Beta-testing stenographers and telegraph operators were told by Densmore to give the typewriters “a good thrashing. Find its weak spots.” As the beta testers thrashed away, Sholes and colleagues refined the machines until by November of 1868, the typewriter used a four-row keyboard in which the top row began A E I . ?. By 1873, the four-row layout began Q W E . T Y. That year, the gun manufacturer Remington and Sons bought the rights to the Sholes and Glidden typewriter—with the U.S. Civil War over, Remington wanted to expand outside of firearms. Engineers at Remington moved the R to the top row of the typewriter, giving us more or less the same key layout we have today.
The QWERTY layout wasn’t invented by one person or another, but by many people working together. Incidentally, Sholes himself found the key layout unsatisfactory and continued to work on improvements for the rest of his life. A few months before his death, he sought a patent for a new keyboard where the top row of letter keys began X P M C H.
But it was QWERTY that hung around, in part because the Remington 2 typewriter became very popular, and in part because it’s a good keyboard layout. There have been many attempts to improve upon QWERTY in the years since its introduction, but none made a big enough difference to shift the standard. The best-known purportedly easier typing layout is the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, created in 1932 by August Dvorak, which features A O E U on the left-side home keys. Some studies found that Dvorak’s layout improved typing speed and lowered error rates, but many of those studies were paid for by Dvorak, and more recent scholarship has shown little if any benefit to the Dvorak, or any other purportedly optimized keyboard layout.
The QWERTY keyboard—partly by accident—is pretty good at alternating hands within words, which means that one hand can be reaching for a key while the other hand is typing. It’s not perfectly efficient—the most common keys are typed by the left hand, whereas most people type slightly faster and more accurately with their right hands—but for most of us, most of the time, QWERTY works.
It has certainly worked for me. In elementary school, I had terrible handwriting （hence it taking an entire line of notebook paper to write the word interesting in cursive）。 No matter how hard I tried to hold the pencil steady, I just couldn’t write well. But even as a kid, I was a hell of a typist. Typing on a QWERTY keyboard was one of the first things I ever became good at, initially because I wanted to play the text-based video games of the 1980s, but eventually because I liked the feeling of excellence. By sixth grade I could type eighty words a minute. These days, I can type as fast as I can think. Or maybe, since I’ve spent so much of my life thinking through typing, my brain has learned to think at the speed of my typing, just as my brain has learned to think of the alphabet as beginning Q-W-E-R-T-Y.
The keyboard is my path to having thoughts, and also my path to sharing them. I can’t play an instrument, but I can bang on this literary piano, and when it’s going well, a certain percussive rhythm develops. Sometimes—not every day, certainly, but sometimes—knowing where the letters are allows me to feel like I know where the words are. I love the sound of pressing keys on a great keyboard—the technical term is “key action”—but what I love most about typing is that on the screen or on the page, my writing is visually indistinguishable from anyone else’s.
As a kid on the early internet, I loved typing because no one could know how small and thin my hands were, how scared I was all the time, how I struggled to talk out loud. Online, back in 1991, I wasn’t made of anxious flesh and brittle bone; I was made out of keystrokes. When I could no longer bear to be myself, I was able to become for a while a series of keys struck in quick succession. And on some level, that’s why I’m still typing all these years later.
So even though it isn’t a perfect keyboard layout, I still give the QWERTY keyboard four stars.
THE WORLD’S LARGEST BALL OF PAINT
I DON’T LABOR UNDER THE DELUSION that the United States is an exemplary or even particularly exceptional nation, but we do have a lot of the world’s largest balls. The world’s largest ball of barbed wire is in the U.S., as is the world’s largest ball of popcorn, and the world’s largest ball of stickers, and the world’s largest ball of rubber bands, and so on. The world’s largest ball of stamps is in Omaha, Nebraska—it was collected by the residents of the orphanage known as Boys Town.
I visited the ball of stamps twenty years ago, on a road trip with a girlfriend during which we crisscrossed the country seeking out roadside attractions. Our relationship was falling apart, and so we sought a geographical cure. We visited Nebraska’s Carhenge, an exact replica of Stonehenge built out of junked cars, and South Dakota’s Corn Palace, a massive structure with a facade made primarily of corn kernels. We also visited several of the world’s largest balls, including both the world’s largest ball of twine rolled by one person in Darwin, Minnesota, and the world’s largest ball of twine rolled by a community in Cawker City, Kansas.* We broke up soon after, but we’ll always have Cawker City.
* * *
There’s an Emily Dickinson poem that begins, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” It’s one of the only poems I’ve managed to commit to memory. It ends like this:
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -
Several years ago, a plank in reason broke within me, and I dropped down and down, and hit a world at every plunge. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but precedent is cold comfort when you feel the funeral in your brain. As I struggled to recover, or at least slow the plunge, my thoughts drifted back to the road trips I’d taken, and I decided to try a geographical cure. I drove to see the world’s largest ball of paint, which ended up kind of saving my life, at least for the time being.
* * *
I’m fascinated by roadside attractions because they are one place where we see the work of huge systems intersect with the work of tiny individuals. We have so many roadside attractions because we have so many roads—our interstate highway system is built to move lots of people across vast areas of land.* Once you’re on an Interstate, it’s easy to stay on it until you need gas or food. To tempt you away from the cruise-controlled straightforwardness of the American highway requires something extraordinary. Something unprecedented. The world’s largest ______.
It’s the system that makes the roadside attraction necessary, but individuals choose what to make and why. Consider, for example, Joel Waul, creator of Megaton, the world’s largest ball of rubber bands. When first constructing the ball, Waul wrote on his Myspace page, “First, have a definite, clear practical idea, a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends. Third, adjust all means to that end. —Aristotle.”* For Waul, the definite and clear and practical idea was to make the world’s largest ball of rubber bands, which would eventually come to weigh over nine thousand pounds. I’m not sure why I find it beautiful to devote oneself obsessively to the creation of something that doesn’t matter, but I do.
The world’s largest ball of paint is located in the tiny town of Alexandria, Indiana. Back in 1977, Mike Carmichael painted a baseball with his three-year-old son. And then they kept painting it. Carmichael told Roadside America, “My intention was to paint maybe a thousand coats on it and then maybe cut it in half and see what it looked like. But then it got to the size where it looked kinda neat, and all my family said keep painting it.” Carmichael also invited friends and family over to paint the ball, and eventually strangers started showing up, and Mike would have them paint it, too.