Typing in the movies (1) : Cipher Bureau

In this new series we look at some interesting appearances by typewriters in old movies.

A few months ago we discussed the specialist Musicwriter which was a typewriter to create musical notation. In the rather good 1939 spy drama Cipher Bureau we see one (or similar anyway) in action! The film deals with a U.S. government department tasked with cracking enemy agent codes (which the film covers in quite interesting detail).

The key part of the film however is when the enemy agents switch to an ingenious new code which uses musical notes, the spy master planning to send his message over the radio in a live concert! The code breakers are onto this though, they listen to the concert and transcribe the music into notation using the Musicwriter (how realistic this is i don't know, i can't play a note!) 

Thanks to the Musicwriter the enemy spy ring is foiled, the U.S. is safe and everyone goes home happily for tea. Typewriters save the world, again.

Image from movie

Musicwriter

The Musicwriter was an interesting specialised typewriter used for creating sheet music. It was invented by Cecil Effinger, a noted composer and inventor, in the early 1950s and thousands were built by various manufacturers including Olympia between 1956 and 1990.

The idea of the Musicwriter is simple, the typebars have various elements of musical notation on them instead of letters. However, to write sheet music the Musicwriter required a very fine tunable way to place the paper in the correct place. A pointer was located above the ribbon to help the operator make their adjustments. A vernier was also available for fine tuning the horizontal position of the carriage. Pressing a key on the Musicwriter did not advance the carriage as on a normal typewriter (all keys were "dead keys"). However, even with these aids the Musicwriter required quite a lot of practice to get the music notation correct!

Early Musicwriter keyboard layout [1]

Example of Musicwriter output

[1] "A music writing machine that works", The Office (1957-08 Vol. 46 No. 2) p. 43