Edited at https://subtitletools.com
(whirring)
(wind noise)
(engine revving)
- Sunday, August 215t, 1966.
A perfect day for an execution.
Approximately 122 miles southwest of Las Vegas,
a 1963 Buick LeSabre, license plate FUP744,
is hammering along US highway 91, Interstate 15.
- Ed was driving my car, a '63 Buick.
Pat Blackwell was in the backseat with all his camera stuff.
I had a typewriter with me and it was Ed's typewriter.
One of the feet was broken off of it and I said,
man, I don't have any place to put my feet.
So I said, I'll buy you another typewriter, Ed,
let's throw this thing out the window.
And he said, toss it.
- [Darren] At 5:07 PM, the passenger window rolls down.
- We saw a flat place up ahead and I said,
okay, get her up to 90 miles an hour and
at the right moment, I just tossed it.
(shattering) (engine revving)
- The wreckage stretches along (ding)
189 feet of asphalt and Nevada desert.
- Either me or Ed said, you know we should go back
and photograph that.
If there was ever an investigation of this,
was it an accident or was it a murder?
(plinky piano notes)
It was too directly bound to its own anguish
to be anything other than a cry of negation,
carrying within itself, the seeds of its own destruction.
- Ed Ruscha and Mason Williams' Royal Road Test
is still one of my favorite books.
It looks like a technical manual,
it's a little yellow, spiral bound notebook.
The kind of thing that you might have received
as an instruction manual with any Royal typewriter.
- Scene of strewn wreckage.
Figure in foreground points to impact area,
there is no real explanation of it,
you're just kind of confronted with the bald facts of it
and these really stark black and white photos.
The kind of thing that you might see if someone
was investigating a crime scene.
- [Mason] Carriage assembly.
- Then you're left trying to make sense out of it.
(eerie piano notes)
When I found that book,
it was kind of a definitive moment for me.
I looked at it and I thought, yeah,
this is the grave of typewriting,
this is the moment when it stopped being one thing
and started being something else.
- [Auctioneer] Here we are now, Lot 84, Cormac McCarthy's
Olivetti manual typewriter,
on which he has typed all but one of all of his novels,
including three not yet published.
And I can open up.
It is on the left at $45,000, $48,000, $50,000.
$60,000, 70,000.
$80,000.
$85,000.
(ding) $90,000
$95,000.
$120,000, you came all this way.
$170,000.
$180,000.
$190,000.
$200,000.
Wanna say $210,000?
$210,000.
Last chance, at end selling, $210,000.
Congratulations, sir, Paddle 623.
(light jazz music)
- We've become a throwaway society.
Obsolete,
depends on your point of view, I guess.
We'll take care of it for you, have it fixed
in no time at all, sir.
(clicking)
I've been repairing typewriters
here in Berkeley for 38 years.
You name it, I've probably worked on it.
The first six or seven years I was in this business
I ate, drank, slept Smith Corona typewriters.
The Standards, the Sterlings, the Clippers, the Silents,
the Super Silents, the Galaxies, the Classic 125,
the Skywriters.
I like 'em because they've got a cool, nice touch on 'em.
I think that Smith-Corona is like a good version
of a Chevy, it holds up.
It's not a Benz like maybe an Olympia might be,
but it's a good Chevy.
(clicking)
Quiet.
Dependable.
California Typewriters is a small, family-run business.
It's just the owner Herb, his daughters, and me.
- You have to push up on here.
- Herb bought the typewriter shop back in the early 80$.
Just about the time that personal computer
came on the scene.
(clicking) (dings)
He's an ex-IBM guy.
He knows the IBM Selectric and the ball machine,
but he's probably the best Selectric guy I know.
I mean, I've worked on a few, but I can't come close
to his skills on a Selectric.
(clicking)
Herb's got a dream that people
are gonna come back to typewriters.
- [Carmen] My dad believes that there are various people
all over the place totally excited about typewriters.
I think he thinks it's somewhat of a wave of the future.
That more people are gonna come back to them,
just for different reasons.
He's hopeful, for sure.
And he's willing to spend his last dime.
(grunts)
(footsteps)
- I probably have 250 plus typewriters in my collection
and I would say that 90% of them
are in perfect working order.
I've tried to foster a community of typewriting people
and it hasn't quite worked.
I've given typewriters to folks,
because I have a lot of spares.
And if somebody says,
jeez, I'd like to have a typewriter to write letters.
It's on their desk within 48 hours,
with a note from me explaining the typewriter to them.
I go to their houses later on
and they have it up on a shelf somewhere
like it's an object of art.
And I say, get that bad boy down, put it on your desk.
Have it right there
so you can always type something to somebody.
(clacking)
I type almost every day.
There's usually a memo that I'm sending to somebody
or a question or a thank you note or an actual response.
I hate getting email thank yous from folks.
Hey, we had a great time last night.
Or, hey, I really appreciated it.
So, really, you appreciated it so much that you
took seven seconds to send me an email.
Now if they take 70 seconds to type me out something
on a piece of paper and send it to me,
well, I'll keep that forever.
Otherwise I'll just delete that email.
Look, there's always gonna be great watches that are made,
you'll have to pay a premium for them.
The truth is, no good typewriters
are ever gonna be made again.
No matter how much of a premium
you're gonna want to pay for 'em.
There is no factory, there is no businessman in the world
who's going to open up a factory and says,
we
are going to make
the finest typewriter that will last absolutely forever
and anybody who is willing to pay the $17,000
for a Hanks Typewriter.
Well, they're gonna pass it down to their gen...
No, that's not gonna...
They might do that with a watch.
You might do that, there'll always be a new iPad
that's coming down the pike,
there's always gonna be good cars and things like that,
but no one is ever going to make the great typewriter
ever, ever, ever again.
Boo hoo.
(downtempo jazz music)
(scraping)
- When I was a kid I didn't really think about the future.
We were constantly building things.
We built go carts, we built balsa wood gliders,
we built a five-story tree house.
And it was the house
that the neighborhood kids came to play.
My parents didn't care what we did,
they didn't worry about noise and we could build things
in my father's workshop.
It was a tremendous childhood.
(downtempo jazz music)
My name is Martin Howard.
I've been collecting 19th century typewriters,
from the 18805 and 18905 for 22 years now.
I didn't want to collect Swiss music boxes
or microscopes, or telescopes,
I wanted to collect something that was sort of off the radar
in that regard.
The quality of how things were built
at that time is spectacular.
Cast and machine made part5 beautifully painted.
It's the wild west of typewriters.
My collection I call the Martin Howard collection.
They're all typewriters of nonstandard design.
During the 18805 and 18905,
there were many different styles of typewriters,
but there were two main classes of typewriters.
One was the keyboard typewriter and the other,
what we call are now index typewriters.
I really love typewriters that are the genesis
of an idea, the very beginning form.
(click)
Even if it was a failure down the road
and died out of the evolutionary tree,
that's okay, I like the beginning of any idea.
(ding) (whirring)
(clicking)
One of the things I love finding in my typewriters
when I'm working on them is a dried spider,
a spider from the 18805 or the 18905.
What it tells me is that nobody has raided the tomb
and I'm the first to crack open this typewriter.
The only typewriter of great historical note
that's missing from my collection
is a Sholes and Glidden typewriter.
The Sholes and Glidden is the first
commercially successful typewriter,
it appeared in 1874.
It's of the utmost historical importance,
and after years of collecting, it still eludes me.
(metal shifting) (downtempo minimalist music)
(clinking)
(shuffling)
(clank)
- I feel like I'm just as much a typewriter person
as anybody who actually likes to see typewriters intact
it's just that I have a different way of coming at it.
Some collectors, typewriter enthusiasts,
don't like that I do this.
They get riled up as if I'm going to destroy
thousands of typewriters and that's not really the case.
Most of the ones I take apart are
in pretty rough shape.
I don't really hack into them, I'm pretty gentle
when I destroy them.
I'd always wanted to take a typewriter apart
since I was 10 or 11.
My mom had an old Underwood and I'd always
sit alongside of it and hit the keys
and look at all the machinery inside
and want to kind of be in there and see it,
from the key getting pushed to the
type bar hitting the platen.
Thought it was great.
Just couldn't get enough of it.
At the time, this Queen video came out
with bits and pieces of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
That's kinda how the typewriter looked to me,
it's like those little planes flying through Metropolis.
When I looked inside, I felt like I was flying
through the typewriter,
as if it were this big city machine.
I've seen Metropolis more times than I can count.
(grinding and rattling)
I moved to Oakland three years ago
after living in the mountains for almost 18 years.
I was living in the woods, basically,
making what appeared to be naked robots
out of machine parts.
And it didn't really go over very well there.
