The Old School
Today we visit a couple of classrooms from the past. Back before “keyboarding” classes, nearly every high school student learned touch-typing, in rooms full of clacking, dinging, ratcheting clamor. And lest those of you who didn’t have to take one of those classes believes that there is no difference between “typing” and “keyboarding”, the two are worlds apart. Touch-typing is an art. The keys are not neatly compressed together and nearly level, as on a computer keyboard. The vertical and horizontal finger reach of a manual typewriter is nearly twice that of a keyboard. Shifting required actual muscle strength. You had to align forms with the type; calculate centering, right-justification, columns; keep track of your bottom margin; plan ahead for footnotes. There was no word wrap.
If you made a mistake–oops!–backspace and delete could not save you. Heaven forbid you didn’t discover the typo immediately and had to use half-spacing to insert a missing character. If you were being timed for speed, there was no going back and correcting your mistakes with a quick backspace or Ctrl-<-. Those flubs counted against your word count.
And you did most of this without looking at the machine.
First up is a postcard, c.1915, of the Spencerian Commercial School typewriting room. Click to see it full-size and try to find as many different typewriters as you can. Is that a Smith Premier 10 next to the Monarch and the Remington in the near row?
Next is a Library of Congress photo of a typing class at Eastern High School in Washington, D.C., c.1920. Most of the typewriters are Remington #10s. Click the photo to view it larger and enjoy the fashions which were popular then. If you click here, you’ll see the most wonderful thing about this photo: the list of classroom typewriter serial numbers and reported problems (“Remington RX85832 – Bell does not ring”).
Interestingly, while the fashions and the machines in use indicate that this undated photo was taken in the 1920s, a couple of those serial numbers cross-reference to much later dates.
