Advert of the week
» THANKS to BT reader Peter Hobday who sent us this a while ago. He scanned it from the 1954 edition of the Port of Bristol Authority handbook.
Given that the average weekly wage at the time was around £7, £52 for an Imperial typewriter puts it in the same sort of price bracket as two or three top-ofthe-range desktop computers nowadays.
Who knew they were so expensive?
I’m old enough to remember using one of these things, though by the early 1980s you could pick one up second-hand for next to nothing because more and more offices were by then starting to use computers.
Many older readers will also recall that they weighed a ton. If you’d chucked one at a tank, the tank would come off worse.
In ye olden days, there were two types of typewriter users. There were women who had been properly trained in touchtyping and would rattle off hundreds of words per minute without making a single mistake, and who would leave the office at 5pm with painted fingernails as pristine as they had been at 9am.
Then there were male journalists. Whether they were young, keen and idealistic like me, or wheezing old hacks who smelt of whisky before lunchtime, it was all the same. We all hammered out our copy using only our index fingers.
Every male, aside from the handful of weirdos who’d had lessons, made heavy work of two-fingered typing, and yet when computer keyboards started to come in during the 1980s, everyone moaned about something called repetitive strain injury – RSI.
The National Union of Journalists got quite het up about it for a while.
Like Duran Duran and leg-warmers, RSI was big in the 1980s but nobody’s taken much notice of any of them since. At the time, though, many said that these mysterious new aches and pains in fingers, wrists and forearms resulting from tapping a keyboard were going to be the ruin of us all.
It’s hard to see how using a modern electronic keyboard could possibly have been worse than thumping away two-fingered at an old Imperial (stopping every mid-sentence to swipe back the carriage). Surely all those two-fingered typists must have ended up with awfully stiff finger joints?