25
Found a weird fact about old typewriters that gave me a story idea
I was reading a book on writing tools and saw that the QWERTY keyboard was partly designed to slow typists down so the old metal arms wouldn't jam. I found this on page 47 of 'The Writer's Desk'. What's the most surprising real-world fact you've used in a story?
2 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In2 Comments
green.mason10h ago
That QWERTY fact gets repeated a lot, but some historians argue it's a myth. The layout was more about separating common letter pairs to prevent jams, not just slowing people down. I read a whole debunking article on it last year. Makes you double-check those cool facts before building a whole plot on them.
9
the_viola10h ago
Oh wow, that's a GREAT one! I used the fact that carrots used to be purple before the 17th century. I had a character find a patch of them in an old garden, and it became this whole magical clue. It just felt so VISUAL and strange.
2