Remington Typewriter: What, No Spellcheck?!

RT sent me a photo of a Remington typewriter. Many people collect these wonderful but heavy machines. According to the online database RT owns a Remington 12.

Many people know Underwood, Remington, Smith Corona, and Olivia, and that’s what they know about typewriters. My son Locky came to see me celebrate my last birthday, and witnessed me open my big present from my partner – a bright pink 1956 Royal typewriter. Once I it set up out of the original suitcase-box, Locky asked, “Mom, where’s the spell check?”

The next question from my 31 year old, “Okay, no spell check. So how do you correct a misspelling, Mom?” The case included a little box with small, old-timey correction tabs. I explained that in high school, typing term papers, I placed one of these little tabs over the mistake, retype the same character, hitting the key hard. I then over-typed the right characters over the whited-out characterss. Sometimes this didn’t work, because you needed to roll up the paper to get to the right spot, and when you rolled the paper back, the ‘register’ was not exact.

My son asked about “whiteout,” since he never heard of this either. I explained that Bette Nesmith Graham invented Whiteout in liquid form in 1956. Yes, she’s the mother of Monkees’ Michael Nesmith, I mentioned to Locky, but he of course said, “Monkees?” I told him about their popular TV music show, then said we didn’t like to use whiteout in the typewriter because it ‘gummedup’ the works.

My son’s comment? “How did you get through High School, Mom?”

RT’s typewriter dates to 1929

Made by Remington, who created their first typewriter in 1870’s. In those days, $75-150 seemed like a ton of money, and only celebrities afforded them. Mark Twain became one of the first writers to produce a typewritten manuscript.

Throughout the early 20th century, many famous writers preferred the Remington typewriter, such as Rudyard Kipling, Agatha Christie, Margaret Mitchell, and Quentin Crisp. Imagine my son’s amazement to find out writers typed WHOLE BOOKS on typewriters without word processing features.

You may associate the name Remington with rifles, and yes, it took Remington Company 60 years before they tried typewriters. 10 years before the turn of the last century, Remington Company gave up creating typewriters and sold the rights of the NAME to the Standard Typewriter Manufacturing Company, not a great name, so they wisely used “Remington.”

The Remington Company borrowed a concept from one of the first inventors of ANY typewriter machine, the QWERTY character layout. When you look down at your computer, this lives today as THE character key layout. The other feature our computers retain is the SHIFT key, pioneered by Remington. A computer does not SHIFT, which means that one character key held both the lower and upper case of a letter. We became so used to this tradition that every computer keyboard includes a SHIFT key. The third novel idea pioneered by the Remington Company was that a typewriter could be made in COLORS.

RT’s model is the Remington 12, which took three years to develop, because the company realized the loudness of a manual typewriter. So they invented the cover for the frontstrike keys. Frontstrike keys are the opposite of upstrike keys, which move up instead of directly up-front. RT, they named your typewriter the NOISELESS. Amusing, today we text on our phones in a crowded movie theater and no one hears us. Imagine typing a text message silently on one of these beasts–not possible.

A famous story says William Burroughs used old-fashioned Remington typewriters into the 1950’s because the sound of it worked for him. Think of this, we really do NOT need the sound of our fingers hitting on our computer keyboards. Nothing mechanical happens when we press the keys. But this, like the QWERTY layout, the SHIFT key, and the use of color in the carcass, stays with us. This SOUND of typing, even though not mechanically produced, is part of our daily noise. The word ‘to type,’ defined in Webster’s: “to write something on a typewriter by pressing the keys.” Technology changed this, but not our PERCEPTION of how that technology should sound.

The value, RT, of your typewriter is $500 in good condition.