The photograph shows a class of enlisted men learning to touch-type. There are no two machines the same in the room. A Yedek Subay was assigned to assist me as Orhan Hataysal would have been busy doing other interpreting tasks.


Yesterday I stated that I conducted Teleprinter (Teletypwriter) Operator and Message Centre Chief courses at the Turkish Signal Corps School (Muhabere Okulu) at Mamak, Turkey.

Operators have to be able to touch-type. We had to start somewhere, so we concentrated on getting the touch-typing part of the course prepared. That entailed the use of something that the students could learn to type on. We had no typewriters. Necessity is the mother of invention, so made a mock keyboard where the students could practice the fingering. It didn't work. Our Cadre did a trawl of businesses in Ankara and we begged any unused typewriters. The response was marvellous. We could have started a museum of typewriters with some of them, but chose to convert them to the same type face and keyboards as a teleprinter. I was absolutely amazed at what those cadre chaps could do. As most of the donated typewriters were not QWERTY, we had to make them thus. Those cadre people systematically chose the typewriters that looked most like QWERTY typewriters and altered many parts to end up with a QWERTY typewriter. Blanks were made to cover the keys.

Height adjustable Operator chairs were also manufactured.

Training manuals had to be prepared along with Charts for the instructor. We did lots of practicing of sharing work with the fingers across the keyboard and decided to make our own system. The left hand stayed pretty much as in any typing manual, but we gave the right hand a lot more work to do. Nevertheless we decided to keep JKL(Carriage Return) under the right hand with G and H uncovered.

The aim of the first part of the course was to try to get the student to be able to touch type at 25 words per minute without error. That was very quickly acheived by the enlisted men where the older, more senior Non Commisioned Officers took a little longer.

One day we were visited by an American who asked me what I would like that would assist the course. I replied "Twenty five typewriters." Within a couple of weeks 25 brand new typewriters were delivered. They were Smith Corona. Thank You.

To maintain rhythm we had a metronome in class clicking away and often we played marching music.

Whenever I needed to have a good interpreter in the classroom, Orhan Hataysal would be there.