I mentioned my first typewriter this morning.
That no longer exists - being little more than a toy beaten into non-existence by over-use not long after its acquisition, I suspect.
This was the replacement:
This was old when acquired from a family friend when I was about 10. It may be pre-WW2 vintage.
It was portable at that age only if my twin was around to share the weight.
It did invaluable service for a number of years, being replaced by a manual portable in my teenage years when it was apparent that I was never going to stop typing, and the noise from this one was unbearable downstairs in my parents' home.
I still have it. And it still works. It has been through a lot of house moves and must be the oldest of my own possessions that I still have.
When my sons were young, they were puzzled as to where the screen was.
Typists must have been strong in those days.
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When power supplies and digital networks start failing, maybe we’ll return to purely mechanical technology?
Perhaps you know the origin of the QWERTY keyboard layout on English language typewriters? (As I understand it…)
The keys are separated in such a way that the levers with letters that are commonly adjacent in English words are widely spaced, to prevent one flicking upwards at the same time as the other is withdrawing, through the same place above the paper, and thereby jamming. This enables faster typing without jams, but at the cost of more agility and strength in the typist’s fingers!
French and other languages have different layouts (AZERTY etc)
I remember jamming keys despite that…..
As I understand it, the widespread idea that the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow down typists, or to separate common sequences of letters to prevent jamming of the mechanism, is just not true. Or at least there is no convincing evidence that it is true, and researchers who have looked at the history and development of the typewriter keyboard don’t think it is correct.
Early keyboards started with an alphabetical arrangement and then evolved over time as they were used. For example SE and Z are close together because telegraph operators wanted “…/.” to be close to “….” to make it easier to input the right letters once the context made it clearer (a bit like a translator from German waiting for the verbs at the end of the sentence). It was QWE.TY (with a full stop in the place of R) for a time before it settled on QWERTY.
It seems that Remington was an early mover and responsible for popularising QWERTY, and locked typists into their system by providing training courses, so it became a de facto standard.
Much more here:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-the-legend-of-the-qwerty-keyboard-49863249/
Useful if there is a power cut.
The joy of watching my sons attempt to use a dial phone!
That was something
Indeed…..
A fine piece of historical artifacts Richard , the last Labour manifesto that was successful in attaining government was probably typed on it .
Most likely…..
We learned to type on Remingtons at school and I agree those keys were tough to depress for young hands. Thankfully, not long after I left school electric typewriters began to be manufactured and those keys needed a lighter touch. All the typewriters then were very heavy.
I must say, I don’t miss the ribbons, the carbon copies and the TypEx. Correcting errors is so much easier now.
I have an iMac with a 24″ screen I can carry in one hand and I love it.
Nostalgic image – what memories it evokes!
From memory, this looks to me exactly like the Remington my mother (a teacher, not a secretary) obtained secondhand in the 50s and which I sometimes used before going to University.
From the mid-60s, as a PhD student and then lecturer in Sheffield, documents needing to be typed (including articles) were written by hand and given to a secretary to be typed, with handouts for students being typed onto stencils for production on a Xerox machine.
But my research required the use of a huge computer housed in multiple cabinets in a very large room at the top of the the building, with programmes typed (by me) on a computer terminal which generated a roll of paper tape to be kept carefully to be fed into the computer. Any mistakes had to be corrected by physically cutting and removing the offending section and using Scotch tape to replace it with new paper tape created by punching the correct row(s) of holes by hand ; later came stacks of individual punched cards (easier to correct but a panic if you dropped the stack) and finally (wow!) direct input to a new mainframe computer. In the early days, complex mathematical programmes could run for several hours and I had to be authorised to use the computer alone at night, feeding in the tape or cards and then waiting (im)patiently while it ran before going home for a few hours sleep. How things have changed!
I never learned to touch type, which – as things turned out – was just as well because since moving to France 40 years ago, I have used a French (AZERTY) keyboard.
But I have also found that, with advancing age, I now make many more typos – either by hitting an adjacent key (even when looking at the keyboard!), inverting 2 letters (with left & right hand fingers) or not tapping hard enough to register – and have to re-read carefully and edit, which is frustrating!
So apologies for any remaining typos in this! And also for its length – I got a bit carried away.
I always have to read with care!
Memories – so easy to forget – it was another world.
Unusual for Richard to be typing so young.
Those Remington typewriters were part of a mysterious seperate world of women- seen in offices.
Similar to anrigaut – discussion papers and research papers written by hand and typed by a secretary.
Booking overnight sessions on a paper-tape- fed Ferranti computer – occupying most of a disused church. People used to collapse from exhaustion in the early hours – and found slumped over the controls in the early morning.
