The Illustrated Phonographic World (New York), September 1893 –
© 2023 – 2022, Mark Adams. All rights reserved.
Opus 151
by Anne Knish
CANDLE, candle,
Flicker and flow–
I knew you once–
But it was not long ago,
it was
Last night.
And you spoiled my otherwise bright
evening.
From Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments, 1916
The Spectric movement is not so genuinely appreciated as the Imagist or Vorticist movements, but the group produced frankly credible and original poetry.
© 2023, Mark Adams. All rights reserved.
Mary A. Saunders, businesswoman and typist.
Ironically, while extolling the accomplishments of a certain woman in business, a newspaper editorial from 1905 omitted her name. The subject was, in fact, Mary A. Saunders, a pioneering typist and “author” of QWERTYUIOP (she suggested switching the positions of the period and the y, yielding QWERTY – more here).
While much had been said about the role of the typewriter in the women’s liberation movement, the editorialist asserted that, ultimately, the typewriter freed men from menial tasks. “Have men thereby been thrown out of employment,” writes the paper, “or have they been released from the typewriter to do the increased work which the invention of the typewriter has made possible for an accelerated industrial system?”
Only men are named in the article.
Chicago Tribune (Chicago, Illinois), January 22, 1905 –
© 2023 – 2022, Mark Adams. All rights reserved.
“Our best customers have hitherto been theatrical people, for whom we prepare prompt books and actors’ parts at the price of 5s. an act — that is to say, an act of fifteen pages of type-writing on quarto paper.” – The Pall Mall Gazette, May 5, 1885
I recall my great aunt using a typewriter to make copies, and, yes, that entailed typing documents, over and over and over, until a sufficient number of copies were made. And such was one of the uses of the typewriter from the earliest days:
© 2023 – 2022, Mark Adams. All rights reserved.
From The Cosmopolitan Shorthander (Toronto), April 1885 –
What is noteworthy about the typewriter in this cartoon is its size: very compact for a machine in 1885. Portables of this period were exclusively index machines, which were very portable but not very typeable.
Here’s a portable typewriter of the mid-1880s:
© 2023, Mark Adams. All rights reserved.
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