All hail the typewriter!
Some fun facts from The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor” today:
It was on this day in 1868 that the typewriter was patented, by Christopher Sholes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1873, he sold the patent to the Remington Arms Co., a famous gun maker, for $12,000. There had been typewriters before, but they weren’t very practical — it took longer to type a letter than to write it by hand. The first commercial typewriter based on Sholes’ design, a Remington Model 1, went on the market in 1874.
Ernest Hemingway, (books by this author) loved his Royal typewriter. He kept it in his bedroom so it would never be too far away, and he put it on top of a bookshelf and wrote standing up.
Hunter S. Thompson, (books by this author) wrote on a red IBM Selectric. One of his first jobs was as a copy boy for Time, and while he was supposed to be working, he used a typewriter and typed out, word for word, all of The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, in order to learn something about writing style.
Jack Kerouac, (books by this author) was fast at typing, and it frustrated him to have to change the paper so often. So he took long sheets of drawing paper, trimmed them to fit in the machine, and wrote all of On the Road that way. When he taped them together at the end, the manuscript was 120 feet long.
I’ve made a lot of dumb decisions in my life, but perhaps one of the smartest was to take Mr. Palomino’s typewriting course as a sophomore at Moreno Valley H.S. We learned on this brand new typewriter at the time: IBM Selectric. If I recall correctly, I got up to 85 words a minute on a timed test.
When I went to the U. of Virginia, I typed other students’ papers to make extra cash — at 50 cents per page. I had a Royal manual typewriter. Used that up to my second year at Yale when I got an electric typewriter.
My first computer was an Apple IIc. That’s what I typed the spec script K-9 on. Remember those 5 1/4 inch floppy discs? Had a dot matrix printer that was a slow as molasses. I’d hit print for a draft of the script, go out for a run, come back, and it would still be printing.
When I had an overall deal at Warner Bros., I got my hands on my first laptop. Thing weighed a ton and the screen was almost unviewable.
I can still type fast, something that comes in handy at work, teaching online, and of course here at GITS. And I’ve transitioned pretty well to texting on my Blackberry. But I’ve been convinced to move to an iPhone when my current phone contract is up in August. I’m sure my typing skills will take a hit, using my thick forefinger.
I guess what I want to say is, “Thank you, Mr. Palomino, for teaching me how to type!”
How about you? How’d you learn to type? What was your first typewriter / computer? And what does it feel like when you sense your creativity coursing through your fingers onto the keyboard, making words appear like magic in the screenplay you’re writing?
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