More about typewriters
HAVE been doing a lot of reading about typewriters; have even learnt a bit about the history - no-one really knows how the QWERTY keyboard came about - but it goes back over a century, and was fascinated in the difficulty in getting the type onto the page so that the typist could easily see his/her work.
The difficulty was in the mechanism to get the keys to hit the paper. The early technique was to have the letter come up by a lever to strike the paper from below. It took a while, several decades, before someone figured out how to do the engineering.
As well, typewriters were very expensive. Often around $100, which in the buying power days of Victorian & Edwardian workers, was around $30,000 - equivalent to the price of a car nowadays.
So here's another little piece, typed this time on a Smith Corona XD 4600 electronic portable.
It's rather frustrating to see how, as the technology & convenience advances, so the quality of construction plummets accordingly, perhaps not just with typewriters.
A typewriter made around the turn of the century - the 20th century that is - was a work of art as well as a business tool. Many came decorated with gorgeous flower arrangements painted on the sides, perhaps as a way of justifying the cost of construction. Solid metal & durability was the order of the day.
But the relatively modern Smith Corona is a poor shadow of its forbears, despite its significant advantages. The worst thing about it is the low grade plastic of which it's made, similar to a Fisher Price toy, to my mind. The lid rattles if tapped, the power switch is stiff & noisy & the display (it has a one line display for the memory feature) is too faint for my liking.
And yet, the quality of the output is marvellous. Clear & sharp. Or it was before I began playing around with my scanned document!
The difficulty was in the mechanism to get the keys to hit the paper. The early technique was to have the letter come up by a lever to strike the paper from below. It took a while, several decades, before someone figured out how to do the engineering.
As well, typewriters were very expensive. Often around $100, which in the buying power days of Victorian & Edwardian workers, was around $30,000 - equivalent to the price of a car nowadays.
So here's another little piece, typed this time on a Smith Corona XD 4600 electronic portable.
It's rather frustrating to see how, as the technology & convenience advances, so the quality of construction plummets accordingly, perhaps not just with typewriters.
A typewriter made around the turn of the century - the 20th century that is - was a work of art as well as a business tool. Many came decorated with gorgeous flower arrangements painted on the sides, perhaps as a way of justifying the cost of construction. Solid metal & durability was the order of the day.
But the relatively modern Smith Corona is a poor shadow of its forbears, despite its significant advantages. The worst thing about it is the low grade plastic of which it's made, similar to a Fisher Price toy, to my mind. The lid rattles if tapped, the power switch is stiff & noisy & the display (it has a one line display for the memory feature) is too faint for my liking.
And yet, the quality of the output is marvellous. Clear & sharp. Or it was before I began playing around with my scanned document!
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