In Mechanica Antiqua

  "The Greatest Achievement in Typewriter History," or so they claimed with the launch of the Emerson in 1909.  If I think about mechanically superiors machines available at the time, several come to mind.  Regardless, this machine did come with the perk of a backspace, something Hammond was selling in a box.  At $50, complete with with a shady decimal tab, and dubious amounts of praise, the Emerson threatened to revolutionize front strike typing.  However, greed and poor decision making ran the company into the ground before it could even get off it.  It was as if the Wright brothers made a tunnel boring machine on accident.  All was not lost for the Emerson Company however, as in 1911, the factory and rights were purchased by Sears and Roebuck--not the company, the guys.  After many trials and tribulations, including the departure of one of the company's founding partners; Mr. Sears, armed with millions of dollars from selling things through the...

  There was a time when I had convinced myself that I could somehow manage to write weekly blog posts.  Funnily enough, that was the time when I had only owned three typewriters, and had zero income to afford any more.  How I expected to write weekly about the same three machines is beyond me.  Yet here I am with more typewriters than I know what to do with, and I haven't updated my blog more frequently than like, twice a year.  Tirade aside, I'd like to tell you about the Olympia SG3, a machine that I serviced in an afternoon, and blogged about over the course of a month.   The Olympia SG3 is second in line in the SG series desktops.  It saw several different versions, with this one I believe being the second.  How the second, second typewriter is called a 3 I'll never know.  Despite lacking the cooler features of the earlier SG1, it still retains the high quality build features that made the early model so robust.  Mainly the stur...

Hermes: The Patron God of Typewriters A brief examination of the impact of the Greek Pantheon on the typewriter.      As the old adage goes, “a picture says a thousand words,” and when we have a long standing picture, we call it symbolism.   Symbolism has long played an important role in human culture.   Throughout the ages symbols have said what words could not, transmitting abstract thoughts and ideas that serve to guide our thoughts and behaviors (Udechukwu 1).   Symbolism by its very nature is vital to human communication; it serves as the pathway for us to share complex ideas that have the ability to transcend time.   In the case of the ancient Greeks a variety of symbols were attributed to their many gods.   These symbols represented specific domains that the gods had patronage of, for Poseidon it was the trident, and for Zeus it was the lightning bolt.   Though the settings and context, like the Greek Pantheon, for many ancient symbols...