In Mechanica Antiqua

  I have been wanting to get my hands on a Bennett typewriter for a while now.  They're often considered the world's smallest keyboard typewriter, and rightfully so.  The Bennett employs a full modified unilinear QWERTY keyboard, with a form factor half that of the Underwood 3 bank.  It is truly a typewriter that would fit in your coat pocket--I know, I tried. I'm not a typewriter collector, I am a typewriter user.  Those of you who know me know that I enjoy using machines that would make most collectors cringe.  I'm a big fan of typing.  For a long time, I searched for the perfect ultra-portable typewriter, but none that I tried were excellent enough to type on to justify the weight and shoulder pain required to take them out and about.  The Bennett, though not great to type on, was certainly the smallest of the bunch. This weekend I was able to get my hands on a Junior, specifically a second model Junior made between 1907 and 1910.  The fir...

  I decided to make this header photo extra large as it is itself, the subject of this article.  Before we delve into this thing I created, I figured it would do some good to explain the origin of the idea, which is twofold.  The very first motion picture was released in 1878 by Eadweard Muybridge, and featured a running horse.  The film was created on glass plate negatives with specialty cameras with gravity-fed shutters designed by Muybridge himself.  The goal was, in short, to examine things in detail that the eye could not naturally capture.  Muybridge was tasked with discovering if and when all four hooves of a horse were off the ground.  Over the later parts of his career, Muybridge conducted many other sequence photographic projects which served as a sort of slow-motion analysis.   The second facet of this project's inspiration originates much much later, in the 1960s.  IBM had just released the first of the Selectric series elect...