My father had an old Royal. Manual. He eventually passed it onto me when I was just a little kid. I loved typing and taught myself. All wrong but it sufficed. I tried to take typing in high school, figuring on an easy A, but because I'd been typing one way for so many years prior, the hand positions and such was more than I wanted to learn so I dropped it. I can type 50 words a minute but in my own style.
That's funny, New Haven, that you don't know about carbon copies. I remember helping my father prepare his clients' income taxes and using carbons to create the extra set of taxes for the client to keep. When he finally got a xerox machine in the office, that was a really big deal.
I have my last typewriter, a beautiful Smith-Corona, somewhere in the basement. Haven't used it in years.
Typing class.....I already knew how to type (thanks to my Mom) by the time typing class was offered to me in eigth grade. My teacher was Mrs. Bryant.
She stands out because she spent the first five minutes of class telling us our assignment and then would read a romance novel the rest of the period. Badly dyed blonde hair ~ and she wore that horrible bright blue eye-shadow from the sixties. I got straight A's in her class for two years though.
New Haven<
The term carbon copy has become a standard phrase in American English as in, "Little Jane is a carbon copy of her mother."
Those sheets of carbon paper were a pain in many ways. They were hard for me to keep straight in the cartridge roll of the typewriter. Also, they could smear unwanted ink stains on your hands. If you didn't know about these stains, you would sometimes ruin a good shirt. Or, worse still, you would put your hand(s) on your face, and other classmates sometimes thought you had either been in a fight leaving bruises or that you were very unwashed.
Back in the late fifties when I was in the US Air Force, we had to type many things in seven copies with carbons. Yes, seven copies. When we made a mistake, it was a mess...... black hands and all! Ever try erasing carbon copies? LOL c.i.
Ohmygosh, c.i.! I'd forgotten about carbon erasers! Those were the pits! Oy!
Rae<
Didn't something called "ink eradicator" dissolve a typo on the original copy so you could strike over it?
The ink eradicator that I recall was for ink from pens. For typewriters I recall "White out" which you dabbed on the error, waited for it to dry, and then made a messy strike- over. Today they have "liquid paper", little strips with a powdery coating on one side. You place the strip over the error and restrike the error leaving a powder over the error. Then after removing the strip, you retype, hopefully correctly.
The ink eradicator that I recall was for ink from pens. For typewriters I recall "White out" which you dabbed on the error, waited for it to dry, and then made a messy strike- over. Today they have "liquid paper", little strips with a powdery coating on one side. You place the strip over the error and restrike the error leaving a powder over the error. Then after removing the strip, you retype, hopefully correctly.
My first typewriter was a portable Olivetti.
In High School I got an Olympia typewriter, made in East Germany. Worked perfectly for two decades.
I used it a lot for "underground" newspapers. You hit the stencil paper with the keys, using no ribbons. Corrections were impossible.Then, the page would go to the manual mimeograph. Good times.
The first one I ever used was one of original IBM Selectrics. When I took typing in school we used manual ones - what a throwback.
Once I had an old East German mechanical typewriter Erica with Cyrillic character set at home. Typing a medium-size text on it was a hard physical labor if compared to doing the same thing with help of computer...
Where is my post? I can't see it?
Looks like we're having pagination problems again.
Everyone is accounted for now.....Whew! I thought it was just me!
flyboy<
Thanks for setting me straight again on the ink eradicator. You are correct. It was used for what is today another antiquity: the fountain pen.
Ah! Fountain pens! They are definitely from the heyday of manual typewriters. I got to use one earlier this week at a friend's home. He collects them and I needed to jot down a quick note from something I read. The "feel" of it - great to have that sensory feeling again. Such power in creating your powers to have the right "feel"! I doubt that most folks experience a thrill from keyboarding at the PC....
Speaking of fountain pens, I just discovered that an old friend and sometime colleague still writes his checks with a steel nib dipped in a bottle of ink he keeps on his desk. He told me it's extremely hard to find regular writing ink (as opposed to India ink which artists still use) in local stores. He lives in Saratoga Springs, NY. Come to think of it, I haven't tried to buy a bottle of ink in decades. Or typewriter ribbons either, for that matter. Do they still make 'em? I still have a Smith-Corona Electronic tucked away in the back of a closet somewhere. Disposed of all the portable manuals which had accumulated over the years. The one I really hated to get rid of was an old Olympia which had the option of a Latvian keyboard. The way that worked was, all the appropriate diacritical marks were there as "dead" letter. In other words, you could hit the cedilla or umlaut or tilde, it would print but not advance the carriage. Then you could print the appropriate letter over or under the diacritical mark. Neat.
Gad, I'm showing my age!
Somebody commented on carbon copy having entered the English idiom. It has done so in another way as well. When we type 'cc', meaning a copy is being sent to someone else, as well as the main addressee, that 'cc' stands for 'carbon copy.'
I'm surprised that people have trouble finding fountain pen ink. A top of the line Mont Blanc pen is still considered a choice gift for graduating law students. I believe many doctors also use fountain pens; though considering the legibility of much of their writing they might as well use crayons.
I'm so old, the typewriter I used said "Royal." c.i.
Wow I believe they still sell ink, not just india in art stores, but ink for calligraphy, and in a large store in Boston all kinds of Fountain Pens. It's called Penfields, I'll check if they have a web site, one of my attorneys bought me a disposal fountain pen there with bright aqua ink there for my birthday.
Carbons were a nightmare for me as well. In college, I worked on a television news show in the communications dept. It was student written and produced and I was forever typing on scripts for the prompter. They were mulitlayered with carbons, so if I messed up, the error went through all the sheets, and had to all be whited-out individually. I even convinced the dept. the student tv organization needed its own electric typewriter because we were always bothering the secretaries in the office to use the office equipment, so we got one. All outdated now. The student television dept. was severely cut, and whatever survives, they must do the scripts on a computer/prompter by now.
: )
My 7th grade social studies teacher explained to my mom on a parent's night, that I was doing as well as I could because my hand writing (printing) was so poor. He showed her an "A" paper of another student that was typed. My mom an artist (and an art teacher) and unfortunately at that point in time, a member of the local school committee was shocked. She asked if, if he seriously believed that kid actually that paper himself. At that point Mr. C. acknowledged a parent did the typing. Then my mom asked if he believed said parent did not at the same time correct grammar and small errors, etc. I was then signed up for typing class, in another town, since our town did not offer it. My mom lost her re-election (thankfully), and years later ended up ironically teaching part time in the Middle School with Mr. C. who she basically told off when he asked how I was doing in school. People often comment on my fast and overall typing skills, which I think I inherited from my maternal grandmother. Whenever I get positive comments I send a big air kiss out to Mr. C.
