I’m inspired today by a story about a man who ran a popular typewriter repair shop in New York City. Reading about the great developments he saw in writing machines from the 1960s through the 1990s I realized I was here for each one of those changes. As a writer, those developments trace my personal evolution.
I’ve thought many times about the greats writing their classic novels by hand before typewriters existed. Most, if not all, of the writers published before 1860 wrote entire books by hand.
The typewriter was invented a century before it came into popular use. One hundred years later, a version of that same typewriter—one we came to call “a manual”—was the kind used in my junior high school typing class in 1972, when I was twelve.
Typing class in 1972 was an elective at my school, an optional class, not a required one. I took the class not only to write notes to friends in there with me, but because I was handwriting copious pages in notebooks I called diaries after school and I saw a future in writing this new way, where the pages looked something like the pages in books.
My mother gave me her manual typewriter that year, replacing it with an electric typewriter for herself. She wrote letters to friends on that new typewriter, blazing her way through letters at about 80 wpm (wpm=words per minute; yes, it’s something like mph).
By the time I graduated high school in 1977 I had saved enough money working at my first job to buy an electric typewriter I took to college with me.
The 1980s were around the corner, and when I turned that corner, in front of me was a taste of the brave new world. The first taste came in the form of an IBM Selectric II typewriter with its changeable ball of type, at one of my first jobs in San Francisco after graduation in 1982.
But it was the next innovation in typewriters that made an indelible impression on me: The IBM Correcting Selectric typewriter. A backspace key could erase a wrong letter? Wow.
Unless you had to type using carbon paper, that is. For three months I worked for a publisher where I had to use four carbon copies behind every letter written. Each of those carbon copies was a different color—yellow, green, blue, and pink. If I had to correct a typographical error, it meant pulling out five bottles of Liquid Paper—yellow, green, blue, pink, and white—and dotting the typographical error with it using the attached brush inside the bottle. The sheets of paper had to be set aside to dry separately before I could neatly handwrite the correct letter in the right place on each of the pages. Tedious and time-consuming, but this was the only way. Lining up carbon copies to type a corrected letter was as good as impossible.
In 1984, the Macintosh computer came to the rescue—and so much more. Elation! Joy! My debut with one of these marvels came the first year it was available. In my editorial office at a magazine in Palo Alto I sat at my desk directly in front of one of these, a Macintosh 128K, happily typing away. A personal computer was mine to use all day every day. Beside it I kept a box of hard discs holding files of articles I’d written and could revise in minutes then print out again if I wanted. Liquid paper? Dinosaur era. Creating was better, too. With a computer I could change words while I wrote, exploring options until I landed on the right one.
How about you? If you lived in the last few decades of the twentieth century, can you trace your journey through the typewriter and its evolution? There could be some wonderful stories there.
