The Iron Whim

Wershler-Henry begins his book explaining how, although the typewriter is "dead," one can find many variations of it on Ebay. Typewriters from the 70's are being called "vintage" and they are bought up. The funny thing is that most people buy them and never use them. I understand why this is so-- I used to have hundreds of toy cars from my childhood; my dad threw them out a few years ago. He claimed I didn't need them because I didn't use them. He just didn't understand. Vintage items, although obsolete, "serve as a sign of the passage of time" (pg 23).

How I interpret this is not that the old times are over and that time is ephemeral, but having vintage items is a kind of denial that the good times-- the known-- still exists. It keeps alive the dead, as paradoxical as that seems.

"Vintage" items bring back memories, memories of comfortable times, memories of the known. No one knows the future, and new technology is not received with open arms immediately. It is not immediately deemed as safe because it is not familiar. In fact, some technology, like the Dvorak keyboard (as opposed to the standard QWERTY keyboard) is never welcomed at all, despite the testings and proofs that less errors are made with it (chapter 19).

I like Wershler-Henry's approach to his book- instead of going through a history of mechanical invention, he goes through what purposes the typewriter was invented to serve, and how the type-writer influenced society.

I found it quite interesting that one of the reasons some inventors give for the invention of the type-writer (although it was not called this at first) was to produce "truth" (pg 37 among others-- on page 46, for instance: "the invention was... for the purpose of illuminating...epistolary truths"). One may just as well produce lies on such a machine as truth(well I thought this at first-- I will explain later). In fact, Wershler-Henry notes many times throughout the book that the authorship of type-written documents is ambiguous:

One never knows if the author is the dictator, the amanuensis, the typewriter itself, or a spirit that goes through the amanuensis ( a good example is Chapter 12's Theodora Bosanquet). I think it is kind of eerie, really-- if you sit alone with a typewriter, you are never really alone.

Now I will explain why I changed my mind about "lies" being produced on the typewriter:

After I read "Regardless of whether... these works are literary conceits...the works themselves remains valuable contributions to culture" (pg 77). I think that what these "lies" show are truth about a culture. The imagination that created a lie is a product of a culture, and imagination is a respectable trait. Therefore, it seems logical (yet absurd) to make a claim that the biggest/most-convincing lie is the most imaginative/creative and respectable person!

My next to last thought on this book concerns women. My friend and I were recently discussing feminists. I thought that women are not really treated inferiorly or seen inferiorly, but my friend thought they are. Now that I read Iron Whim, I see they really were. The type-writer SEEMED like a break through for women, but in a sense, it was not. Women did get into the workforce, but were always with the typewriter(and received little pay compared to men). It was as if it was OK that a woman was working only because men knew that the woman could not do work by themselves-- they required an extra assistant-- the type-writer. On page 88, Wershler-Henry writes that "the merging of the two[type-writer and woman]...alleviated the suspicion that either on their own might have elicited."

"If a novel presented a woman as an author, it would assign her with an emasculated hireling" (pg 92). This sentence reminds me of Harry Potter's author-- few knew that she was a woman because on the book, it was the initials of her first and middle name that appeared.

So you know, maybe I am wrong about women being treated equally, although I do think we (or them since I did not do anything?,...) have come a long way.

My last thought is about the typing monkeys! I never thought about that instead of looking for a unique story/play/poem, experimenters try to test if the monkeys can write Shakespeare. What good is this? I suppose it makes for some good philosophical debate or something, but it does not make sense to produce Romeo and Juliet when it already exists. Additionally, it is ironic that that chapter talks about probability of the monkeys because I am in Probability class this semester. I could do some of my own calculations to figure out these types of problems. Even if something is infinite (for example: there are 20 coupons, all different colors. If you pick up one, record the color, then put it back, how many turns will it take to get a complete set of colors? This could go on forever, never getting the last color...) an "expected value" can still be calculated.

It is not intuitive, but in the mathematics/probability world, it somehow works...