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?

3 comments

3 Comments

green.mason1mo 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.

theabennett20d ago

Huh, that's interesting! So if it wasn't about slowing people down, do you think the old typists back then just got used to it over time? I mean, if they were trying to stop jams, did the layout actually work for that, or did it cause other problems? I've always wondered how the guys who designed it even tested it without computers.

the_viola1mo 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.