Daily Dose of English 221
Typewriters
Daily Dose of English 221
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, oh, whoa, we're going to be talking about typewriters. Typewriters are what we use, what people used before you could readily and easily type on computers. And I would like to talk about them today. So, okay, what do I wanna start with this? I just thought of this idea a little bit ago because I actually got myself a typewriter a couple of weeks ago, sort of a self birthday present, because I was just browsing in like an antique store. I had a little bit of time to kill before something and I was walking around and I found an antique store. And I went inside and I found a really cool typewriter. And it's from like 1947 or something like that. Pretty old, but still in good condition. Not perfect condition, but still in good condition. And so I decided that I wanted to buy it. And so I did. And the reason, there's a couple of reasons that I wanted to buy one. And I want to talk about those a little bit. But first, yeah, no, let's just start there, actually. That's a better idea. So I saw a video about some good analog ways to improve your apartment. And I thought it was really good. And something that's analog is basically a machine or it's physical. So analog clocks are physical clocks that rotate gears and they show the points at the little numbers with hands. It's an analog clock. A digital clock uses a small computer to basically calculate and show the digits. I think that the term digital actually comes from how it does the calculation of the time, not necessarily that it uses digits, but I could be wrong there. But analog is basically real stuff, not computers. And so one of the ways to improve your apartment with analog things that this person recommended was to have a typewriter and allow people to write, right? Just let them write things and you stick them up on a board, right? Have these like clickety clacky things that you can touch and do in an apartment. And I really liked that idea. I thought it was really cool. But I also wanted a, like a way to, to be able to write easily ish without being on my computer because I'm on my computer all day. And I thought it was really cool to be able to write stuff, um, and put thoughts on the paper. Oh, hi, what are you sniffing me for? He jumped up onto my lap and then immediately started sniffing right at my face. What a weird boy. You're a weird little boy. What was I saying? Oh yeah, I wanted a way to write down something and not be on my computer more because I'm on my computer all day for work and then I do, I record this on the computer and then I also do some writing on my laptop. which is nicer than being here at my desk, not for long periods of time, but for a short period of time. But I also would like a way to be able to just do words plus thoughts, completely disconnected from everything else. And it's been really great, actually. I've used the typewriter to just either type random stuff, but also to write more letters or things to people that I want to have as like a physical writing because I don't love handwriting stuff. I do handwrite my notes, like if I have a quick note to write or I do a little diary journal every morning. But I don't necessarily want to do that for a whole letter and have it be messy and not fit as much stuff on there. And so I really like that it's very efficient, effective, but it still has that physicalness of writing with a pen. And so it's been really cool actually. It cost me about 200 bucks to get, which is not super cheap, but it's also relatively inexpensive for these typewriters. Like the one that I got, if it was in perfect condition, it would be several hundred dollars more. It's not in perfect condition, it's in mostly working condition. But that's the other thing that's so cool about typewriters is that they are machines. They're physical, complex machines and I think that's amazing. Like I've been looking at this thing and fixing little parts of it and understanding and learning about it and it's so intricate. It's such a masterful work piece of machinery that has lasted already for 75 years or whatever. I think it's from 1947 and that means 60 years would be 2007 and then 70 years would be 2017. Yeah, over 75 years, it's lasted, it's still functional. And because when you look at it, like these pieces of metal are so smart, essentially. Like there's so many little things that are really, really cool about it. And I just, I love that aspect of having something so, that obviously took a lot of time and using of the thing. What are some cool parts of it that I've found? You can adjust the margins. The margins are on the side of a sheet of paper or something you're writing on, that white space that you leave. If you go to print something, you're going to leave margins around the edges because it looks better. It's easier to read and it looks nicer. But you can also adjust the margin. So if you want to have a smaller margins wider margins, you totally can and What you do for that is on the back you kind of open up a thing and you and you move these physical little Things like little metal bits and you move them to where you want the machine to stop going right because what they do is they just stop where it is and But then one of them has the little, has a little thing hanging off it to ding the bell when you get to the end of a line. And so finding out little things like that is, it's just so, so cool. Or finding, there's ink that you, physical ink that has to like be put onto each stamp. And there is a, there's a metal rod. that you can move from side to side. And I didn't know quite why, but then I realized that if you