Ever wonder why they put electricity into typewriters

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Andy Rooney

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Andy Rooney's Remington

I had my old Remington typewriter that sat firmly on my desk where I liked to work. I fed it paper, a sheet at a time. On the sheet of paper, I keyed in letters to words as I thought about them very carefully.

With experience and skill, I could make sentences and paragraphs with rare instances of mistyping. When I did make a mistake or wanted to correct something, I did that through a procedure that required my using pencil and making marks that editors and typesetters could understand very well.

We had rules for writing that were well accommodated by my manual Remington.

The only part that needed changing was the ribbon. It was a simple procedure too that I put off until I could not read an impression anymore.

At some point, someone decided I needed a ribbon with black and red. I never knew what the red was for, so I didn’t use it until the black ran out. Then, the editors got excited one day when I turned a story that was all red.

They may have wondered if I did that for emphasis or what?

Then one day, the administration came into my office and offered an IBM typewriter that was electric and had something called a ball with type on it. They said it would be faster. Faster than what? Faster than I can think?

It required being plugged into the socket and it was lighter weight and jumped around on my desk, so I held out for the Remington as long as I could.

In Memorium for Andy Rooney