(2 of 3)
Noteworthy Typewriter Stunts and Tricks. In the late 1920s, the Royal Typewriter Co. dropped 11,000 parachuted typewriters out of a plane over Hartford, Conn. This was intended to increase sales. Tricks with typewriters were also popular in the early days, such as making palm trees out of capital I's and asterisks. Placing such things in a composition must have offered problems, but they are said to have given much fun.
Typewriters in Art. Claes Oldenburg's Soft Typewriter. Also, Leroy Anderson's musical number The Typewriter, remembered for its effective use of the bell. Marshall McLuhan surmised that the typewriter has contributed to the writing of free-verse poetry, because the righthand margins are uneven. This is fascinating, but unlikely. Yet e.e. cummings' poems could have been composed on nothing but a typewriter, and many novelists have used the lower case and run-on words to convey streams of consciousness. Don Marquis' archys life of mehitabel made a poet of a cockroach who was unable to press the shift key.
The Typewriter and the Lady. Men constituted the first "typewriters," as the operators were originally called, but women soon took over the task, which was supposed to give them entry to the American workplace. As it turned out, typewriters ultimately tied women down to uninteresting mechanical jobs, proving once again that men are smarter than machines. The typist in modern folklore is often given a melancholy identity, like the typist in T.S. Eliot's Waste Land, who takes her lover as wearily as she lights her stove. On a happier side, Rose Fritz, the national speed-typing champion from 1906 to 1909, never lost to a man, and Stella Willins, the 1926 world's amateur champion, once typed 264 words in one minute, repeating a memorized sentence. The report that the sentence was "How I loathe this work" is apocryphal.
The Typewriter Goes to the Movies.
Movies about the press inevitably display lots of typewriters on which reporters furiously bang out their stories as if they were using artillery. Such scenes illustrate the idea that the typewriter can be a weapon, which recalls the original patent that the inventor, Christopher Latham Sholes, sold to E. Remington & Sons, a manufacturer of firearms. There is always something heroically decisive about a character's plunking himself down before a typewriter in a movie. The machine itself becomes an instrument of integrity, which may be one of the things we miss when it finally disappears.
Pleasant as all this may be to record, it does not add up to much. Mainly one will miss the manual machine simply because it has been around so long. We take unexpressed comfort from the sight of familiar objects, superannuated or not, tending to regret their absence even when we no longer require their presence. Then, too, we will miss the sound, the clackbop from the house next door that signaled the Great American Novel in progress, or the Great American Last-Minute Term Paper. Writers will miss their old machines greatly, even as they now flirt pantingly with Apple IIs. They will even miss the mistakes they used to make. This sort of msitake. The new machines correct so perfectly that they do not show error, and sometimes error was nice to see, a useful memento of human sloppiness.