I didn't know for sure if it was good
or if it was worth looking at
or if it was worth anybody's time.
So I had to come here to see.
(clanking)
A lot of it's my own compulsion,
my own need to make art and be an artist.
When I first moved here, I didn't really know anybody.
I was driving through Berkeley one day
and I saw this sign with a typewriter logo on it
that said California Typewriter and I looked in the window.
Sure enough, there were typewriters.
I'm always nervous to tell people who like typewriters
about what I do, 'cause some people don't like it.
But the Permillions are super friendly and
they're like the first friends I made when I got here.
- [Herb] Hey, hey, what's up, Jer?
- Hey, Herb.
- [Ken] 15 that Jeremy, Herb?
Hey, what's up, buddy?
How you doin' man?
- [Jeremy] Alright.
Occasionally they'll call me and ask me
if I have a certain part, like a carriage return lever,
platen knobs, mainsprings.
- [Jeremy] Really common parts that I have boxes full of.
- This won't fly, but that's the guy I need right there
so that one's gonna do it, yeah that'll fit.
- I usually take 'em all the way apart.
If I can give him any kind of part that he needs
to put into a functioning typewriter, I'm happy to do it.
It's pretty common actually.
You know, Smith-Coronas?
Herb has a lot of IBM Selectrics.
Some of them are just too far gone, too hard to repair.
So he gives them to me instead of throwing them away.
Thank you.
Thanks, Herb.
- [Herb] Alright, see you later.
- Catch you later.
(slams)
(whirring)
(wipers thunking)
- I feel like I've been peripatetic since I was an infant.
(distant thunder)
I basically grew up in the backseat of a Plymouth.
I don't like flying.
I'd rather be in a car.
But it's really hard to write a play when you're on the move
because you have to focus, you know.
I feel my great strength as a writer is being alone.
Aloneness is a condition of writing.
You look at all the writers that have come up with something
worth its own salt, you know,
and they're utterly alone.
All of 'em.
(shuffling paper)
The plays that really bore me to death
are the ones in which the writer's thinking all the time.
Causing the actors, the characters to speak for the author.
It's very boring
compared to a character who speaks for himself.
There's a certain framework of time that takes shape
around a play.
Sometimes you might fly through a three act play.
You can write it in a week or two.
And a one act play might take you a year.
One of the keys to leaving a piece of writing
and coming back to it
is to leave it at the point where you know
it's about to go somewhere.
Don't come to a dead end and stop and say oh my god,
you know, and walk away.
You'll come back, you're gonna be in the same dead end
as you left it, you know.
I just never got along with the computer screen.
And it's somehow removed from the tactile experience.
When you go to ride a horse, you have to saddle it,
whenever you use a typewriter, you have to feed it paper.
There's a percussion about it.
You can see the ink flying onto the surface of the paper.
So a letter will go, pam, like that, but
along with it is the ink and pshh, flying into the paper.
I'd rather ride a horse than drive a car,
but that puts you in a very different relationship
to the modern world, you know.
(piano jazz music)
- [News Anchor] Well, neither rain nor prices
prove to be obstacles for Apple customers today,
who wanted to snap up the new iPad on the very first day.
- [News Anchor] The rain held off until 3:00 AM
along San Francisco's Stockton Street.
One line was for customers who had preordered
their new iPads online, another was for those who hadn't.
- [News Anchor] Throughout the morning,
we've been seeing this line here
at the downtown San Francisco Apple Store growing.
Right now, it stretches about half a block down Ellis
and continues to grow.
- [Carmen] Well, things have been tough,
up and down all along.
We've had loans, we've had second mortgages.
We've had all our credit cards maxed out
just to keep the business rolling.
When you like what you do, you can almost get paid peanuts
and if you can get by on peanuts, it's fine.
- This is a Hermes, made in Switzerland.
Early 605.
My oldest son found it in a
swap meet somewhere in California.
And it was in fairly rough shape,
we had to kind of rebuild it.
I mean, some people who knew what they were doing
rebuilt it, you know. (chuckles)
It's a beautiful typewriter and it feels great.
And of all the manual typewriters I have,
it has the greatest feel.
Just in the keys, there's a little way they
cup your fingers.
I mean, this is as good as it gets.
(quiet rattling)
There's the whole deal right there.
So simple
and complex.
(light piano jazz music) (soft clicks)
(whirring)
- [Ken] You know, it's almost like you're a kid
working on your bicycle.
You can see what's happening with it.
The lever goes up, the carriage moves,
the letter leaves its mark.
You just can't get that kind of fascination
out of a piece of electronic equipment.
- [News Anchor] The magic moment came at 8:00
when the doors opened.
(applause)
- Unfairly well known for standing next to
new technology and finding a way to incorporate it
into what I'm doing.
I was onstage several years with Steve Jobs,
introducing Apple software and hardware.
I mean they would come to my house and show me stuff
and it would be mind-blowing and I would say,
oh, I can't wait to use this.
For me, I feel like the next step in technology
is less about what you're using
and more about how you're using it.
In between my second and third record,
I went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
And I saw all these great, classic seminal songs
that were written on hotel paper, or you know,
whatever paper was around.
I mean, you can see right into their ideas.
You can see who scratched out a lot of ideas and
which ideas came to people really quickly.
And I thought to myself, wow,
I don't have any representation of this.
I have hard drives, you know.
And you think to yourself, you always have it
it's on a hard drive, but I've never gone back
to any hard drive that I've saved.
Ever.
And said, oh, let me dig this thing up.
It's sort of like a high concept trash, in a weird way, you know.
It's like a trash with this weird sort of promise
that you can still always get it, but you won't.
And I realized, I have nothing to prove
that I've written the stuff that I've written.
There's no...
You can't see how I came up with the stuff, there's no...
You can't touch it, you know.
So I started saying,
I just want documentation of my writing.
Then I remembered seeing
Don't Look Back, you know that great
Pennebaker documentary on Bob Dylan.
And there's this scene where he's just sitting there,
he's kinda playing the typewriter.
It's almost as much of a musical instrument
as the harmonica or the guitar is for him.
And he's kinda in his own world, and there's the requisite
ashtray with a whole bunch of smoldering cigarettes in it.
And I just sort of love the idea of
even if you're Bob Dylan, you still have to sit
at this altar to sort of produce something.
See what that's all about.
(grinding peeling)
I got my typewriter at some online office superstore.
They're like $120 and you get everything in it.
You plug and play and it's ready to go.
It just makes me think there's probably like
four or five of them in the warehouse
and every time
they ship one out, it's like,
someone at Brother gets pissed off
that they have to keep the Service Department open
for that much longer, 'cause someone else bought one.
(clicking)
I instantly started to really come alive on it.
And I realized the reason that I was able
to come alive on the typewriter,
where I wasn't using a computer or even a pen,
was that you were at sort of a safe distance
where you can express yourself openly
without having to edit yourself at the same time.
And so it became this sort of like confessional for me where
I would sit and just type.
And the reason that I was able to go deeper into an idea
is because I wasn't stopped anywhere
in that writing by a red squiggly line.
And what is spell check or grammar check
if all you're really trying to do is sort of dig
into this sort of mercurial sort of world
of what your ideas are.
So if you're trying to say,
close your eyes and clone yourself,
build your heart and army,
and you spell army wrong.
Well, now you feel sort of obligated to fix the word army,
and while you're fixing the word army,
you've now completely lost the tack on being a whacko
in what you're writing.
So what I would do is I would sit at my counter
in my apartment in New York
and I would type out three pages.
Sometimes it would be before I went out,
sometimes it would be after I went out.
And I never read 'em back until I got to the studio.
If this were in Microsoft Word, I'd never see these again.
some of which made the records.
Obviously, most of which didn't, but
you can see me sort of fighting for this song
called Queen of California.
(strumming folk chords)
"When I die, I'm coming back as colors,
"the Queen of California's on the line.
"I've got five free days and a..."
Wait a minute, "I've got five free days before I go away."
"I hear the Queen of California needs a man
"to start a new life in the sun.
"I'm chasing the sun.
"I gotta find the Queen of California.
"I hear the Queen of California lives up there in the sun,
"took a while to get it through.
"There's nothing she can do to me now."
It's like, and it's almost kind of artistic, sort of.
Even when it is spelled completely wrong.
It's almost what thoughts look like.
You know, the sort of stop and start of it.
"Never has a man this alone felt this alive
"Never has a man so alone felt so alive,"
it's like trying to get the wording.
"Never is a phone so dead
"at the side of my bed
"Haven't charged it in 36 hours.
"Searching for the sun that Neil Young hung
"after the gold rush in '71."
A lyric that actually made it into Queen of California.
"They must have switched it for a different one,
"'cause it's some new kind of digital light."
