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Friday
Oct102014

* * The allure of the widget

This article appeared in my column in the News Messenger.

 

From my earliest recollections, I’ve been fascinated by mechanical things. Gizmos. Widgets. Linkages. Cams. And assemblies therefrom.

One of my favorite childhood games was Mouse Trap, a board game published by Ideal in 1963. While playing the game, the players first cooperated to build a mouse trap, but then conspired against each other to trap opponents’ plastic mouse game pieces.

The game was inspired by one of my heroes, Reuben Garrett Lucius "Rube" Goldberg, an engineer, cartoonist, and inventor known best for his designs for complicated machinery that performed otherwise simple tasks in intricate, convoluted ways. Any device that made the simple complicated became eponymously referred to as a Rube Goldberg device.

So strong was my interest in mechanical things that when I prepared for life after high school, I applied to the Mechanical Engineering department in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. I was a lackluster, disinterested high school student, and I was lucky to be accepted, much less graduated four years later. My diploma is still one my proudest achievements and something I worked for harder than anything in my life. But that’s a story for another day.

What’s in my mind today is the cherry-red IBM Correcting Selectric II typewriter that sits before me. I don’t want to get too technical as I describe its current condition, but for those of you less mechanically inclined, let’s just say it is “kaput.” It’s broken. It doesn’t work any more.

I’m not the only person who has ever been mechanically fascinated, and the typewriter was one of industrial history’s most nettlesome challenges. Engineers and inventors after the Civil War put their minds into the creation of a Type Writer, the most influential of which was the Sholes & Gooden machine, introduced in the mid 1870s. The S&G was decorated with painted flowers and decals and was manufactured in the sewing machine department of the Remington Arms Company.

Typewriter design involved a series of challenges, primarily for taking the 26 letters of the alphabet – plus uppercase, the 10 numeric keys, and an assortment of other grammatical symbols (still useful for expressing profanity: @%^&$!!), and placing them on a keyboard that would allow them to be used rapidly and without smashing into each other. Sholes invented the QWERTY keyboard which by legend was created to slow down typing by separating frequently used characters. It still plagues us today, lowering productivity for millions of keyboarders across the English language world. But that’s another story, too.

Anyway, typewriters made steady progress as manufacturers like Remington, Underwood, Burroughs, Royal, Smith-Corona, and Olivetti introduced new designs and innovations. From the earliest decorative machines through more utilitarian industrial machines, typewriters became ubiquitous and indispensible in offices throughout the world.

Then, in the early 1960s IBM (International Business Machines) produced the most important, revolutionary typewriter in history, the Selectric, colloquially refereed to as the golf ball machine. It defined modernity. It employed a spherical type-head connected by linkages to the keyboard to issue forth to the ribbon and strike the paper with an instant, unfailing precision. It was a visually elegant machine, futuristic and fantastical. It produced a quiet hum as it sat waiting for input, but then became aural perfection as its internal widgets sprang forth with reassuring slaps. It was absolute typewriting perfection. Many of the greatest works of literature from the 1960s into the 1990s emanated from those whirling balls.

Then, suddenly, typewriters became irrelevant. Personal computers flooded into our lives with an astonishing celerity. Millions of typewriters simply weren’t needed any more. Bluntly, computers were better in every way. Except they offer no fulfillment to us widget lovers. So when I uncovered my venerable Selectric to type an address onto an envelope a few weeks ago, I was shattered that it worked no more. 

Doing some research, I learned that there are still devotees to the Selectric around the world and repairmen who fix them. I’m told there is a shop in Roanoke that can bring it back to life. I learned that the problem was gunking up of the internal mechanisms, due to inactivity. The fix is an immersion into solvent and a thorough re-lubrication.

The problem is that the repair will cost several hundred dollars. That, for a device I will seldom if ever use again. It’d be just for the nostalgic value, just to watch that type-ball whirl again under the light, finger-flick touch of my fingers.

If my editor can be convinced to accept my columns on a sheet of paper from my Selectric, perhaps I’ll shake the nickels from the sofa cushions and have it fixed. Otherwise, I’ll just put it away and when I see it from time to time, marvel at the magnificent widget-infused machine it is.

 

 

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