Smith-Corona typewriters - 21 July 1995

A news photograph in the morning paper, a picture so routine you'd pass it over at once if you didn't stop to wonder why something so ordinary had ever been printed. It was a picture of a yard, a depot of some sort with seven or eight or more vans parked at random: why should they make news?

Before I flipped the page, I thought there'd been a strike perhaps of truck drivers, only when you looked at the caption did you discover the creepy reason for the picture: these vans were lining up to deliver corpses in Chicago, not an historical picture, not a nostalgic anniversary of the Capone era. We were at the back entrance to the morgue last week and it was trying to take in and find room for 70 odd corpses of perfectly ordinary people who'd been stricken and killed by the atrocious heat, which across the whole Midwest and the great plains and down from Maine to Florida, drenched and flabbergasted half the country. It was as bad as any mid-summer heat most people could remember.

In New York City alone last weekend at the official shade temperature was 104, but that temperature is taken from a protected gauge 200 feet up in the air above the dense foliage of Central Park and need I say nobody lives up there. Down below, the accumulated heat of many days radiates from the big buildings through the canyons of the streets where the thermometers registered 114 in any discoverable shade.

Well there's nothing more can be said about that nasty spell, which was relieved this week by a descent into the blessed 90s, but as with an earthquake, a hurricane, a terrorist bombing, all you can say is: isn't it awful and say no more unless you can say something to help. That's the way I've come to feel about Bosnia.

All of us commentators who have opinions about everything mirrored minded, us who can tell Nato Generals what they should be doing while we ourselves couldn't load a pop gun. Well on a trip to London an old lady asked me: "What do the Americans feel about Bosnia?" I could only say: "What the British and the French and no doubt the Tibetans feel and think, everything, many points of view." And I imagine that most of all in Britain, France and the United States there will be ordinary people who keep on remembering the day Hitler took a very great risk and marched in town or the Rhineland. He knew that his own future and that of the Third Reich might turn on the response of France and Britain to this great audacity, so he checked through his London Embassy to see if the British would make any retaliatory move. He knew so little about British history and the structure of British government that he thought the man who would decide Britain's policy would be the new King Edward VIII. He heard what was never documented in English records, he heard probably from the scoundrel Ambassador Ribbentrop, that German re-entry into the Rhineland would be alright with Buckingham Palace. Anyway he did it, no retaliation not a rifle shot.

There was one very vocal protester, the well known among Tories and Socialists alike, the well known warmonger Winston Churchill. He said at the time, two French divisions would have thrown the Nazi's back where they came from and we might never have had, what the old warrior called the unnecessary war. So now we hear sad wiseacres say: if only three years ago in Bosnia... But if if if will get us nowhere. Also, maybe as I talk, or I should say as some of you are hearing on Monday or Tuesday, those scary gun ships, battle helicopters with this missiles, and their, what is it 120 anti tank weapons? will have fulfilled the gaudy promise of their inventors.

Anyway enough. To all of us I suppose, there comes sooner or later the sad end of some institution we've come to take for granted. I remember Max Beerbohm bemoaning the end of the carriage and pair and the arrival of the abominable taxi cab with an internal combustion engine. I suppose if you pursue this morbid vein you could go all the way back to John Ruskin who was appalled at the end of the stagecoach and the introduction of the railroad and wrote in a snorting sentence as I recall: "You have filled every green valley of England with belching fire and smoke".

Well I'm not snorting, I'm just sad to record the death of an institution, which not only introduced a new convenience to millions, but was the first great liberator of young women that invited them to be participants in the halls of western industry. I will tease you no more! Last week, the Smith-Corona Company, the last company to manufacture typewriters, filed for bankruptcy. The typewriter is dead and it surely deserves a decent burial or at least a worthy obituary. Its only history is not so much a blank as a blur and as with any invention that became universally used, four or five countries claimed credit for it. Don't look up the history of the electric bulb or radio or televisions cathay tube if you want to brush up your patriotism.

There is, in English reference books, mention of a London engineer who applied for a patent on what he called a writing machine in 1714, but apart from the application, no more's been heard of it since. Leap ahead 70 years and there's a Frenchman wanting to patent a writing machine for the blind. Maybe the French went ahead and built it and have it still, nobody it seems followed it up across the Channel or across the Atlantic where bright boys were beginning to dream up some, as it turned out, historic inventions: the cotton gin, same fellow, the even more revolutionary interchangeable part, and the beginning of the assembly line, which has totally transformed the material world even in my lifetime.

However in the first decades of the 19th century, things started to hum for the typewriter, or click, first an American, then a Frenchman attempted a rude machine. Then in 1845, one Charles Wheatstone made several, which were almost from the start interesting if not very workable antiques: they found their way into the South Kensington Science Museum. But I think everyone's agreed – I haven't checked with the Russians who invented everything they say even baseball – everyone's agreed the three Americans sounding like a law firm: Sholes, Soule and Glidden, financed by three other men, created a machine and sold the rights to Remington Arms Company: the very same rifle manufacturers. And this was a landmark, a clarion call – what I'm afraid we'd now call a defining moment – in human history: QWERTYUIOP was born. QWERTYUIOP.

If by any chance I'm talking to anyone who owns a manual typewriter – a chance of others, likely as someone who owns a hitching post – look at the top line of keys, what do they say? They say 'QWERTYUIOP'. Q is at the top left hand corner and it goes through W.E.R.T.Y.U.I.O and P. The second line is all consonants so it's unpronounceable except perhaps in Polish. Third line again the remaining consonants beginning with a Z or Zee and suggests a cousin of the former Presidential National Security Advisor: Zbigniew Brzezinski. This arrangement of three lines of letters remains a permanent memorial to the ingenuity of Sholes, Soule and Glidden. Many other combinations were tried out and abandoned, the cousin of Anton Dvorak the composer invented one and named it after himself, thoughtfully arranged so that the stronger fingers – how did he know – hit the most frequently used letters. It didn't work. QWERTYUIOP remained, but improvements on the mechanism went on and on and an inked pad gave way to an inked ribbon and eventually to a revolving sphere tantalisingly known as a golf ball.

The history of the improvements in what to us looks like a very simple machine is full of terms you'd think were about designing an interplanetary space station: coiled springs, drums, ratchet, centre spindle, escapement wheel, fulcrum wire, weighted tam, the platern. It took 44 years from the manufacture of the first serviceable Showells, Sole and Gidden, to the arrival of the portable 1912, just in time for my parents to decide to give me on my 21st birthday, in 1929 my beloved Corona portable in which the bank of keys folded over into a little truly portable box. I have it still. I treasure it because in my last two years at the university I typed all my essays and got remarkably high marks because I believe they were a blessed relief to the eyesight of the supervisor plodding through the jungle of hieroglyphics of the other poor pen squiggling saps.

The time came, some of you may remember a year or two ago, when it was getting harder and harder to get ribbons. Kind listeners on four continents bought and sent to me several small piles. Alas they all shared the same flaw, they'd been made years ago and had no more ink in them than a length of string. At last, this year I went downtown and I did something I swore I'd never do: I bought an electric typewriter. It is at least softer to the touch of arthritic fingers, otherwise it can run away with you.

The old man I bought it from is a true expert, he's made typewriters in 145 languages and he warned me that the electric typewriter too is on its deathbed. I don't wonder. My two first grandsons used computers and word processors from the age of nine, both are now in their 20s. Years ago, the number one grandson tottered into my study and said: "Poppa is it true you have a manual typewriter?" "Indeed." "May I look?" "Of course." He looked he said "Wow".

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.