Well, you know.
(strumming light melody)
All stream of consciousness.
And that's the thing, I can't get to stream of consciousness
when I'm involved in my own editorial process
as I'm trying to be a whacko.
You know, I'm trying to be an absolute whack job
when I'm typing, but it's like,
the typewriter doesn't judge you, it just goes,
right away, sir.
Right away sir, however you want it to be.
- [Ken] They do talk to you, yeah.
They talk to you.
I didn't think a machine would talk to you,
but they actually do.
(minimalist piano music)
- One of the odd things about the end of the 19th century
is you have this 30 year period or so,
where all of the major forms of electromechanical media
are invented and more or less at the same time,
we get the final form of the typewriter, motion pictures.
telegraphy, all this stuff sort of happens at once.
The other thing that was happening in America at that moment
was there was this interest in spiritualism,
and séances, and table tapping, and poltergeists,
and all of those kinds of things.
It's a moment in history when death is a lot more present
than it is now.
You could send a telegram to someone and, you know,
it might take a couple of weeks to get to them
and by the time they receive it,
either you might be dead or they might be dead.
It was a pretty natural question to ask,
well, with all of these new forms of media,
is there any way that we can receive communications
from the dead?
In a weird kind of way, typewriting is haunted.
There's this sense that the writing somehow comes to you
through the machine.
Someone or something gives you something to type
and the machine kind of mediates it.
Is the typewriter pulling the strings
and making the author do the work?
The typewriter has to be working
almost before thinking starts happening.
Once that process gets going, it's like a little machine.
The writing comes out of it, but
the question of cause and effect is a lot more tricky
than you might first imagine.
- I don't ever feel nervous that the words won't come.
This, this is beautiful.
'Cause I don't feel like I'm in control of it
most of the time.
(clicking)
I just trust there will be words that come.
And thankfully there always have been,
and I hope that it continues.
I often think about what I do as counseling,
because people come to me with some big stuff.
I write a lot of poems about death
and about people who've died.
I wrote a poem for a man who had lost his wife
three months ago and they'd been married for 43 years.
And when he made his request, he could barely talk.
Somebody's desire for words sometimes
is a desire for something more.
(minimalist piano music)
A man had gone to the Golden Gate Bridge to jump
and was saved by the police.
that was about his secret nobody in his life knew.
I was so grateful to him for unloading it on me.
If you were to ask me to speak a poem,
I couldn't do it, but if you put me
in front of a typewriter, it happens.
It's like maybe that's one of the reasons I never allow
anybody else to use this particular machine.
My typewriter is like the truest love of my life.
- That is clean.
- There's something about it that is so built well.
And if you care for it, it's just gonna keep working.
I do worry that some day there might not be somebody
who knows how to fix it.
(clicking)
(downtempo festive piano)
- [Jeremy] Once a month, there's a flea market in Alameda
at the old naval base.
People come from all over the Bay Area,
it's mostly antiques
and they have a ton of typewriters.
Herb and I will go,
and we're both lookin' for the same thing.
- How much is your typewriter?
- [Seller] $75.
- Mm-hmm.
- She's pretty.
- [Herb] Yeah, not bad.
- How much is it? - $75.
- Nah, that's too much. - Yes, absolutely.
- [Jeremy] I'm looking for typewriters that
I can take apart.
- I had people stoppin' by the shop,
they're just hustlers, you know.
Had a bunch of typewriters and other stuff,
they had like 15 Selectrics.
If you need a couple more, just...
- Alright.
- Yeah, 'cause I've been turning 'em down, honestly.
- [Jeremy] Herb's looking for something
that he can make a little nicer,
or something that's already pretty immaculate.
An L.C. Smith.
That's sold.
So we help each other spot all the typewriters.
Ooh, a Clipper.
We're both looking for a deal,
which is harder to get these days because
there's so many more people interested in typewriters
than there were 10, 15 years ago.
- Not exactly.
- [Jeremy] How much?
- [Herb] $75 for that Clipper
and that Underwood was...
- [Jeremy] How much was that one?
- [Herb] That was $68.
- [Jeremy] I don't see many of those.
- I got about two or three of 'em already in line.
- And what are those worth?
- $200, $300 bucks, somewhere in that neighborhood.
Catch the right party,
maybe you could go a little more than that.
You can put some rubber parts on it
and a wash job on it and hey.
Yeah, if I get desperate and can't find anything else,
I might come back to it.
Ooh, how much your... - Typewriter?
- Yes. - $150.
- [Herb] Oh, okay.
Maybe we could negotiate a little bit like that on there?
and she paid a lot for it out of a job.
- Hmm.
Know anything about whether it works or not?
(clicking) (blues music)
Yeah, definitely needs some attention.
(chuckles)
(clicks)
I'll take it.
- [Jeremy] That's a good one.
- Had it been any color but red,
I'd have passed right by it for $150, I guarantee you that.
Red is sort of a hot color
and it's an easy, easy mover so to speak.
Let's rock and roll.
(blues music)
(appreciative noises)
- Yeah, it seems a little touchy up there.
(clicking)
- Yeah, no, I feel something for these machines.
I'll look at 'em and my mind just goes
where has this machine been at?
If it could talk, man could it tell some stories.
You never know where these typewriters come from.
You know, they come from all over the world.
One could've been in some famous person's library somewhere
halfway across the world and now it made it
to this shop over here in Berkeley.
- Christopher Latham Sholes is a very interesting man.
He was an editor, a publisher, and for a while
he was a state senator.
He was also a keen inventor.
And in Milwaukee, a few years after the Civil War,
he invented his typewriter.
(oompah music)
'Scuse me sir, can I ask you a question.
I'm looking for the location of the historical plaque
that talks about the invention of the typewriter,
somewhere nearby I believe.
(oompah music)
"At 318 Sate Street,
"approximately 300 feet northeast of here,
"Christopher Latham Sholes perfected
"the first practical typewriter in September 1869
"in the machine shop of C.S. Kleinsteuber."
300 feet northeast of here.
(car engine rumbling)
(oompah music)
17,18,19,20".
295, 296, 297, 298, 299...
(cars whooshing)
I've come to Milwaukee to get my hands
on a Sholes and Glidden.
(click)
To be able to get close to the source
of the very first typewriter
is something I've dreamed about for a long time.
Today, perhaps, there are only 175 that are known to exist.
Good morning.
So nice to meet you.
- Hi, good to meet you. - It's wonderful.
Many of those are in museums,
a few are held in private hands.
This has been a pilgrimage I've wanted to make for years.
I would love to be able to have
one of these typewriters in my own collection.
- Oh, I want one of those.
I want one of those, Al.
To be able to explore it.
- This has been in the museum since probably
just after World War I.
- [Martin] And really have a sense that my collection
has become complete at that point,
even though I don't have all the typewriters.
But that would really give me a sense of completion.
(light piano music)
Many efforts had been made since the 17005,
by various inventors, to create a typewriting machine.
But they all ended in failure with very few being produced.
But Christopher Latham Sholes's place in history
is marked by what he did in Kleinsteuber's machine shop,
beginning at 1867 and the six difficult years
that followed to create the world's first
commercially successful typewriter.
The initial efforts used a piano type keyboard.
What you're really kind of looking at here
is just a man's ideas in how to get the mechanics
of the fingers making type to the mechanics
of getting it on a piece of paper.
The lower is the back half of the alphabet
and the upper keys would've been the front half
of the alphabet.
Sholes and his team made around 50 to 60 prototypes
and at the end of those six years,
he ended up with a working wooden typewriter.
Is this written by Sholes?
- [Scholar] It is from Sholes.
- Wow.
- Typewritten. - Touching history here.
"I think the machine is now as perfect in its mechanism
"as I know how to make it.
"I know of no respect in which I can improve it.
"The machine is done and I want some more worlds to conquer.
"Life will be most flat, stale, and unprofitable
"without something to invent.
"Yours, etc.,
"Sholes."
The wooden prototype met with rejection right away.
They took it to half a dozen different manufacturers
whom all declined to manufacture the typewriter.
Then someone suggested that they take the typewriter
to Remington and Sons.
Now, Remington and Sons had been making weaponry
for the Civil War and with the Civil War over,
they were looking for new things to manufacture.
Remington and Sons took this wooden prototype
and they spent the next year turning it into a metal machine
that was much more reliable, and durable,
and could be mass produced by them.
And the first Sholes and Glidden typewriters
appeared on the market in 1874.
May I push a key and get a feel?
I've never done this before, by the way,
I've never actually pushed a key on a Sholes and Glidden.
- Yes, give it a try.
- That's fine?
Gonna push the J there.
(soft clack)
That's wonderful.
