Recalling Manual Typewriters

By Elton Camp This will be a trip down memory lane for older folks, but even younger ones may find it interestingor at least it will help them appreciate word processing. 1 I learned to type well during the 11th and 12th grades in 1957 and 1958. Willie Maude Nelson, wife of the principal, Dr. E.E. Nelson was the instructor for Typing I. We had manual typewriters with blank keyboards. They were designed to prevent us from getting in the habit of looking at the keys as we typed. A single electric model sat at the back. We took turns using it. That meant about 1 months between uses considering the size of the class. I hated the electric model. When I laid my hands on the home keys, all of them activated. I was accustomed to the heavy striking needed on manual models. The way to correct keying errors was to pull the carriage to one side and erase the mistake. If the eraser crumbs fell into the typewriter, they caused mechanical problems and a reprimand from the teacher. This type of correction produced unsightly documents. Whiteout was years in the future. About five spaces from the end of each line, a bell sounded to signal us to manually return the carriage to the left for the next line. If a word being typed was longer than that, the keys quit working and it was necessary to press margin release to finish it. The key now called Enter was called Return on early models of electric typewriters. Return still had to be pressed at the end of each line when the bell sounded. Typewriter ribbons began to grow dimmer from the very first use and required a messy periodic replacement. It was necessary to clean the keys frequently or accumulated ink would fill in any enclosed space, especially on o and e. To create professional looking documents was virtually impossible. Dirty keys produced this:

The reason the Shift key for capital letters bears that name is because, on manual models, pressing Shift literally shifted the armatures so that a different part hit the paper

to make capital letters. Failure to fully depress Shift would result in flying capitals which appeared well above the line. Special formats were difficult to accomplish. Superscript or subscript was possible only by manually turning the roller a half turn and then typing the number. Centering could be done only by calculating the midpoint of the line, placing the carriage at that point, and then backspacing half the number letters in the line to be centered. Placing text in columns required a complicated set of mathematical calculations. To have a justified right margin, it was necessary to place slashes at the end of each sentence to bring all the lines to the same point. Then the typist counted the slashes on each line and then retyped the page while inserting extra spaces between words so that the right margin was even. Only one size font was possible on a given machine. Most typewriters had Pica and a few the smaller Elite. Bold or italic font wasnt possible, but one could underline words by backspacing and typing again with the underline key. A shift to the upper part of the ribbon produced red type. It was common for keys to stick. That required a trip to the repair shop. Any major corrections or rearrangement of text required starting over and retyping the entire document. If a page being typed had to be removed, it was impossible to reinsert it correctly so the material lined up. Only persons who endured that technology can truly appreciate word processing. While I was enrolled in Typing I, my parents bought me a typewriter to use at home. That was a big help even if it was an old model Royal. We got it somewhere near Scottsboro and I used it through undergraduate school.

Like My Typewriter I was, I think, the only boy in Typing II, but I saw the value in being able to type well and didnt care. Nobody couldve anticipated the need for typing that would arise in future years in connection with computers, so that skill was even more valuable than Id anticipated. Those two courses helped me more, in a practical way, over the years than any others.