typewriters

This page considers the typewriter, a device that - along with the sewing machine - has been as revolutionary as the bicycle or the motorcar.

It covers -

• introduction
• uptake
• culture
• industry
• carbons
• fetishes
• studies

     introduction

[under development]

     culture

Darren Wershler-Henry's postmodernist The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 2005) commented that

the typewriter has become the symbol of a non-existent sepia-toned era when people typed passionately late into the night under the flickering light of a single naked bulb, sleeves rolled up, suspenders hanging down, lighting each new cigarette off the smouldering butt of the last, occasionally taking a pull from the bottle of bourbon in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet.

An equally powerful symbol, however, might be that of the female typist, with scholars such as Margery Davies in Woman's Place Is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers 1870-1930 (Philadelphia: Temple Uni Press 1982), Graham Lowe's 1980 'Women, Work and the Office: the Feminization of Clerical Occupations in Canada, 1901-1931' in Canadian Journal of Sociology 5 and Ellen Lupton in Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (New York: Princeton Architectural Press 1993) and highlighting ways in which office automation both liberated and shackled women.

Students of probability have preferred the image of the 'dactylographic monkey', articulated by statistician Emile Borel (1871-1956) in 1913. He posited that a sufficient large number of simians, rewarded with bananas or otherwise, would eventually reproduce every book in the Bibliotheque Nationale by random keystrokes on a typewriter.

Borel's symbol has been unconsciously appropriated in writing about apes randomly recreating the Library of Congress, British Library (eg Arthur Eddington's 1928 The Nature of the Physical World and James Jeans' 1930 The Mysterious Universe) or works of Shakespeare (Douglas Adams' 1979 The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy) or Karl Marx.

Jorge Luis Borges' 1939 The Library of Babel sensibly commented that "Strictly speaking, one immortal monkey would suffice". One sarky contact considers that the blogosphere is such a work in progress.

     industry

[under development]

     carbons

Carbon paper (initially 'carbonated paper') and stencil technologies such as the mimeograph encouraged use of the typewriter by enabling automated reproduction of a small number of copies. Those copies could be used as reference copy on file (eg of an outgoing letter or contract), as a back-up copy in case of misadventure or as a small-scale publication (with some groups for example circulating newsletters in the form of carbon copies or hectographs and samizdat authors gaining a readership for heterodox poetry and other literature with a blurred carbon copy).

Historians disagree about who gets priority for the invention of carbon paper, usually attributed to UK scholar Ralph Wedgwood (who received a patent in 1806 for a "Stylographic Writer") or Pellegrino Turri of Italy. Carbon paper is a 'mechanical' or 'dry transfer' technology, dependent on pressure from a stylus or typewriter key transferring a pigment from the reprographic paper to another sheet of paper. The 'carbon' refers to early use of carbon black (usually dissolved in an oil that was manually brushed over each sheet) as the pigment.

Carbon paper was initially manufactured entirely by hand and on a craft basis, with most production involving small pads. Improvements from the 1850s onwards saw the development of mass production of large sheets of carbon paper based on a hot wax in a naptha solvent that evaporated after application by a machine, with the paper being cut to A4 and other sizes before being sold in bulk or on a piece by piece basis.

The paper could be reused several times, if treated with care, although poorly-maintained typewriters or insufficient pressure in handwriting might result in a blurred impression or in damage to the paper (which tended to be flimsy and thus tore easily or was cut by impact with typewriter keys). Users complained that the 'ink' rubbed off on hands, cuffs and other exposed surfaces.

Paper was typically monochrome (ie blue or red). Creating a multi-coloured copy thus involved mastery of a typewriter and willingness to swap carbon paper during typing of a document.

As noted above, there were limits on the number of legible copies that could be produced at one time using carbon paper (ie most typewriters did not allow the operator to sandwich more than an 'original' and three sheets of carbon paper and copies in the machine) and on the number of times the paper could be reused.

That encouraged adoption of stencil technologies such as the Cyclostyle (patented by Gestetner in 1880), which allowed a larger number of reproductions from a master document prepared on a typewriter or by hand.

Adoption of the photocopier resulted in an ongoing decline in demand for carbon paper, which is now regarded by many people as a curiosity and - apart from receipt pads for small businesses - is no longer sold by many stationery vendors.

     fetishes

The discussion of collectibles elsewhere on this site notes that some consumers (and institutions) have placed a special value on literary and other manuscripts, whether because those documents can be studied for signs of the creative process (and enable production of a definitive scholarly edition) or merely because they have an 'aura' from their association with the author. What of typewriters and other devices from Walter Benjamin's 'age of mechanical reproduction'.

In 2008 an owner advertised one of George Bernard Shaw's typewriters on AbeBooks.com for a mere US$8,600. Christie's had earlier auctioned a typewriter "signed" by author Douglas Adams, bringing £2,000. A Hemingway typewriter went for US$2,750.

     studies

Studies include The Writing Machine: A History of the Typewriter (London: Allen & Unwin 1973) by Michael Adler, Century of the Typewriter (London: Heinemann 1974) by Wilfred Beeching, The Wonderful Writing Machine (New York: Random House 1954) by Bruce Bliven and The Typewriter and the Men Who Made It (Urbana: Uni of Illinois Press 1954) by Richard Current.

For management and social impacts see Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930 (Chicago: Uni of Illinois Press 1992) by Sharon Strom, JoAnne Yates' Control Through Communication: The Rise of System In American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1993), James Beninger's Control Revolution: Technological & Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1989) and Alan Delgado's The Enormous File: A Social History of the Office (London: John Murray 1979)

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