$125 was a lot of money to put out for this machine,
especially as nobody could type and nobody knew
the benefits of what a typewriter could offer.
(melancholy horn)
Of great significance was the appearance
of the first Qwerty keyboard
on this Sholes and Glidden typewriter.
If you look at the keyboard,
the top row, left to right, says Qwerty.
- There is endless debate about how that order
came into being.
Some say that all of the letters in the word
typewriter are on the first line of keys.
So a salesman who was trying to demonstrate
the benefits of this wonderful new machine
to prospective customers could whack out the word
typewriter very, very quickly.
Without having to be particularly proficient.
When the Sholes and Glidden came out,
it was not well received, people didn't understand
what a typewriter could offer.
They only sold 1,000 units.
Sholes was very disappointed
and he sold all his remaining shares in the company.
The Remington Two typewriter, coming out in 1878
was really the turning point for this revolutionary machine.
Within a few short years, all hell would break loose.
By the mid-18905, there were as many as 60
typewriter manufacturers, not just in America
but also in Europe.
And the sales had taken off.
- Two Royals,
The last of 'em.
Most of the machines that we repair are approximately
40 to 50 years old.
The companies that made the machines
and supplied the parts, they are long gone.
Ames supply company was the last of the companies
that supplied us with parts for a lot of the typewriters.
Their primary thing was to take old typewriter platens
and recover them, resurface 'em.
We got a letter last week saying that after 110 years
in operation, Ames Supply Company was going out of business.
(rattling)
- My dad, he's very good at solving problems.
He could look at it, and figure it out,
and solve it within minutes.
And that's something you gotta appreciate with my father
that you just don't find that nowadays.
It's a lost art.
- It's not the right consistency.
That's actually pretty close in diameter on it.
- Pops, he loves all this.
This has been his life ever since I was born
and he stayed with it.
- Yeah, so like 9.5 right from the end.
- He told me if you wanna do something, do it all the way,
but make sure you enjoy it.
Like don't halve anything, go 100% and make sure you like
what you're doing.
- See if you can slide that one in there,
I don't know if it's a lot easier.
Go ahead and get the copper.
- [Son] And he showed me that.
- [Ken] Put a little soap on that.
- [Son] I'm here, tryin' to help my dad out, man.
- [Ken] You get that?
Oh, yeah, that's going on, isn't it.
Then grind it.
(metallic whirring)
I think what the typewriter symbolizes to me is America.
I think that might work.
American hard work, what this country was based on.
Made by us with our own hands to help us out
but not to spoil us and not to make us complacent.
(clicking)
- I think that much of the joy of life
can come and should come from work.
I think we've been sold a certain bill of goods
about ease and happiness
being necessarily synonymous.
They aren't.
Something goes out of the human experience,
when life is made progressively easier, less complicated.
Less demanding of alertness, effort,
and appreciation of work when it's done.
There was once a typewriter that was standing alone
on a shelf in an old store in White Plains, New York,
nobody paying much attention to it at all.
That's the beginning of the story.
Then along came...
In 1965, when I was starting to work on my first book,
feeling that I needed something more substantial
to work on than a portable typewriter.
I went and bought a secondhand, Royal Standard typewriter.
And I probably paid $25 for it.
Got it in White Plains, New York
and I've been using it all these years.
Almost every day, written everything I have written on it
and there's nothing wrong with it.
It's a magnificent example of superb American manufacturing.
People tell me that I could do much better,
I could go faster, and have less to contend with
if I were to use a computer, a word processor.
But I don't wanna go faster.
If anything, I would prefer to go slower.
To me, it's understandable.
I press the key, and another key comes up
and prints a letter on a piece of paper.
And then you can pull it out,
it's a piece of paper upon which you have printed something.
You've made that, it's tangible.
It's real.
I think the tool of the typewriter,
because it is more difficult,
produces for me a better result.
(birds chirping)
I work virtually all day, every day.
I come out after breakfast and I work until lunchtime
and then I go in, get a bite to eat, come back out,
work for the rest of the day.
Now I'm not typing, not writing on the typewriter
all that time.
If you were to walk by in the field behind there
and you looked in the window,
you'd think, well that guy's just sitting
in there daydreaming, but an awful lot of the process is
just thinking.
- There are a lot of fractals in nature.
Mysterious geometry that exists in everything.
(clanking) I see the same shapes
inside the typewriter.
I like to pull out the shapes that I feel resemble
parts of the anatomy.
Sometimes a part dictates that it be surface anatomy,
sometimes it's a bone, skeletal anatomy.
Sometimes it's a little mixture of both.
When I take the typewriters apart,
I don't see this unnatural object.
I see people, I see us in them.
Very often, near the platen knobs,
there's a spot where someone's finger
has rubbed across the carriage.
And it's this one nice, shiny, polished spot
with a little bit of dirt and oil from the fingers.
I like that kind of
thing that's left on the typewriter.
I can say that there's probably that person's DNA.
It's fun to see those traces of people.
It's such an emotional machine.
A lot of memories and a lot of real people
put themselves on a piece of paper through a machine.
And I understand all that.
This is how I choose to appreciate the typewriter,
by dissecting it and bringing out the little bits and pieces
that are us in them.
So my favorite stuff to do is the human figures,
because I find every curve on the human body
in here somewhere, in one of these typewriters.
And I like to try to put those together.
I do that with pins and springs and nuts.
I don't use anything apart from what's in the typewriter.
I have learned how to match the parts
to the corresponding part in the human body,
just by, you know, play
and putting the parts together and,
oh, you look like a leg, or you know.
A very childlike way of just having a dialogue with parts.
(rattling)
I grew up in northern Minnesota on the Mesabi Iron Range.
I lived in a lot of trailers.
My dad never made a lot of money.
He never had any desire to buy a house.
I left there probably two days after I graduated.
I wanted to get out
and now I'm in a trailer again.
(chucang)
It's kinda crazy.
As a kid, deer were everywhere.
There were times when my dad was laid off from the railroad
and we were eating Campbell's soup,
peanut butter from the jar, and venison.
When I moved down to Oakland,
one of the first sculptures that I made was the deer.
I had always told myself I would make one.
(ambient indie music)
I've taken this deer across the Bay Bridge
about six times back and forth.
I've shown it at galleries, art exhibitions.
I don't like for work to sit around
and taunt me with the failure of not being able to sell it.
I'm a bit ambivalent about the whole gallery scene.
Trying to work as an artist and then sell my work
through a gallery has been exceedingly difficult.
It's hard to take a piece that I worked on
for maybe as much as a year,
to sell it for not a lot of money,
and then only get half of that not a lot of money.
So just two weeks?
Oh okay.
The best way for me to do this for a living
is to take on the promotion myself.
And the internet makes it really easy,
just takes me a couple hours a day.
I have just about every social networking profile
that you can imagine.
I try to show a little
of what the studio looks like every day
with images of my process while I'm working on a piece.
People can email me directly and I manage to get enough work
to almost pay the bills.
(engine rumbling)
(guitar strumming) (crowd chatter)
- [Ken] When I was a kid, about 19, 20 years old
got a job workin' in Berkeley.
It's like the whole world opened up to me over here.
Different kind of people, different kind of cultures.
I really found myself wanting to go to work every day.
It lets you see the world without going to see the world.
You know, the world comes to you in this city over here.
The first time I heard a black guy
with a British accent it blew me away.
(piano tinkling)
(downtempo jazz music)
The store is open five days a week, 12 to 5.
Couple years ago, it was only open three days a week.
It's picking up, but it's just not there yet.
It's just enough to keep us going,
but not enough to keep me going. (chuckles)
(jazz music)
I'm just hoping that things'll turn around.
Herb and I, we have the skills, the experience.
We have all the knowledge of doing this, we just need
customers.
(clicking) - Wait, wait wait, I wanna.
(clicking)
- Linus, you broke, it's ripped.
- No I didn't.
- Yeah.
- It was already ripped.
- One good thing about them is that
you don't have to turn them on or plug them in.
I used to have a PC, but I did not like my PC one bit.
- There is a wonderful way to spend time typing.
You get to think about it.
You get to romantically sit back and ponder
what your next words are going to be
and that is a pleasant, tactile action.
It actually turns writing or composing
into a very specific, physical process
that has a soundtrack to it.
Listen to this one.
(chunking)
See, hear that heavy chunk that you hear right there.
Smith Corona, now.
(clacking)
Little muted, a little softer.
And now hear the Olympia.
(clicking)
Crisp, a little solid report that comes out.
That, to me, is a good, solid work of art.
(clicking)
- It's really exciting to come into a shop where
you're surrounded by all these great typewriters
and your mind reels at the different sounds
that they can make.
Certain typewriters, you may discover sounds
that you never heard before.
(ding)
It's hard to find a typewriter with good bell tone.
