Writing your novel might be challenging enough, but can you imagine trying to type it on this?
This strange typographic pincushion is the world’s first commercially produced typewriter: the Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, which was prototyped by the Danish inventor Rasmus Malling-Hansen in 1865. Photos of this fantastical machine (it looks like something you’d find in the Codex Seraphinianus, perhaps somewhere around this entry) have been popping up on various tech blogs intrigued by its steampunk aesthetic and poignant obsolescence.
It’s a nostalgic reminder that the act of writing is one of imperfect translation from the mental to the physical realm: as Nietzsche typed of his own defective Writing Ball, “Our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts.” If all you had at your desk was a Smith-Corona electric typewriter of the kind William McKibben wrote about in this magazine in 1984 (its defining feature was the ability to erase up to two just-typed words), would you think twice before typing out that paragraph that just came to you in the shower? Now, of course, we have MS Word and “undo,” but the technology most of us use to record our thoughts is an old one: the QWERTY keyboard, which debuted in 1873, just three years after the Malling-Hansen Writing Ball entered production.
The act of composing on a Writing Ball probably less resembles modern-day typing than it does scrying (peering into an object, like a crystal ball, in order to divine the future). And the reasons that typing won out might seem obvious—for one, it’s impossible to see what you’re typing when using a Writing Ball. But a QWERTY keyboard is by no means the most intuitive or efficient writing instrument, as devoted proponents of the Dvorak Keyboard will tell you. QWERTY is ubiquitous today because, well, it’s ubiquitous. After a century of mass adoption by the designers of typewriters, then computers, people know how to use it—and it’s so ingrained that manufacturers go to great lengths to adapt QWERTY devices for languages that don’t even lend themselves to alphanumeric input.
Before you go blaming your writer’s block on your keyboard, however, there are other ways to put ideas to paper (or flash memory). Besides a pen, a device whose origins are much more archaic than those of the Writing Ball, you could use dictation software. Speech-to-type fidelity has long been a concern, but is improving; the developers of the popular Dragon Dictation software claim 99.6% accuracy. Of course, all that talking aloud might inspire your café neighbors to hurl more than words at you.
Or you could try a chorded jellyfish keyboard, although the learning curve seems formidable for those not versed in mind-melding.
What, then, of touchscreens? Alas, any iPad or iPhone user’s first complaint is usually the awkwardness of the virtual keyboard, which is based—of course—on QWERTY. App developers are starting to look beyond Apple’s default input method, but WritePad (which lets you trace letters with your fingers or a touch-sensitive stylus) is still only as fast and as useful as your handwriting, and touch systems like Swype (which attempts to predict words based on quick finger gestures rather than the tapping of a traditional keyboard) seem better suited to LOLspeak than literature.
Until the technology exists to extract sentences directly from our minds, we’re stuck with a middleman, some kind of system or device to translate them to written form. I wouldn’t trade my keyboard for a Writing Ball. But perhaps composing on such a beautiful, alien object might inspire me, as it did Nietschze, to try to free my thoughts from my writing instruments.
(Image: Auction Team Koln, via Malling-Hansen Society, which has many more pictures of the Writing Ball on its site.)
