jbg
Active Member
This little vignette, from Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond has little to do with the central topic. It is one of the ingenious touches that the author employs to maintain people's focus through a very dense and scholarly work. To say the book is exhaustively researched would be an understatement.Excerpt from Guns said:This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row.
Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand).
The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick suc-cession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then.
Guns, Germs and Steel starts out with a question supposedly posed to the author by a New Guinea native, about why Europeans, rather than New Guineans conquered the world. The book's premise is that race and culture are not a factor. Geography turns out to be the central factor, enabling the Europeans (and others on a smaller scale) to conquer the world. I was exposed to the "Germs" portion of this hypothesis in the book 1491: The Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. Mann posits that horses and rats were that vector and suggests that much of North America's Native American population was reduced by 90% to 98% by the spread of those diseases. In other words the migrant European population found far fewer Native Americans than had existed half a century before. If the native population was dense enough to have the famous major Aztec, Mayan and Inca cities and in the Midwest cities such as Cahokia, there was enough population to support transmission of highly contagious diseases.
Smallpox, diphtheria and typhoid raced through the native populations in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. In addition to the numbers killed, their leadership was decapitated, resulting in disorganization. Diamond mentions but does not emphasize this, focusing on the spread of crops, animal domestication, tools and weaponry. It is not surprising that Guns, Germs, and Steel appears in the bibliography of 1491; I stopped at the local library today and checked.
Earlier, when making notes, I noted that "(t)he book reminds me of what I flipped from article to article in the World Book. I just finished reading the chapter about Pizarro‘s conquest of the Incas. I feel like I am back in 1965 and 1966 reading the old encyclopedias." That holds true. Overall, I give the book four stars. I rarely give five. Here my quibble is that the book does drag in places, especially near the end. The 2003 postscript was less informative than I had hoped. Otherwise, a great read.