Looking Back At Typing Class: The Class That Really Mattered In The Long Run

May 26, 2020

Over the years, education has changed significantly, and technology has had a profound impact on education in multiple ways. Now that there is online learning and various new tools to assist with teaching, there is a class that is often taken for granted or forgotten: typing. The typewriter is seldom thought of as a piece of technology, but it has greatly shaped education as well as our future inventions. 

According to Britannica, several attempts to invent the typewriter were created throughout the 19th century. However, it wasn't until American inventor Christopher Latham Sholes patented his invention in 1868 that the typewriter became popular and able to be produced commercially. In 1873, Latham signed a contract with the E. Remington company and just a year later typewriters were on the market under the simple name of Remington. 

According to The Atlantic, people of the right age in the 1970s and 1980s had typing class in a high school classroom with not a computer, of course, but a typewriter. At the time, some schools offered classes in either business typing or personal typing. While the methods weren't perhaps as strategic to adjust people to QWERTY keyboard as they are today, they prepped people to go into fields such as the secretarial one, where typing was valued for recording keeping and dictation. 

The same article from The Atlantic explains how the typewriter truly transformed gender dynamics in the workplace. Before the typewriter, men were mostly there to dictate and write down the ideas of other men. After the invention of the typewriter, women were ready to enter the workforce as secretaries and started to change the workplace as it became more mixed-gender. 

Early Remington typewriters were even marketed towards women, as the shape of them was made to resemble sewing machines and even sometimes decorated with flowers. Women of the mid-20th century were there to fill the needed role of recordkeeping with the new technology that was the typewriter. 

According to “Basic Typing Methods," a 1943 black-and-white Encyclopedia Brittanica film, typing required various teaching methods to develop proficiency. Good posture and proper foot placement were stressed as important to successful typing. The same idea that we use today of a 'home row' of keys was encouraged to help people to be able to type without looking, at type faster than a pen could write, rather than using the slow 'hunt-and-peck' method in which one just searches for letters one-by-one. 

Even today the typewriter has greatly influenced the modern version of typing and other technologies. Although kids are now learning to type on iPhones, iPad, and laptops, none of this would have been possible without the initial invention of the typewriter. While many forget that the standard QWERTY keyboard comes from the typewriter, those who took typing classes back in the day surely know the original origin. 

Do you remember typing class? Are you glad you gained typing skills? Let us know your thoughts and be sure to pass this on to others so they can remember a blast from the past as well!