This bell isn't the loudest,
but it's got the best tone to it.
This one, the whole case is...
It doesn't articulate on a lever.
On better typewriters, that bell should be loud,
it should be clear.
Now this one the bell is kind of a more thuddy sound,
this one, it rings really loudly.
(chiming)
This one has the best bell of them all.
It's hard to find a typewriter where it's a quality sound
and it can be consistently made.
(dinging)
(sustained chime)
- We are the Boston Typewriter Orchestra
and we perform music on old typewriters.
Old, discarded typewriters.
We're a collective and what a shitty answer that was.
(rhythmic clacking)
(ding)
(rhythmic clacking)
(ding)
(rhythmic clacking)
(ding)
(rhythmic clacking)
- One of the things we sat down pretty early with
in the BTO and decided, was that
none of us were going to try and quit our day jobs
to make the BTO work as a legitimate band.
And that was sort of a really liberating decision.
You know, make enough money to keep us in typewriters,
beer, the occasional pizza.
(orchestral clicking and dinging)
(percussive clacking)
We don't want to destroy these.
We are using them as an instrument.
We are repurposing them, (audience clapping)
but our intent is not to destroy it.
(crowd cheering typocide)
I murdered one and I have to find a new typewriter.
You feel like Pete Townsend, I guess.
He destroyed the guitar, like,
shit, we'd better get it signed fast
so I can have another guitar to destroy.
I mean, I've killed three typewriters now.
Each one of them has its own personality
and spirit and soul.
- We had the two Smith Coronas
that had a really nice case slide on 'em.
- Oh god, yeah.
- And those two have since become inoperable,
in pieces.
And there's an entire song that we can't play now,
because we haven't been able
to restock those two typewriters
to that specific mechanics of the case slide.
(melodic furious clanging)
(ding)
(rhythmic clacking)
(ding)
- We spend a lot of time really crafting all of our songs.
- We do some covers.
We set up Gil Scott-Heron's
The Revolution will not be Televised
and it's now the Revolution will be Typewritten.
And we do a cover of...
- We're working on a cover of Rain and Blood.
That's Slayer.
(rhythmic clacking)
(ding)
(ticking)
I was at somebody's house years and years ago
and saw, framed on the wall, a thank you note
that Noel Coward had written to somebody
he had had lunch with.
And this was in 1930-something.
And I thought,
Okay, Noel Coward actually typed out on his typewriter
and sent it to somebody, has then lingered around,
and then somebody bought it at some auction
or something like that.
But that piece of paper is still with us.
And I think that that is, deep down inside is,
the interest that I have in it.
Anybody with one of these can create a document
that will physically last forever.
And if the idea on it is a good one,
the idea can last forever, too.
- Everybody knows the feeling of having lost
digital data.
Nothing is worse than losing digital data as a writer.
I've never lost something I've typed.
10 years from now, is any of the computers gonna read
the stuff that we've saved?
I have no idea.
But this still absolutely human compliant.
It's human compatible.
You don't have to upgrade to look at it,
you just have to make sure it doesn't light on fire.
That's all you have to do.
- I type over everything, I don't bother with white out.
I don't bother, I don't try to correct it,
I don't make multiple drafts.
If I make a mistake, I just will maybe
(clacking)
X it out like that.
- I think there's a great value in mistakes.
It's their value for history and how things are made.
(birds chirping)
You see the perfect finished text of a speech
that a president of the United States makes.
How much editing did the President do on that?
How much of his speech was not written by him?
Which words they changed, which sentences they crossed out,
that's extremely interesting.
You see, the process of what it took to get
to the finished result.
With a computer, no manuscript like that
will be around anymore.
Future historians are going to have nothing to work with.
There will be no diaries, there will be no letters.
So how will we know
what they really thought?
What the processes were?
(gramophone playing)
- As the benefits of this revolutionary machine
became clear, there was a real shortage
of trained typists, people did not know
how to operate them efficiently.
The first typing school ever opened in New York in 1881
and it was at the YWCA, there were six woman enrolled
and it was a six month class.
Every woman who was trained to type got a job immediately.
The type writer was what the typist was called,
so the woman was the type writer.
And there was this huge groundswell for the first time
of women entering into the man's business environment.
They were paid less than men, but it was still
a larger salary than they had been paid
when they worked in factories or as a school teacher.
Sholes didn't get any financial gain
from success when it came,
but he was very satisfied that his invention
had provided new opportunities for women.
He saw it as a means of emancipating women
and getting them into the workplace in a new capacity.
(patriotic music)
If I could time travel,
I'd love to go back to Kleinsteuber's machine shop
and to see Sholes, I mean to actually see him there,
a breathing, living man.
If I could've spoken to Sholes,
I would've shook his hand,
I'd want to feel his palm in my palm.
I'd look him in the eyes, see his face alive,
not just a photograph.
I'm not too sure what I'd say,
there'd perhaps be tears in my eyes.
(patriotic music)
I would suggest that we have a beer together.
I'd want to tell Sholes a bit about
what the 20th century was like,
I'd wanna tell him a bit about the computer,
the personal computer.
I'd want to tell Sholes
that the Qwerty keyboard was still there
(jazz music)
- When typewriter manufacturers
were designing the typewriter,
they wanted to make something sexy.
Create something that people could relate to
and wanna put their fingers on.
(clacking)
I'd dreamed about creating a woman.
Like a full scale nude woman for a long time.
Something archetypal,
something that would show the sensuality, the curves,
and the lines that I found in the typewriter parts.
Yeah, but not unnaturally.
It's very difficult to put things together
in a way that emulates real life.
Just the right size.
It's too sharp.
In trying to create her beauty,
it's helping me bring out the forms in the typewriter
that I think are the most beautiful and most sensual.
I used a bell and a platen knob
for the lips, because it has the little vertical lines
that look like the cracks in the lips.
Two of the ribbon spool covers from a Royal
get set up as the pelvis.
(clunking)
One of the sexiest lines is the curve of the pectoral muscle
just above the breast, and that exists
in a lot of typewriters.
Royals have those, Olympia, Underwoods.
They're suggesting breasts.
When I'm in the thick of creating,
my body disappears, physical pain disappears,
and it's very meditative in that I'm not thinking
about the bills I have to pay or what day of the week it is.
I give that trance state more time in my life
than any other time.
Any money that I've made doing this,
that's what that all pays for, is that time for me.
Being in that state.
- When I hit those trances,
it's a very strange combination
of laying the pavement and driving on it.
- You're seeing a phenomenon,
you're seeing this apparition take place.
I don't mean to sound hocus pocus about it, but
there's something taking place and you're true to that.
- And you cannot decide when those moments are gonna be,
you just have to be there in case they happen.
But you have to keep your heart rate down,
and focus, and stay in that trance.
And just let that one side of your brain create,
and the other side of your brain send it through.
- And sometimes you see it by leaps and bounds
and sometimes it's just static.
You don't just write it, you see it.
- The best creators in the world are fiercely arrogant.
And it's not the arrogance that you normally think of.
It's the arrogance
in looking at something you haven't created yet
and say, yes I have.
- Sometimes it leads you somewhere, sometimes it doesn't.
You know.
But that's the adventure of it all.
- You create something so you don't have to live
with the reality that you couldn't create something.
It's sick, it's a very sick process.
I'm going to create something just so I don't have nothing.
(ding)
Doesn't make any sense.
(engine revving) (horn honking)
(distant siren)
- Herb put the building up for sale.
You know, I didn't wanna see him do it,
I mean, he struggled a lot to keep it goin'.
And to see him put it up for sale, I was kinda sad for him.
We haven't heard anything since the sign's been put up,
but just a couple days ago, got an inquire
from a prospective buyer.
After they left, I talked to Herb and
he seems to think the guys are quite interested in it.
If the shop gets sold,
then I've gotta find something else to do.
So I'm kind of waiting to see
what my next move is gonna be.
I can't make a move until they make one.
- [Candy] Dad mentioned that,
he was really concerned about payment.
- Oh absolutely, he'd have to give severance.
- Oh definitely, you'd have to give him something.
Yeah, some kind of package for sure.
- Absolutely. - And some kind of time.
Some kind of warning, I mean not 30 days, 60 days.
- Well as long as it comes with a reasonable check,
it should help soften that blow.
- [Candy] We pay him not enough, probably,
for what we get from him.
- [Woman] That's right, that's right.
- [Candy] For what he takes on and does for us.
I think we owe him something, what would you think?
Fifteen years he's been working for you.
And 30 days' notice
and no check, I'm not feelin' it.
- No way.
- I mean, he's gotta go out and find a job now.
He's made it possible for dad to not be there all the time
and Carmen to not be there all the time, actually.
