Thursday, May 14, 2009


With the older manual typewriters each keystroke caused a metal bar to swing down or forward to hit the paper. If the typist worked too quickly, the metal typebars would collide and jam the mechanism. The design solution was to relocate the keys so that letters often typed immediately after one another, such as "i" and "e," would be placed on opposite sides of the machine. -- Stanley Coren: The Left-Hander Syndrome, Free Press, New York (1992).

Swing down or forward? No. Typewriters in the 1880s with QWERTY keyboard had typebars to swing up to hit the back of paper. They are called upstrike typewriters and their typebars never jam. Further­more, in English, the most frequently-used letter sequence is "th". On QWERTY keyboard, you see T and H are adjacently placed. The second is "er" + "re", also placed in neighborhood of one another.
typebar mechanism of upstrike typewriter (cross section)

6 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

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Sunday, January 09, 2011 10:14:00 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Second try..
What have striked Peter Weil, mine or yours?
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TYPEWRITERS/message/47778

I wonder of whom have striked Peter Weil, mine or yours? Which one do you think?
http://qwerty-history.g.hatena.ne.jp/raycy/20110109/1294531065

Sunday, January 09, 2011 11:25:00 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

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Sunday, January 09, 2011 12:13:00 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

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Sunday, January 09, 2011 11:55:00 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

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Monday, January 10, 2011 3:10:00 PM  
Blogger Koichi Yasuoka said...

Sorry, raycy, I cannot understand what you meant in your word-salad-spam comments at all. Anyway in this post on May 14, 2009, I had argued against Prof. Stanley Coren, not for/against Prof. Peter M. Weil or someone else.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011 9:19:00 AM  

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