Today i received a couple of ribbons to fit to the two most recent additions to the collection. The first has been fitted to my Olympia Traveller Deluxe S. This is the typewriter i am currently doing my touch typing practice on, though i've been a bit lazy lately so need to focus before i can finish lesson 2!
It has been awhile since we had a new addition to the collection, so here is the 24th typewriter which is a rather nice Triumph-Adler Tippa. The typewriter seems in full working order though has no ribbon fitted so i can't tell for sure yet. A new ribbon has been ordered. The typewriter has a German keyboard incidentally.
As well as typewriters, the 1970s and 1980s office would also usually have at least one kind of calculation machine. So, lets explore our collection of calculators as well starting with the beefy desktop Triumph-Adler 814.
Also known as the Triumph-Adler EC1M (and built by Omrom in Singapore), the 814 was a large desktop calculator from 1973 built using LSI discrete logic. The calculator came in mains powered (as is our example) or battery powered versions. The calculator has the basic arithmetic functions and a memory. The calculator is designed for heavy duty number crunching in the likes of accounts or payroll departments and has a fold out stand on the back. It is also pretty well built.
There are also a few other function keys along the left-hand side, what operations A, K, CA and CI perform i don't know (however, on other calculators K is often used for carrying out calculations using a constant), unfortunately the calculator is non-operational so trial and error is out of the question. There is a sliding switch above the display, perhaps something to do with number of decimal places displayed? The display is an eight digit VFD (vacuum fluorescent display).
We humans have always found ways to use and push technology, especially mundane every day tech, in ways never originally intended, especially to create art. Human ingenuity has enabled for example music to be created using the clicks and whirrs of a floppy disk drive, in earlier times expert use of the typewriter was used to create artworks. The use of typewriters to create images goes back to the earliest days of the typewriter in the late nineteenth century.
Type sketch art can still be done nowadays, and it is something i will try myself one day perhaps as there are various books online with type sketch art projects, but the heyday was undoubtedly when millions of people daily used typewriters for work in the first half of the twentieth century. One example from the early 1930s was a competition in the New Movie Magazine for typists to recreate photographs of movie stars using their typewriting skills in this case Greta Garbo.
If you collect typewriters you may have noticed that electric typewriters tend to be pretty cheap, thats because most of them suck and often don't work. However, my Smith-Corona XE1630 does work fine though did not come from the market or eBay. In fact it was my Mum's last working typewriter, she let me have it last year on condition i didn't get rid of it just in case she ever needs to use it. Quite why she thinks i would get rid of a typewriter is of course a mystery...
The XE1630 isn't a very exciting machine though, it is very much of it's time and typical of the last gasp of typewriter available before people just switched to microcomputers. The keyboard is very quiet and a bit spongey which i dislike, even my Mac has a mechanical keyboard louder than God. The typewriter is fine though and works well, it is a valued part of the collection, especially as its the only electric i have that actually works!
After talking about British paper sizes such as foolscap folio last week i decided to buy a pack of it for use with my typewriters. Up until now i have been using paper from my laser printer tray but i thought the typewriters deserved their own dedicated supply. In the image you can see the size difference between foolscap folio and a sheet of A4.
Nowadays it will most likely be a sheet of A4 paper which you load into your typewriter but A4 is a metric paper size. What would have been loaded into your 1960s or 1970s built typewriter when it was in actual work use? Traditional British paper sizes are defined in inches of course, the equivalent to A4 would have been foolscap folio which was 203 by 330mm (A4 is 210 by 297). However, there were various other sizes, i like that the A5 equivalent called foolscap quarto is also known as "kings"!
Interestingly, despite being the paper size of the British Empire and Commonwealth, foolscap folio has a German origin. The name foolscap is from the watermark of a jester's hat used to identify it. The actual foolscap size is 337 by 419mm, it is folded in half to make a folio page. Then in half again to make a quarto.
Foolscap folio is still available, i might get some so we can compare it to good old A4.