He would drop whatever he's doing to come help Dad.
(jazz trumpet)
- [Ken] Today's Herb's 70th birthday.
I've fixed up a couple of classic Royals
that they're gonna use to have people sign in.
Lotta people are from Herb's past.
- Hey, remember this move we used to do?
(laughing)
- [Ken] IBM days, his old typewriter days.
I think he's gonna have a good time.
(click)
(crowd chatter and laughter)
- [Speaker] Happy to celebrate 70 years of life, amen.
- [Man] Amen.
- I wanna share one thing.
God had given us two commandments,
one is to love him with everything that we have,
and the second is to love our neighbor,
which includes family and friends.
It's obvious that you love family and friends,
'cause you're here tonight.
And so I wanna give a toast to Herbert Permillion III,
for touching so many lives, Happy Birthday.
70 years of life.
- Alright, yay. (clapping)
(crowd signing Happy Birthday)
(downtempo jazz)
- I love ya, Herb.
(murmuring crowd) (downtempo jazz)
- See your man over there. - Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
(chucang)
- You know, people do have to go to work.
You know, I can't sit here and pet you all afternoon.
So it's rough right now, yeah, definitely rough.
We'll be all right.
I like what I do,
it's just unfortunate that it's just not enough
to where I can make a decent living off of it.
I'm a proud man, you know.
I like to work for my own,
and get my own, and take care of my family.
I want my family to be proud of me, that's the main thing.
And I know they are, you know, my boys are.
You know, I was taught never to give up.
I'm never gonna give up, I'll never just throw in the towel.
I'm gonna always keep trying, you know.
I owe that to my parents.
They were hard working people, they came to California
back in the 405 to work in these shipyards out here.
They sacrificed a lot, they did a lot to raise nine kids.
So I owe it to them not to slouch off or be a bum.
They worked hard and I patterned my life after them.
And I want my sons to pattern theirs after me somewhat.
So gotta keep going, gotta keep goin.
Always gotta keep goin.
(clicking)
(whirring) (clicking)
That thing's gonna probably hit right in the middle.
- [Martin] I've been collecting it 25 years now
and I realize that I'll never shake this obsession.
I've come to San Francisco to see a collector
who has one of the greatest collections
of Sholes and Gliddens.
Jim Rauen has amassed what is arguably
the biggest collection of these machines.
He has 12 of them, wow.
I am the kid in the candy store,
- I've never really used my typewriters.
I've just preserved 'em.
- [Martin] That's good, that's the important thing.
It's much harder now to find a Sholes and Glidden typewriter
in the wild.
- [Jim] This is Sholes and Glidden 2540.
- [Martin] Oh, this is exquisite.
I've only been collecting for half the time
that Jim has, he started collecting 50 years ago
and at that time there were only a handful
of typewriter collectors.
- 3026, that is a gorgeous machine.
You'll love that one.
And that should do it except for those two.
Oh, boy, I used to have your energy.
- I should take off my wedding ring.
- [Jim] Is your wife into typewriters at all, Mark?
- In a word, no.
(grunting)
Oh my, those are shiny and beautiful, wow.
- I think I've got more Sholes and Gliddens
than the Smithsonian does.
(ding)
- Wow, look at that, eh.
It's always a rather personal question to ask a collector
if they have a particular machine for sale.
Are you still looking for Sholes and Gliddens?
I guess certainly if you saw one, you'd...
- Well, I don't know now whether...
So many things economy-wise have changed for us.
- [Martin] Difficult times.
But as collectors, we all sort of have to put
our hat into the ring and make our desires known.
It's important not to be too meek.
I suspect that over the years you've had other collectors
who have come to you interested in
buying a Sholes and Glidden typewriter from you,
has that been the case?
- [Jim] Yes.
Let me ask you this, what are your thoughts about selling
some of your typewriters at this stage.
- Right now, I seriously, really don't have any plans
for selling them now.
There's still more research I'd like to do
and have the machines for.
- I understand that, I understand.
- I'd love to see the collection preserved in a museum
of some type, mechanical museum,
maybe even a typewriter museum.
- [Martin] It's very nice, I would come visit that museum.
- Oh, love to have you.
- [Martin] I dreamed of this moment for a long time,
to be sitting and looking at a Sholes and Glidden typewriter
and knowing it was mine.
(clicking)
My hunt will continue.
(crowd chatter)
I love connecting to the past.
Still yet, the past is so elusive.
(light piano music)
My typewriter room has some trappings from my youth.
It's got a fire engine that I had when I was six years old
and I've got some windup toys my mother used to bring back
to us from Germany.
(click)
I have a twin brother, I'll give you my only twin joke.
Now you know what twins are?
They're womb-mates.
That's my dad and mother.
I first experienced collecting from my parents
collecting these interesting tools.
My dad would restore them, cobbler's tools, cooper's tools,
kitchen implements.
- It's an electric comb.
- [Martin] This is our house,
my parents still have that house
that we moved into in 1966.
There was the Dawn River in the back garden.
We'd build boats, we'd get a door and put walls around it
and we'd go floating it on the river.
We had annual lamb roasts, pretty grand barbecues.
It was a real party house.
This is a pulley ride down the back garden.
She's 85 years old, my dad built a zip line
300 feet long from the top right down to the pine trees
at the bottom of the hill.
And this is a massive teeter totter
my dad built with a universal joint in the middle.
A sort of carnival ride.
We built balsa wood gliders,
that's an eight foot wingspan on that one.
I am capturing my past.
It's there with me, my past, my room,
my playroom, it's still with me
and I'm very happy to have them with me in this room now.
(crowd chatter) (light piano music)
I love to chase the past
and to capture it the best I can.
The past is a luxurious pursuit
which I've luckily been able to indulge,
to some extent.
(seagulls chirping)
(light ambient indie)
- I finally sold some work.
A tech CEO from Silicon Valley
had seen the deer and wanted it.
He contacted me and asked me to install it
in his apartment in San Francisco while he was away.
It was really good timing.
Just paying people who I owe money already.
And then the money's all gone, but it allows me
to move forward a little bit.
I was happy someone appreciated it.
And that was what I dreamed about when I moved
from the mountains to the city, was that at some point,
I'd be installing my work in a really nice apartment
with a beautiful view
and that my work meant something to someone.
(clattering)
Bruce Sterling, the science fiction author,
posted something on Wired.com about my work
and then Cory Doctorow started posting stuff of mine
on BoingBoing.
After that I got picked up by Popular Mechanics,
Gizmodo, Engadget, a lot of the tech blogs.
(clacking)
Things started to pick up very quickly.
How many of you recognize this sound, what is it?
I started getting calls from people in Silicon Valley.
- How many of you actually learned how to type
on a typewriter?
High tech people creating new technologies
who were interested in buying my work.
This piece is a portrait bust of Mark Zuckerberg,
the head of Facebook.
Christmas present for him from a friend.
Hopefully it looks a little like him.
Mark's eyes are kind of a little wide set.
The insides of his eyes are kind of turned up a little bit.
Sometimes I'll get anonymous hate mails on my website
or comments on Instagram or Facebook,
where someone's obviously very upset.
And I'm doin' what I do.
They'd rather see the typewriter live
than have me make my crappy artwork or whatever.
They wanna save every typewriter
and that's just not possible, it's not practical.
And it's not gonna happen.
(soft piano music)
This is the way that I honor them.
I'd much rather see them in this state
than sitting on a shelf collecting dust.
Technology will change us,
we won't be human in the same way.
We will be a different kind of human.
This piece is called Thea.
She's the Greek goddess of sight and light.
It's for Oculus VR, a company that makes
a virtual reality headset, called the Oculus Rift.
That's technology that I've been waiting for
since I was a little kid.
Along with a flying car and all that other stuff.
This is gonna be hanging from cables in their office.
In the near future, there's going to be
a huge split in society.
There'll be one group who'll have all the money
and power to change their DNA, augment their bodies
with technology and become machines that can live forever.
And then there will be the other group
who will reject all that for a completely analog life.
Living in nature with little or no technology
and trying to stay human.
(train horn)
(engine running)
- [Ken] When I was a kid, I liked everything in the future,
I watched the Jetsons, I liked Johnny Quest,
you know, 'cause he had technology, I loved it.
I wanted to be Hadji.
But I'm an adult now and now I see
what it's really doin' to us.
You know, we had plants full of workers,
now they're full of robots.
Sometimes we forget about what happens
when we do have these innovations,
and the fallout effect from that.
- Are you at a loss as a culture if something dies
and nobody appreciates the death of it?
(soft piano music)
Maybe, maybe not.
- Just like time traveling,
when you're comin' in here looking at one of these machines.
They take you back in a place and time.
