November 22, 1963

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories. This is a real story, and an excerpt from chapter 12 of my book Shift Happens.) The keyboards of the first teletypes looked as if the Shift Wars had happened in an alternate timeline won by typewriters with two Shifts, a century before the arrival of the iPhone. The first teletypes were, too, built with only three banks of keys, the digits sharing the top row of QWERTY. Among the most common was the striking green keyboard of Teletype Model 15, made by a company that – like many – renamed itself after its most popular product. The 15s were robust, heavy, and almost indestructible; 200,000 were made between 1930 and 1954, their production prolonged by World War II. But the comparison to typewriters with two Shifts broke down as soon as you sat down to a teletype. There was one key called Figs and another called Ltrs, but there was no actual shifting. The two keys were meant to be used alone –…