I sort of taught myself to touch type only after getting compters with keyboards…. typos now getting worse and worse.-
I was fascinated by printing, type, anything to do with it from a very young age. I even loved John Bull printing sets and I longed to do letterpress – and never did.
I suspect that helps explain my dedication to blogging, but I have only just realised it.
Speaking of the “world of women” in offices, in the late eighties I used to teach these women typists, often in government offices, how to use word processors on the newly installed local area networks. I remember a “tea lady” would bring hot drinks and biscuits around twice a day.
The course usually lasted a week, and it was very interesting to obeserve how some women immediately took to the word processor, seeing how much easier it was to erase their mistakes, save their work, and the spelling checker was the clincher. Some however, quite reasonably, would be very cautious, and it would take several days of patiently explaining the basics of using a mouse, for example, but without exception, I think, they all came to prefer the screen to the typewriters they had used for so long.
I had a secretary in my firm who was used to manual typewriters.
She wrecked computer keyboards for a while. Eventually we persuaded her she really did not need to hit them hard.
I part-supported myself through Uni in the mid-80’s by typing fellow (male) students’ dissertations.
I learnt to touch type at my all girls’ grammar schoolin about 1972 and was seriously advised by the careers teacher to become a multi-lingual secretary – My school-based A levels are in French and Spanish and I have an O level in German. At 17 I knew I was not going to be a secretary.
A few years later I remember the anger of my (shared) secretary when my male colleagues would dictate (on a machine) lengthy letters and say at the end “Can I have 3 carbons with that?” When I explained, gently, that they needed to put those instructions at the beginning of the tape or on the paper request for typing, they did not understand and one even said he thought the typist would listen to the whole tape before starting to type!
But sadly, although I have used a keyboard regularly for most of my life, I no longer touch type. I use mainly 2 fingers of each hand.
I think the make colleague should have been made to do their own typing for doing that!
I taught myself to touch type when I was still at primary school, aged 9 I think. My mum had a typewriter and used it for correspondence and to run a choral society. I found a Pitman typing course – a great thick book bound in a way that it was flat when opened, and I began working my way through it. The idea was to type out each exercise with no errors. If you made an error you had to start all over again, but I must have been far more patient than I am now because I actually stuck to this rule, even as the exercises got longer and longer.
The typing course – I think it may have been Pitman’s Commercial Typewriting: A Progressive Course in Touch Typewriting, which you can still find copies of online, or an earlier one from the same decade – had an interesting secondary educational function for me personally in the texts of the exercises. I remember there was one exercise that contrived to weave together the titles of books by Dickens into a (probably not very plausible) narrative. And the same with titles of Shakespeare plays. Then there were essays about, for example, the Arts & Crafts movement. Because of making errors and having to do the same exercise multiple times, the names of these works of literature and the names of William Morris, various writers etc were all imprinted on my mind at an earlier age than would have been typical.
When I first started learning touch typing and was away from the typewriter, I would be mentally moving my fingers to type out my thoughts! And decades later, when I was learning the Graffiti writing system used on Palm PDAs (predecessors of smartphones) I would again find myself writing out my thoughts using mental Graffiti!
In fact, I still use Graffiti on my Android phone today. I have big fingers and find Graffiti much the easiest way of writing – you trace out simplified shapes of letters on the screen. And I can do it to a certain extent without looking. Of course, in the case of touch typing, the big advantage is that you don’t have to look at the keyboard, so you can read and type at the same time.
My mum bought a Gestetner duplicator (much better than Roneos) to produce concert programmes and I learnt how to use that too. At the time I imagined that Gestetner was an exotic German or Austrian company. It was only decades later, when I moved to north London and went to a talk at Bruce Castle museum, that I discovered that the company and its large factory were based in Tottenham. (Bruce Castle’s well worth a visit by the way, but closed for repairs at the moment.)
I also tried to learn shorthand, but didn’t get very far with it – I wish I had, it would have been invaluable.
The typing came in very handy when computers arrived at work. I was impressed by the speed that other people typed using two fingers, but they always had to look at the keyboard, I didn’t.
I was fascinated by newspapers as a young kid, but didn’t go into journalism because when I was at university I would get writer’s block when writing essays (probably just as well for the sake of my liver, as I had a taste for beer and in those days journalists seem to have spent a large portion of every day in the pub). However, after retirement, as the result of a series of chance events, I found myself in charge of a hyperlocal website where I’ve been able to pursue my continuing interest in the presentation of news.
Thanks for sharing.
I liked your last para: once caught the bug does not go away.