Burnham C. Stickney

“ This invention relates to a keyboard for typing the Japanese katakana alphabet.
The main objects of the invention are to devise a keyboard which conduces to ease of learning and rapidity of operation, and in which the labor is divided about evenly between the right and left hands, and also appropriately divided among the fingers of each hand, and in which the dakuon mark is typed by one hand and the root character by the other hand in a machine in which the other desiderata are secured. Katakana is usually written downwardly in vertical lines ”

“ In the R group the frequent characters RA, RI and RE adjoin one another on keys in the third and second banks, while the less-used character RU is placed upon an adjoining key in the front bank. The infrequent character RO is given an upper-case position upon the RU key. The order of the characters following mainly the alphabetical order in nearly all of the principal groups, is important, the problem being to prepare a keyboard which can be so easily mastered as to constitute a substantial aid to the introduction into the Japanese Empire of the typing of katakana in horizontal lines. ”

“ The fewness of the keys compared with the number of characters of the alphabet, has rendered it necessary on a four-bank keyboard to place eight of the principal characters of the alphabet in upper-case positions, prime characters are necessarily placed in upper-case positions. For system and order there is also placed in the same bank the TSU key (which bears an undersized upper-case duplicate) . This is done without separating this character from the T group. Thus all of the katakana keys in the first bank have prime lower-case letters, and they also have all of the upper-case characters. ”