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The clattering keys grow silent as the curtain falls
27 April 2011
The typewriter is dead. That news didn't surprise me, but it certainly saddened me.
The clatter of typewriter keys was sweet music to my ears, when I was much younger. I remember banging out stories and poems on my grandfather's ancient Underwood, watching the mechanical arms rise and fall, the letters not quite aligned on the paper. That was 45-50 years ago, and the mechanical marvel of a typewriter held endless fascination for me, that elegant combination of gears and levers that not only imprinted my words on the paper, but advanced the head to the next space, and with a swift motion of my right hand, rolled it up exactly the right space to begin at the start of the line again. And it did it with the ding of a little bell!
If you're under the age of 30, you probably never heard that bell ring. But to me it was a musical chime.
I delighted in the effect of the shift key, as it physically elevated the head. And the self-reversing ribbon, with its black and red stripes so you could add a splash of angry colour to a page (and smudge black and red ink on your fingertips any time you had to change the ribbon). And the laborious backspace key that humped the head in reverse one space at a time. The tab stops were metal flanges that had to be inserted and removed by key presses. Tabs worked by releasing the spring-powered head to race left, then to be stopped by banging into the immovable metal projection of the tab stop. There were levers to set line spacing from one to one-and-a-half to two spaces apart.
Type was fixed and unchangeable, a constant Courier font that everyone used, until the IBM Selectric of the early 1960s offered interchangeable 'golf balls' each with its own specific font. Until then there was no bold, no italic, just underline. Those new, electric machines took some of the work out of typing, since physical pressure was no longer needed to fling a letter at the paper or to return the carriage to the start of the next line. Little electric motors did all that for you.
Want a duplicate? No photocopiers back then. Instead, you typed with a sheet of carbon paper sandwiched between two pages. Remember discovering you had put the carbon paper in backwards? Or reusing carbon paper so often it began to fall apart and portions of letters didn't come through on the copy? I printed my high school newsletter on a typewriter with special stencils made for the Gestetner duplicating machine (a mimeograph), a nasty process that meant a lot of purple ink on your hands and clothes most of the time.
Corrections were made by backspacing and retyping the correct letter or number. This usually involved painting the mistake with a white fluid (remember "Whiteout"?) or using some form of white correction paper (later brought out as a no-fuss tape). That changed in 1978 when the first electronic typewriter - a combination of (very primitive) word processor and typewriter appeared. This allowed you to type a few characters up to a whole line, read them on a tiny LCD screen, correct them, then press "print" to transfer them to the paper (using the same sort of mechanical devices as in electric typewriters).
In the late 19th century, there were dozens of incompatible designs and styles of typewriter. Many actually printed on the back, so the typist couldn't see what was being typed without turning the machine around. That changed in 1900 with the arrival of the Underwood No. 5, which put the paper facing the typist and created the standard for all typewriter manufacturers to follow. Underwood went on to become the world's largest typewriter company.
The first newspaper I worked for, in the late 1960s, had mechanical typewriters for its reporters (it also used hot type, but that's another story...). I travelled around the country with a Corona portable for a few years (until CN managed to destroy it in its cargo car). I've had a miscellany of typewriters, from the old, heavyweight clunkers, to lightweight portables, to the latest electric models with (gasp!) correction and spellchecking. Before word processors, before personal computers, if you wanted to be a writer, you typed. Knowing how to spell properly was important!*
Typewriters gave rise to all sorts of productivity, and created a new market for people to work at home. Portable typewriters gave reporters mobility and independence. It gave would-be writers like myself a platform from which to launch our creativity and soar into the stratospheric realms of thought made form. Mark Twain was one of the first authors to use a typewriter. Although his anti-technology mentor, Gandhi, refused to use one, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru celebrated the typewriter as a "symbol of India's emerging independence and industrialization."
Today I have an old, working but cranky, Underwood in my garage. Heavy, cantankerous, old and slow (somewhat like me), in dire need of a new ribbon. It's now a piece of history. The last mechanical typewriters are disappearing. No one makes them anymore, at least not for everyday use. What began in the 1870s died 140 years later.**
As told in this Telegraph story, the last manufacturer of mechanical typewriters, was Godrej and Boyce, of India. They ceased production in 2009 and have a mere 500 left in inventory (many of which, it seems, are in the Arabic language). Computers dominate today, even in India. With the last of the inventory selling for around $260 CAD, compared to inexpensive laptops and Netbooks priced in the same zone, it's easy to understand why.