move it to one side, it engages a gear with the left-hand side of the ink. And every time you press a key, the ink moves forward a little bit on the left, forward a little bit on the left. But if you move that bar to the other side, the ink goes the other direction. So you can wind the ink one way, then unwind it the other as you write. So you don't have to always rewind or change the position of the ink. You can go back and forth until it runs out. And that's like little things like that. Or finding, there is a piece missing of mine that I noticed because I noticed that when you move the bar back, so you press the thing and it moves it from the physical, what's called, I think it's called the carriage from the left to the right. So as you're typing, you're right, it moves to the left. And then you grab it, you press the thingy, and then it goes all the way back to the right and vrrt. That arm that you pull does a couple of things. The first thing is that it pulls the paper down a little bit, so it goes to the next line, but then it also pushes it, so you act as your lever. But it's supposed to bounce back. It's not supposed to stay there because if it stays pulled in, it will be in the way of the hammers hitting the page. So, but mine is missing a little piece of metal that like pushes it back. So I have to find a way to either do that again, but all I do right now is just push it out of the way manually, which also works just fine. But like going, okay. I know that this is wrong because it's not working exactly right. So then I was trying to figure out what happened, right? So I go, okay, so this piece there, that must do that. Okay, I see that. So then when I press this, oh, I see. And then I could see in there where there was like a little space for something. There's like this hook that's not connected to anything. And then I go, oh, so that must be where it pushes against to move the arm out of the way. And I'm just really enjoying that discovery. I haven't even looked anything up yet. I tried to look up a video on how to take one apart. I didn't even get past a minute. I was like, yeah, I don't really want to do that. So I've really been enjoying exploring it a bit more. just looking at it and using it as well, because typing with it is really satisfying. And I like the fact that I have to think about what I want to type before typing it, right? Because you can't just delete something, right? It's written in hard ink on the paper. And so I have to think about what I want to write, and then I can write it out. And I think that's a really neat process. I also discovered a couple of things about typewriters that I didn't know, because I've never really used one. I've known they've existed, I've touched them, I've typed little things, but I've never actually used one to do something. they were well before my even my parents time my parents um their age like in university they had like machines that are closer to to like what we think of as a computer for writing basically just nice fancy typewriters that were a lot easier to use um and they often like printed stuff and like i think they even had like some spell check stuff or something i forget exactly what it was uh but uh they're they're later into the what 60s There were Different things and getting into the 70s 80s. That's where like computers started to be in universities Yeah, I'm not exact. I don't remember exactly what it was because actually my parents are a little older than that so they probably would have But I don't know because my mom talked about Yeah, like typing up papers for university was still something that not everybody could do. And there were people who would like pay, or they would charge rather, they like would work and charge other students whatever amount of money to write up their paper for them. And so you would hand write your paper and then you'd go to find somebody who has a machine to type it out on. And I'm pretty sure that they weren't computers like full on computers, but I could be wrong. I don't know. Maybe they were like, oh, maybe they were computerized typewriters. Right, because, yeah, I don't know, actually. I should look into that. But, yeah, I do want to say one more thing about the typewriters that I found really interesting that I learned. When I got my typewriter, I was like, hey, hang on a second. Where's the number one? There's no number one on my typewriter. There's also no exclamation mark. Because my typewriter's in Spanish, so it has the ñ and the upside-down question mark and the upside-down exclamation mark. but there's not a regular exclamation mark, and there's not a one key. But there's also not a one key on English typewriters. So I was like, what's going on with that? Turns out the number one looks exactly like the lowercase letter L. And so you just type a lowercase letter L for one, and to do an exclamation mark, you do apostrophe, backspace, period. There you go, right? There's a lot of things that you can do to represent other symbols with a nice set of symbols, which I think is just really, really cool because you don't think about that because on your computer you can type whatever you can type a hundred emojis, right? And so being able to like having to rethink like how you want to create like words on a page is just really cool. So yeah, that's my rambling on typewriters for a bit. I hope that you enjoyed, maybe learned a little bit of something new. If you've ever used a typewriter or if they're more popular in your home country, I would definitely love to hear. I think they're really interesting. But that's everything I have for you today. See you again. Bye.
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