You can visualize what was happening in the '405
or World War I or the '605, if you will,
just by the typewriters that we work on here
and the era that they came out in.
(jazz festive music)
So I'm prayin' to God that we can keep this thing going.
Fingers crossed.
Fingers crossed, I hope there's a lot of enthusiasts
still out there, you know, that want their machines fixed.
Yeah, I can do it, I mean' I'm not braggin',
but I'm damn good.
I am, I am, no brag, just fact.
- Individually, I think we are a culture,
individually, every individual is a culture.
But the big picture of the culture
doesn't make any sense to me.
(festive jazz music)
- [Ken] Yeah.
Here around Christmastime, we probably do our best work.
When they come in the shop, it's very nostalgic to 'em.
The typewriter involves a sense of times gone,
that I think were a lot less stressful.
Alright, stick you on back in here,
get you all dolled up.
They're time machines.
I think there's enough people out there
that can keep us afloat.
But I don't know, I don't know.
- I'm not...
- You're not gettin' it yet? - Look, are you?
Looks kinda somehow uneven.
That looks okay, that one maybe should go on the other side.
- That's what I'm thinkin', yeah,
that can go over there, yeah.
- Yeah, put that over there.
- [Richard] Typewriters are a so called thing of the past
so people sometimes turn to them
in an attempt to recapture the past.
- [Ken] How we lookin', how we lookin'?
- I think it looks good, I think it looks way better.
- It's a way to travel back in time
to a previous period in history.
I've come to see typewriters less as objects of nostalgia
than signs of a future,
signs of something that's going to happen.
There's a slow movement afoot.
People realizing that not everything has to be
completely efficient, not everything has to be
goal oriented, but you can enjoy the process itself.
You could compare typing to the slow cooking movement,
the point is not to eat as efficiently as possible,
the point is to take your time.
And efficiency is not the paramount value,
the point is to enjoy what you're doing.
- Afraid that you can talk to your own friends,
but how do we take that video calling experience
and really make it social?
In fact, you can only video call with people
who've already accepted your friend request.
- [Richard] Computers, they're great tools,
but they're also seductive and they take away
some of our power sometimes.
- It's gonna be a one-click toggle
to change between these modes.
- [Richard] There's a fine line between
having something help you and having you be dependent on it.
- [Woman] We have facial detection,
which actually tells you if someone's home.
- [Woman] You have face alerts,
if someone walks into the living room,
you can receive a face alert.
- I don't wanna find out tomorrow what happened today.
I wanna find out within seconds or microseconds,
if possible.
Social media allows everyone to know everything
about everyone.
- We added a little accelerometer inside the sensor,
you're actually gonna get a vibration
to let you know to stand up straight.
And it takes all your data points,
and then the real secret sauce is where our engineers
had made all the algorithms
that take all this data and actually turn it into
insights and information.
- There'll be always those people who are against it,
but I think for the most part,
people'll start to come around to it.
- I was having this rebellious moment,
this feeling of being sick of the digital world,
how intrusive it is, how pesky it is, how invasive it is.
And I went to my typewriter and wrote down a manifesto.
(clicking) (motivational music)
"We assert our right to resist the Paradigm.
"To rebel against the Information Regime.
"To escape the Data Stream.
"We strike a blow for self-reliance, privacy, coherence
"against dependency, surveillance, and disintegration.
"We affirm the written word and written thought
"against multimedia, multitasking, and the meme.
"We choose the real over representation,
"the physical over the digital,
"the durable over the unsustainable.
"The self sufficient over the efficient."
(clicking) (inspirational music)
(whirring)
After I wrote it, I put it through the scanner
and shared it online.
Then I put a little note on my blog saying,
Psst, visit this website where you can find it
and people did.
They started copying it, retyping it, sharing it.
Here's somebody who translated it into Italian,
here's a translation into Serbian.
Then in a few weeks, I started getting postcards, letters
in my mailbox from the insurgency around the world.
The revolution reached the village of Graubunden,
located in the Southern Valley, agent Neckerman Jr.
"Greetings from the insurrection,
"we are pleased to inform you that typewriters
"are now mandatory in every tower and minaret east of Paris.
"Unfortunately it was not a bloodless coup.
"Sometimes the unenlightened must be shown the error
"of their wicked ways.
"We are confident that every public building,
"and every hamlet, village, and city,
"will soon resonate with the glorious clatter of type bars
"falling upon paper.
"It is never too late to experience the joys
"of our mechanical friends."
"Freedom must always be freedom
"for those who think differently," Rosa Luxemburg.
"Comrade Polt, this month I visited a foreign country
"where I hope to make contact with a new cell
"of the insurgency, workers of the Typosphere unite."
This one came in recently from Alabama.
"This dispatch comes from the province known among
"the cognoscente as the Magic City.
"Natives here express satisfaction at the recent contact
"with the glorious revolutionaries
"of the London Town Directorate
"and hold themselves in readiness for further instructions
"from the Politburo.
"Vive l'insurgencie."
Communique ends.
From Melbourne, Australia.
"Typewriter writers of Melbourne, unite.
"Bring out your weapons of writing
"and write in the streets, in the parks,
"at the football.
"Write like every word matters.
"We watch our movement to grow stronger every day.
"The revolution will be typewritten."
(soft piano music)
- Sometimes I feel homesick for a place
I can never really get back to.
My father died last June,
he was 86.
Eventually, the house will have to be sold.
The house was the house that people came to to play,
it was where my friends came,
it was the adventure playground.
I can see myself in 10, 15, 20 years,
walking along the river
and approaching my parents' house from the valley.
I come down here and imagine the pleasures of childhood
that were had here.
- [Herb] Want something to drink, here?
- Yeah, lemonade, medium. - Oh okay.
What's up? - Right here good?
- [Herb] Yeah, that's fine.
(humming)
- [Ken] Herb decided not to take the offer on the building.
He decided, well let's just not give up hope yet on it,
let's see if we can keep this thing going.
We realized we needed a website.
- The whole typewriter thing seems to be a fad right now,
but I think it's more than that.
All these kids out there wanting typewriters,
the only way they're gonna see that is online.
(clacking) (beep)
It seems funny that the only way that California Typewriter
will be able to survive is by embracing new technology.
Using social networking in a website
just to tell people that they exist.
Here it is, update. - Okay.
- It's gonna say update on your main,
it's way easier on the app.
They can manage their promotion through the web.
I just took a great picture of
an Instagram post that says something.
Yeah, they won't have to wait for anybody
to come into their store anymore.
Here I'm gonna say this super clean, little beauty.
They can arrange repairs and ship typewriters.
$440?
- [Carmen] Yeah, $440.
- [Jeremy] And they can stay in that space, happy there,
the whole family keeps working together and
it'd be great.
- Right now the site just pretty much features
profiles of the store and of the employees in it
and what we do and how long we've been here.
And it features a few machines,
but it certainly has to grow bigger than that.
One thing about the new technology
is that even though we may hate it,
we need it.
(laughing)
(crowd noise)
First of all, we wanna thank you guys for comin'.
This is our first type in.
this place hasn't been bumping like this in a while, so.
Welcome and thank you for coming.
Yeah, basic service runs about $75
and the ribbon's about $15.
Give you a name and a phone number
to call back at.
Okay, great.
(clicking)
(crowd chatter)
- We're all a little weird.
When you have an addiction
and you find other like-minded people,
this whole group of people enabling each other.
- I thought it was a good opportunity to come
and meet lots of other people who bother with typewriters.
- I'm worse than an alcoholic.
Somebody come up with a creative way
for Typewriters Anonymous and I'm that.
- My name's Tony Midley and I have a typewriter problem.
- I have a typewriter problem, too, and I love it.
- I think there's actually a lot of people
who fit the description of high tech people
who have kind of had enough
and have gone back to the analog world.
I actually work for Facebook, which is really interesting
to me, because I spend all of my time online,
social networking.
I think a lot of people wanna get away from that,
or withdraw from that.
Even young people, and I think that's why they're
attracted to technology like this.
- There's never going to be a typewriter movement.
It's just about, instead of there being
this one massive way of thinking,
there are many, many smaller,
more niche sort of ways of being.
Which would be great to have again.
- I'm Sylvia. - Hi, I'm Mike.
- And bringing back this village
by way of different neighborhoods.
These guys, they're on the typewriter
and they're naturalists.
You're gonna see a group of people grow, and grow, and grow
and grow and grow.
- Hope we can do it again every year.
That's it, alright.
(tinkling)
(cha-cha music)
(dinging)
- [Actor] How do you do, are you an actress? (chuckling)
- [Actress] You have a fantastic set.
- We call her the fate machine.
- [Actress] What?
- You see,
typewriter keys represent the keys of life.