But in India, typewriters were still the device of choice for writing, and in the 1990s, Godrej and Boyce produced 50,000 a year, about a third of India's typewriter manufacturing output. By 2009, that had fallen to around 10,000, still a lot of mechanical machines, but rapidly losing ground to computers. This week, an Indian newspaper reported the death of the typewriter.***
Of course, the typewriter lives on, at least in spirit, in the computer keyboard. The QWERTY keyboard, was designed to accommodate the mechanical typewriter, so common letters would be placed where they took a little more time to reach. This slowed typing enough to allow the mechanical arm of the previous letter to fall back and not get jammed with the next letter being pressed. QWERTY has endured through word processors and computers, despite the development of significantly more efficient layouts like the Dvorak keyboard.
It lives on in the term, "carriage return", too, which persists in some computer manuals even though there is no longer a physical carriage to move. Sometimes just called the "return" key, many people nowadays refer to it as the "enter" key instead. And the inglorious "Caps Lock" key that allows people to email or post IN ALL CAPITALS LIKE THEY WERE ANGRILY SHOUTING AT YOU, is a sad hangover from typewriter days (but one that, if Google has its way, may soon vanish - hoorah! - and being replaced by a "search" key.
Goodbye, too, the infinite money theorem, which postulated that that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will eventually come up with the complete works of William Shakespeare. That experiment has, apparently, migrated from typewriters to computers, and from chimpanzees to bloggers and forum posters.
~~~~~
* Spell checkers don't make anyone spell better. They just make us lazy and dependent. They can be a good and useful tool (especially for a sloppy and inaccurate typist like myself), but not a substitute for learning to spell properly in the first place. Spelling, like basic math, is becoming a talent for the rare cognoscenti; forums and blogs are filled with post by people who can't tell the difference between they're and their, your and you're, pole and poll. Spell checkers don't see the wrong word as incorrect if it is correctly spelled - that takes someone who knows how to spell properly in the first place. It's a nasty circle.
** Unlike its musical counterpart, the piano, which has survived despite the inroads of electronic keyboards. However, as a musical instrument in the home, pianos are not nearly as popular as they were a century ago, and a lot more expensive than an electronic keyboard to buy, move and maintain. Some types of piano, like the player piano which used punched rolls or paper to "play" pre-recorded music, have disappeared from production, however.
*** Reports of its death may be somewhat premature, however. While office typewriters may be gone, according to a Wall Street Journal blog post, "A National Business Review story detailed how New Jersey based company Swintec has a robust market for the machines." Swintec said manufacturers are producing machines for it in China, Japan and Indonesia. Swintec reportedly has contracts with correctional facilities in 43 states to supply "clear typewriters for inmates so they can’t hide contraband inside them." But the office typewriter, as such, seems to have shuffled off this mechanically-mortal coil - unless the news of the demise of the machine piques enough interest to see a revival. Look what it did for the ukulele!
The clatter of typewriter keys was sweet music to my ears, when I was much younger. I remember banging out stories and poems on my grandfather's ancient Underwood, watching the mechanical arms rise and fall, the letters not quite aligned on the paper. That was 45-50 years ago, and the mechanical marvel of a typewriter held endless fascination for me, that elegant combination of gears and levers that not only imprinted my words on the paper, but advanced the head to the next space, and with a swift motion of my right hand, rolled it up exactly the right space to begin at the start of the line again. And it did it with the ding of a little bell!
If you're under the age of 30, you probably never heard that bell ring. But to me it was a musical chime.
I delighted in the effect of the shift key, as it physically elevated the head. And the self-reversing ribbon, with its black and red stripes so you could add a splash of angry colour to a page (and smudge black and red ink on your fingertips any time you had to change the ribbon). And the laborious backspace key that humped the head in reverse one space at a time. The tab stops were metal flanges that had to be inserted and removed by key presses. Tabs worked by releasing the spring-powered head to race left, then to be stopped by banging into the immovable metal projection of the tab stop. There were levers to set line spacing from one to one-and-a-half to two spaces apart.
Want a duplicate? No photocopiers back then. Instead, you typed with a sheet of carbon paper sandwiched between two pages. Remember discovering you had put the carbon paper in backwards? Or reusing carbon paper so often it began to fall apart and portions of letters didn't come through on the copy? I printed my high school newsletter on a typewriter with special stencils made for the Gestetner duplicating machine (a mimeograph), a nasty process that meant a lot of purple ink on your hands and clothes most of the time.
Corrections were made by backspacing and retyping the correct letter or number. This usually involved painting the mistake with a white fluid (remember "Whiteout"?) or using some form of white correction paper (later brought out as a no-fuss tape). That changed in 1978 when the first electronic typewriter - a combination of (very primitive) word processor and typewriter appeared. This allowed you to type a few characters up to a whole line, read them on a tiny LCD screen, correct them, then press "print" to transfer them to the paper (using the same sort of mechanical devices as in electric typewriters).
