Communication and evolution

In my whole life, I’ve had access to four typewriters. If you’re under 30, you’re probably asking yourself “What the hell is that?” You’re gonna see this in a museum, maybe? If you Google it, you can see some pictures of it, if you never saw one.

A typewriter was an old times machine to write things. So, before the existence of printers or even computers, people would use typewriters to write letters (the grandmother of the email), to write documents, to write a bunch of s#@t. And I’m not even that old but the last time I used one, was in my first college. That was the last typewriter I had. The other three were around me growing up but they were not mine.

The first typewriter I used was at home. I don’t how it got there but it was unattended so I felt free to play with it. I remember the case had a handle, so you could carry it anywhere. Like you’d see somebody walking around carrying a 10 lb typewriter up and down.

And they were noisy! This other typewriter at home (different timeline) was electric and when it was on, it sounded like an airplane preparing to take off. But even the manual ones were noisy. Each touch of the finger on a character would cause a series of lever movements that would lift the arm with the type towards the paper and, with an ink ribbon in between them, print the type on the paper, indelible, forever. That means each type was a “bang” in your ears. Of course, the typewriters evolved through time like everything else during its life cycle (and it’s not over yet). There were big ones, small ones, portable ones, silent ones. But that’s another topic.

The second typewriter I had the chance to use was in the office were I worked in my first job, as a secretary, when I was 16 years old. It was a small office and all I had to do was answering the phone and processing orders. During the first year, I used this typewriter to write the orders, until my boss bought a brand new PC (whose memory size was probably 0.1% of what you have on your hand right now) and I figured out how to use the fax-modem to access the internet with a dial-up connection.

This typewriter had an interesting cursive-like font and I loved it! I’ve always loved calligraphy and handwriting. Anyways, this made me think about the simplest thing: fonts. If you work your way around design or marketing or even if you like designing for fun, you know there are millions of fonts available and more and more are added daily. Back in the day, if you bought a typewriter, all you had was one font, always in the same size, in one colour (some machines had two colours available). The greatest revolution in the typewriter’s life, in my opinion, was when they created a ribbon to erase mistakes. Who doesn’t like that feature?

Now think about before that, before Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press in 1439. When hundreds of people, mostly seminarians, would spend their days manually copying every issue of every book. And today, almost 600 years later, you can order a book on Amazon and have it drone-delivered to your door in a couple of hours. How amazing is that???

That was the starting point of a revolutionary era that I like to call “The communication era”. In my opinion, before thinking of the industrial revolution, it’s important to remember that Gutenberg’s press allowed the information to reach more people than ever, dramatically reducing illiteracy among the poorest. Instructions manuals, for instance, were an essential part of the industrial revolution.

You can actually see how much faster human society evolved in the last 300 years when compared with the previous 4000. And this acceleration is due, in great part, to the communication boom that succeeded Gutenberg: the telegraph, the transatlantic cables, the radio, the telephone, the television, the internet, etc. Each new advancement is succeeded by a new technological boom twice as fast as the previous one.

And I believe people are also being transformed by this era. Every generation is being required to learn more and to adapt faster to changes. My generation (I refuse to label it) was caught in between two very different worlds: we were born and grew up without technology but when we were teenagers, computers were getting cheaper, what made them popular pretty quickly. Being still young and having easy access to new technologies allowed us to adapt to the new system, while still being able to function in the old one.

The younger generations, maybe including you, however, never lived in the old system, they grew up with technology and were witnesses of the accelerated transformation of the world around us. They are perhaps more capable of surviving future changes. Maybe they will be the ones shaping the future of humankind. But this is also another topic.

Today I just wanted to talk about typewriters and how they fascinate me.

What fascinates you?

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