(chiming)
And we human beings dance on them
and then when you dance, as we press down the keys
of the machine, the story that's written
is the story of our fate.
- [Actress] It's very symbolic.
- Thank you.
(chiming)
(engine rattling)
- [Jeremy] Typewriter really isn't dead,
it's still getting used in India, at least.
(upbeat Bollywood music)
There are these info slums, places where people
type for a living on the street.
Not for creative purposes, not for writing poems
or for writing novels, but
for business purposes.
(engine revving)
It was recently announced
that the last typewriter manufacturing plant
was closing down.
- The last typewriter manufacturer on earth
has shut down.
The factory was in Mumbai, India.
The company was 60 years old,
it opened in the time of Nehru.
- [Jeremy] Godrej and Boyce stopped their
typewriter manufacturing about three years ago.
- [TV Announcer] They sold 105 of thousands of typewriters
every year, until the typewriter was just killed off
by the computer.
- [Jeremy] Godrej brought me here to create sculptures
from the last 100 typewriters
that rolled off their assembly line.
I don't know what I'm gonna make yet.
(clinking) (murmuring)
Godrej wanted the sculpture to be a symbol of
their commitment to innovation.
To represent their move into the 215t century.
(honking) (distant chanting)
(light ambient music) (clinking)
The lotus, it rises from the filth.
From the murky water at he bottom of the pond
and blossoms into this pure,
uncontaminated, delicate flower.
The symbol of enlightenment, rebirth, perfection.
Something beautiful growing from the bottom of a dirty pond.
There's no such thing as permanence.
Things die and they're reborn as something new.
I don't wanna look back.
The future is the only thing you can do anything about.
You can't do anything about the past.
A lot of people are really scared
about how the future is unfolding
and the only way to think about it
is to be optimistic.
We're gonna do amazing things with technology,
we have to.
The thing that people who are afraid of change
should remember is that people born after you are,
living in your time, they don't want what you want.
They want what's in their time.
(engine running) (light ambient music)
We can't stop that habit that people have
of taking knowledge and trying to tweak the world
around us with it, we're always going to do that.
I don't know what the future holds for me.
I'm doing what I love and I'm doing what I want.
I don't know where I'm gonna be six months from now.
(clicking)
- [Martin] I remember when I told my wife
that I'd had my first typewriter dream.
She was quite alarmed.
I'm looking in a big glass window of a store,
it's nighttime, they're closed.
And I look in and I see shelves.
And on the shelves are wonderful, early typewriters.
Rare ones, unusual ones, ones I've never seen before.
And my eyes dance along the shelves,
checking out these treasures.
But I can't get in, the door's locked.
Sometimes I'm actually transported
into the store, and I get to get
really close to the shelves.
I never touched the typewriters,
I can never touch them, but I get close.
That's as far as it goes.
- I have no idea what the life of this typewriter was
before I had the privilege of possessing it.
Nor do I have any idea what will become of it
when my turn is over.
I'd like to think it will stay in our family
and maybe there will be grandchildren that wanna write.
And maybe one or two of them might be peculiar enough
to enjoy this as much as their grandfather did.
- Hello, hi, my gosh.
Alan, I'm Martin, hi.
We've met before, I think.
- We've talked on the phone.
- We have. - But we haven't met.
- Well we've got catching up to do.
There's typewriters in these hills, eh?
Hi.
- Canadian boy. - Oh.
This year, there's a gathering
of antique typewriter collectors
in Morgantown, West Virginia at Herman Price's house.
- [Man] Have you seen his Manhattan paper table.
- No. - It's like the Mona Lisa.
- Oh, come, come.
Herman Price, his whole basement is a labyrinth
of rooms and corridors where typewriters are stacked
on shelves from the floor right up to the ceiling.
- Anybody come from 2,000 miles?
(murmuring assent)
3,000 miles.
(laughing)
4,000 miles.
And the winner is, Marty Rice.
Come on up here, Marty.
I have a lot of typewriters.
It's approximately 700.
Marty is from outer space. (laughter)
And I've found that collecting the typewriter friends
is a lot more fun than collecting typewriters.
- This is a white Moll number three.
- [Martin] There's a whole range of ages here
from 14, the youngest, up to 75 approaching 80.
- And it's just a fun machine
that makes you smile to look at it.
- Mostly men, all men.
A bit strange, I don't know why that is.
- I take it back with me, the hopper,
and I sleep with her tonight.
And then I'll take it back tomorrow.
- Alright, so this is my Oliver Woodstock,
absolutely no relation to...
- [Martin] It's just wonderful to
share our passion of early typewriters.
- Did you have to do much to it or was it like that
when you got it?
I'll never be able to get all the antique typewriters.
It's spectacular.
There's always gonna be people out there
with bigger collections.
- If I had to keep only one typewriter,
if I had to get rid of them all and only have one left,
There is a version of this Smith Corona, which is the
silent Smith Corona.
I have an electric version of this,
which is kind of like a hybrid model of it,
'cause the only thing in it that is electric is the keys.
But there is...
Let me move this.
Smith Corona, Skywriter, definitely on the top five list.
If you can only take five typewriters with you,
that would be it.
Hermes 2000, definitely might wanna take that bad boy.
The Olympia's okay, but quite frankly,
the rise of the keys is a little too high.
Somewhere around whenever they started making this,
the Smith Corona Silent and various other models
that have the same silhouette, the rise on the keys
is just almost perfect.
Going from an N to a Y requires almost nothing.
The size of the type is not too big and not too small.
But listen to the solidity of the action.
(clacking)
This is a solid, solid piece of machine
that's got beautiful highlights like the stripes
here and there, the colors are good, I love the green keys.
I would probably say that this with a good case
would be the one typewriter I would take
and that's why it's kinda out right now.
I rotate this one into use an awful lot.
(clack clack)
I confess.
(clack clack)
- I'm not picking the typewriter because I think it's hip.
It's the best version of the idea that's ever come around.
And for me, I think the best way to live
is to incorporate the best of the last 100 years
into a hybrid that works.
Write a book on a typewriter and promote it on Twitter.
Why not use the spectrum.
You just have to make sure you get yourself a typewriter
on Ebay or some blade runner-y kind of back alley deal
and say, well, I'm happy to be typing on it.
- [Ken] I think they're here, I think they're coming back
and I think they're gonna be around for a while.
We have a pretty good supply right now.
Herb's always out lookin' for 'em.
He's at flea markets, he's at garage sales.
There's still a lot of 'em out there.
We've got a good supply, but I kinda believe
that you can never have too many.
You know, you can never have too many.
- [TV Host] You know what, I, like you,
mourn the loss of the typewriter.
And then you come up with an app.
- [Tom] I came up with an app.
The Hanx Writer, Hanx with an x.
And I've gotta tell you, man,
of dollars off of this.
(chucang)
I have figured out how to make a computer
work like a typewriter. (laughing)
- [Ken] We're havin' people come in the shop
and say, I just did a Google search for typewriter repair
and you popped up.
- In World War II, that used to be
the reporter style typewriter.
They used to send in reports from the battlefield.
So this has been to World War II and back.
So that's a lot of sentimental value, I guess.
- [Ken] They're comin' from all over the place.
From far away as LA, ones from San Diego.
It really shows what the website did.
- Oh, excuse me. (chucang)
- I'm certainly no prophet, I can't see into the future,
but we're hanging in there.
California Typewriter is here
and we still repair typewriters.
(soft jazz music)
(wind noise)
- It was too directly bound to its own anguish
to be anything other than a cry of negation,
carrying within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
That's the last two lines of the Encyclopedia Britannica
description of the dada movement of art.
You could use that to explain anything in the world.
It's the ultimate all-purpose answer.
If it takes a hen and a half, a day and a half,
to lay an egg and a half, how long does it take
a one legged grasshopper to kick the seeds
out of a dill pickle?
What are you gonna say?
Two seconds, two minutes, two days?
It's completely boring compared to that question.
(jingly whirring)
When you explain things, you rob them of their mystery.
Questions are far more interesting than answers.
There's no meaning to the universe,
but you might say our job is to give it meaning.
But that's for our amusement.
The universe could care less.
(light accordion music)
(clacking)
(smooth jazz music)
- I like the feeling of making something with my hands
I like working with my hands, I like to paint,
I like to build things.
And with this machine, I'm working with my hands.
- I just feel this incredible tension
as I get older between what I would like to see happen
and what's just gonna happen anyway.
- You know, I'm not gonna bemoan the passing of an era.
There's a certain point
where everything left me in the dust. (chuckles)
And I was happy to be left in the dust.
- But all this, it's all going away.
The only people that will keep this up is insane people
and dilettantes and artists.
Mad geniuses like myself and a handful of other people.
(jazz music)