The Sholes and Glidden typewriter hit the market between 1873 and 1874. Also known as the "Remington No. 1", it was the first to achieve commercial success, and it served as the launching pad for the QWERTY layout. However, that original version has several differences compared to modern keyboards. For one, special symbols are conspicuously absent, and for another... there's an extra key: Three vertical dots, next to the "A" key. Why were those dots there?
A Hidden Character
Some symbols are particularly difficult to reproduce on a traditional keyboard. The main solution for this problem is the Character Map, which fortunately hasn't gone anywhere (Windows 10 and 11 love to cut "old" features), and it records an extraordinary number of symbols, many of them quite obscure. Of course, strange and unusual characters predate computers, and there are examples that go back to the birth of the QWERTY layout.
That brings us to the Sholes and Glidden typewriter. Revolutionary for its time, no one doubts that. But as a "first-generation product", it had certain limitations. First, it was a "blind machine", meaning the user couldn't see what was being typed on the paper. Second, its design was limited to uppercase letters, a detail that even back then conveyed THE IDEA OF SOMEONE SHOUTING. Finally, the machine had no special characters like parentheses or brackets. However... the machine had this key:
Its drawing leaves no room for confusion: Three vertical dots. Today it's possible to locate that symbol thanks to the Segoe UI Symbol font, in three variants: Three dots "U+205D", Vertical ellipsis "U+22EE", and Three dot operator "U+2AF6" (technically there's a fourth code, "U+FE19"). Now the question is: Why did they choose it? Given such a shortage of symbols in the original model, it's not hard to imagine more useful options. That's exactly what happened with the British version of the typewriter, which placed the pound sterling symbol in that spot.
Theories and Hypotheses
This change, and an old letter from Mark Twain to his brother Orion (with several characters written by his daughter for fun), confirm that the key's role wasn't mechanical (whether advancing the paper or changing the position of the "cursor"). A Japanese article called "In the Prehistory of QWERTY" suggests that the three dots were used as "paragraph separators" to avoid transcription errors among telegraph operators when receiving messages. Other sources indicate it was a solidus for identifying shillings, which doesn't make much sense on a machine intended for the American market.
But one of the most interesting hypotheses takes us to the curious world of bibliographies. In the nineteenth century, some book titles were very long, and vertical bars (|) were frequently used to indicate line breaks, or to compress poems into a continuous paragraph. The three vertical dots would simply mark an alternative series of pauses for line breaks. The publication "A Century of Printing / The Issues of the Press in Pennsylvania 1685-1784" from 1886 has examples that point in that direction.
So why not just put a regular vertical bar on the machine? The point is it already existed. The capital Latin "I" handled that job and also represented the number 1 on the typewriter. Adding another key to do the same would be absurd, so Sholes and company opted for a different version. The problem is that this hypothesis doesn't quite justify the key's individual presence. Its use would be too limited and obscure.
Obviously, enthusiasts' research doesn't end there, and with each new source a bit more information emerges. Personally, I think Eric Fischer's post based on a supplement to Scientific American from 1887 is the right one: The three vertical dots served as "wildcards" to represent parentheses, brackets, and other similar symbols absent from the typewriter. Let's think about it: A user needs to write the number 160 in parentheses (which it doesn't have). With the "I as 1," that would be I60, but if you applied vertical lines as parentheses, it would become II60I. Instead, with the three vertical dots, it would be ⁝I60⁝, giving a clearer visual reference.
Either way, the three vertical dots disappeared with the debut of the Remington No. 2 (a much superior update to its predecessor), and today they're little more than a Unicode curiosity.
Source: Sentence Spacing
