Dorothy Brush "Random Thoughts" Published Jan. 25, 2006

My advice: Ignore the new gadgets

What do you do when you are confronted with a new gadget? I try to ignore it, hoping it will go away. That was my reaction when I was forced to change from a manual typewriter to an electric because that was all that was available in my new workplace. When I began working from home again, I kept my old faithful manual but purchased an IBM Selectric II. Then along came computers and I went through the same battle. I still use the Selectric for first drafts but begrudgingly transfer the finished product to the computer.

Many writers have an emotional attachment to typewriters. Morley Saffer of "60 Minutes" sticks with a manual Royal typewriter. He can mark-up his copy and he believes "it has some relationship to my humanity. It's got character, personality." Novelist John Updike uses an old manual Olivetti. Poet John Ashberry composes his verse on a very old, circa 1930 Royal. Terrence McNally says, "You have to go to the typewriter, that's all you have to do. I have a word processor now, and you turn it on and something happens after a while, and that's all writing is to me. If I don't go to the typewriter I don't write."

The link my big red typewriter has to my mind is strong and if I hear a sound from it that might be trouble I panic. And for good reason. Recently I read an article declaring typewriter repair shops were clinging on the edge of survival! I knew that was true locally because annually I had taken my machine for a check-up. Now there is no place left to take it.

One repairman said, "It's a dying field. People want to do things faster now." Another said, "Some drag their old typewriters in to be fixed because their computer is down." Now parts are hard to find and the few repairmen left who understand typewriters do it more as a hobby than a business.

Typewriter history began when an Englishman filed a patent for a typewriter in 1714. He described it "an artificial machine or method for the impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another, as in writing... so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print." Henry Miller had a fine idea but took it no further. In following years other inventors filed patents for such a machine but nothing developed.

Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee, WI, poet, inventor, newspaperman and Christian, made the break-through because of his concern for his pastor. There was an epidemic raging in his town and the minister had little time to write a sermon because of caring for the sick and dying. When Sholes wondered why there wasn't a quicker way of writing, a friend challenged him to come up with a machine.

After months of work he patented a writing device. Sholes gathered a group of friends to watch him tap out in capital letters, C. LATHAM SHOLES SEPTEMBER 1867. That machine became the basis for the first commercially produced machine, the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer in 1874. Later that same year gun manufacturer Remington shipped its first "Type Writer" also based on Sholes' invention. From 1880 to 1920 the competition among typewriter manufacturers was fierce.

Typewriters changed in appearance but the "qwerty keyboard" remained and carried over to computer keyboards. Sholes saw the necessity of distributing the most frequently typed letters across the keyboard to prevent the keys from jamming. He invented the word qwerty for the top-left row of keys.

In helping his pastor, Sholes opened a whole new world for women. During those years most clerks in business establishments were men. When the new typewriter was introduced, the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) began offering courses in typing for women. Some saw this as scandalous when employers rushed to hire these women, but they were the first to be trained. A woman's place was no longer just in the home.

Typewriters do not have a place anymore and Bill Keane caught the decline in one of The Family Circus illustrations several years ago. Daughter and little brother were looking at a typewriter and she told him, "It's Grandma's word processor."

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Dorothy Copus Brush is a Fairfield Glade resident and Crossville Chronicle staffwriter whose column is published each Wednesday. She may be reached at ebrush@frontiernet.net