible Gutenberg completed in 1455 cost the equivalent of three years’ wages of the average clerk-expensive, but a fraction of the cost of hiring a scribe. Setting the type was laborious, but once it was done the pages could be reproduced much faster, cheaper and in much larger quantities. Gutenberg essentially invented the printing industry by replacing handwritten letters with blocks of type. Making a second copy of a book involved hiring a scribe to copy the entire book again by hand. There was no printing as we know it today. And for all of that, even in this brief history of word processing, it’s helpful to very briefly go back a few centuries to when Johannes Gutenberg in 1439 invented moveable type.īefore Gutenberg, all books were completely handwritten. To get the answers to those questions, you need to know a bit more about the history of typing and the history of word processing, including the history of word processing software (and inevitably Microsoft Word). Read next: Behind the orange icon: the history of PowerPoint Going back to Gutenberg Confidence in my typing gave me confidence in everything else.”įast forward nearly four decades, and you might be asking “Why wasn’t he allowed to look at the keys?” or “Who cares about the quick fox and the lazy dog?” or even more fundamentally, “What’s a typewriter?” “I developed a reputation as a fleet writer when really I was a fleet typist. According to Bruni, who has been a Times White House reporter, Rome bureau chief and restaurant critic and is the author of three best-selling books-his ability to get started as a writer owed much to his fluid abilities as a typist. ![]()
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