Did you know you are physically adapting to all your swiping, scrolling, and tapping?

We're changing our bodies and what they're able to do through our habits.

NPR's Body Electric, a special interactive series investigating how to fix the relationship

between our tech and our health. Listen in the Ted Radio Hour feed wherever you get your podcasts.

In the 150-year history of the keyboard, a lot of shifts have happened.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Lili Jamali.

Think about it. How many hours a day do you spend at a computer, taping,

or staring at your smartphone screen, tapping out emails, text messages, or search queries?

The common thread among those activities is, of course, the humble keyboard, the unsung hero of

our tech lives. It's the thing almost every great modern book, or screenplay, or Instagram

caption was first written on. And yet very few people are writing about it.

Designer and writer Marcine Viejare sought to change that with his new book, Shift Happens.

In it, he chronicles the at-times contentious history of the keyboard,

beginning with the very first typewriters. Many different countries in Europe

claim that we had the first typewriter. And they're all kind of correct in a way because

they had typewriters, but some of them were never built. Some of them were manufactured,

but only in one copy. Some of them were manufactured in more copies, but just didn't really work

very well. And they didn't really amount to anything. And so the argument cannot really be settled,

but many people say it should be 150 years around right now, because in September 1873,

you could buy a Quirty typewriter for the first time. You could actually pay not an

insignificant amount of money for a device that didn't really work very well, but it worked.

And you can trace the history of pretty much every keyboard since to this moment in time.

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