In the late 19th century, there were dozens of incompatible designs and styles of typewriter. Many actually printed on the back, so the typist couldn't see what was being typed without turning the machine around. That changed in 1900 with the arrival of the Underwood No. 5, which put the paper facing the typist and created the standard for all typewriter manufacturers to follow. Underwood went on to become the world's largest typewriter company.
The first newspaper I worked for, in the late 1960s, had mechanical typewriters for its reporters (it also used hot type, but that's another story...). I travelled around the country with a Corona portable for a few years (until CN managed to destroy it in its cargo car). I've had a miscellany of typewriters, from the old, heavyweight clunkers, to lightweight portables, to the latest electric models with (gasp!) correction and spellchecking. Before word processors, before personal computers, if you wanted to be a writer, you typed. Knowing how to spell properly was important!*
Typewriters gave rise to all sorts of productivity, and created a new market for people to work at home. Portable typewriters gave reporters mobility and independence. It gave would-be writers like myself a platform from which to launch our creativity and soar into the stratospheric realms of thought made form. Mark Twain was one of the first authors to use a typewriter. Although his anti-technology mentor, Gandhi, refused to use one, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru celebrated the typewriter as a "symbol of India's emerging independence and industrialization."
Today I have an old, working but cranky, Underwood in my garage. Heavy, cantankerous, old and slow (somewhat like me), in dire need of a new ribbon. It's now a piece of history. The last mechanical typewriters are disappearing. No one makes them anymore, at least not for everyday use. What began in the 1870s died 140 years later.**
As told in this Telegraph story, the last manufacturer of mechanical typewriters, was Godrej and Boyce, of India. They ceased production in 2009 and have a mere 500 left in inventory (many of which, it seems, are in the Arabic language). Computers dominate today, even in India. With the last of the inventory selling for around $260 CAD, compared to inexpensive laptops and Netbooks priced in the same zone, it's easy to understand why.
But in India, typewriters were still the device of choice for writing, and in the 1990s, Godrej and Boyce produced 50,000 a year, about a third of India's typewriter manufacturing output. By 2009, that had fallen to around 10,000, still a lot of mechanical machines, but rapidly losing ground to computers. This week, an Indian newspaper reported the death of the typewriter.***
Of course, the typewriter lives on, at least in spirit, in the computer keyboard. The QWERTY keyboard, was designed to accommodate the mechanical typewriter, so common letters would be placed where they took a little more time to reach. This slowed typing enough to allow the mechanical arm of the previous letter to fall back and not get jammed with the next letter being pressed. QWERTY has endured through word processors and computers, despite the development of significantly more efficient layouts like the Dvorak keyboard.
It lives on in the term, "carriage return", too, which persists in some computer manuals even though there is no longer a physical carriage to move. Sometimes just called the "return" key, many people nowadays refer to it as the "enter" key instead. And the inglorious "Caps Lock" key that allows people to email or post IN ALL CAPITALS LIKE THEY WERE ANGRILY SHOUTING AT YOU, is a sad hangover from typewriter days (but one that, if Google has its way, may soon vanish - hoorah! - and being replaced by a "search" key.
Goodbye, too, the infinite money theorem, which postulated that that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will eventually come up with the complete works of William Shakespeare. That experiment has, apparently, migrated from typewriters to computers, and from chimpanzees to bloggers and forum posters.
~~~~~
* Spell checkers don't make anyone spell better. They just make us lazy and dependent. They can be a good and useful tool (especially for a sloppy and inaccurate typist like myself), but not a substitute for learning to spell properly in the first place. Spelling, like basic math, is becoming a talent for the rare cognoscenti; forums and blogs are filled with post by people who can't tell the difference between they're and their, your and you're, pole and poll. Spell checkers don't see the wrong word as incorrect if it is correctly spelled - that takes someone who knows how to spell properly in the first place. It's a nasty circle.
** Unlike its musical counterpart, the piano, which has survived despite the inroads of electronic keyboards. However, as a musical instrument in the home, pianos are not nearly as popular as they were a century ago, and a lot more expensive than an electronic keyboard to buy, move and maintain. Some types of piano, like the player piano which used punched rolls or paper to "play" pre-recorded music, have disappeared from production, however.
*** Reports of its death may be somewhat premature, however. While office typewriters may be gone, according to a Wall Street Journal blog post, "A National Business Review story detailed how New Jersey based company Swintec has a robust market for the machines." Swintec said manufacturers are producing machines for it in China, Japan and Indonesia. Swintec reportedly has contracts with correctional facilities in 43 states to supply "clear typewriters for inmates so they can’t hide contraband inside them." But the office typewriter, as such, seems to have shuffled off this mechanically-mortal coil - unless the news of the demise of the machine piques enough interest to see a revival. Look what it did for the ukulele!
