GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

418 • EPILOGUE
tion concerns the possible significance of local cultural factors unrelated
to the environment. A minor cultural feature may arise for trivial, temporary
local reasons, become fixed, and then predispose a society toward
more important cultural choices, as is suggested by applications of chaos
theory to other fields of science. Such cultural processes are among history's
wild cards that would tend to make history unpredictable.
As one example, I mentioned in Chapter 13 the QWERTY keyboard
for typewriters. It was adopted initially, out of many competing keyboard
designs, for trivial specific reasons involving early typewriter construction
in America in the 1860s, typewriter salesmanship, a decision in 1882 by a
certain Ms. Longley who founded the Shorthand and Typewriter Institute
in Cincinnati, and the success of Ms. Longley's star typing pupil Frank
McGurrin, who thrashed Ms. Longley's non-QWERTY competitor Louis
Taub in a widely publicized typing contest in 1888. The decision could
have gone to another keyboard at any of numerous stages between the
1860s and the 1880s; nothing about the American environment favored
the QWERTY keyboard over its rivals. Once the decision had been made,
though, the QWERTY keyboard became so entrenched that it was also
adopted for computer keyboard design a century later. Equally trivial specific
reasons, now lost in the remote past, may have lain behind the Sumerian
adoption of a counting system based on 12 instead of 10 (leading to
our modern 60-minute hour, 24-hour day, 12-month year, and 360-degree
circle), in contrast to the widespread Mesoamerican counting system based
on 20 (leading to its calendar using two concurrent cycles of 260 named
days and a 365-day year).
Those details of typewriter, clock, and calendar design have not affected
the competitive success of the societies adopting them. But it is easy to
imagine how they could have. For example, if the QWERTY keyboard of
the United States had not been adopted elsewhere in the world as well—
say, if Japan or Europe had adopted the much more efficient Dvorak keyboard—that
trivial decision in the 19th century might have had big consequences
for the competitive position of 20th-century American technology.
Similarly, a study of Chinese children suggested that they learn to write
more quickly when taught an alphabetic transcription of Chinese sounds
(termed pinyin) than when taught traditional Chinese writing, with its
thousands of signs. It has been suggested that the latter arose because of
their convenience for distinguishing the large numbers of Chinese words
possessing differing meanings but the same sounds (homophones). If so,