A Complete Soul

I just read a very good article about an old man who repaired typewriters during World War II and beyond. Very recommended.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97nov/type.htm

For some reason, I really like old things that aren't "useful" anymore. I have a slide rule and a typewriter on my desk next to my multi-core, Internet connected computers. I'm not so much a pack-rat, I don't think (maybe consult with my wife on that question), I just like great things, no matter when in history they were considered great.

How would it be, if by some modern process, my Remington Letter-riter Deluxe were able to repeat the long sequence of keystrokes it has made since manufacture? What if my slide rule could tell me about the problems it has helped to solve?

I've spent a good deal of valuable time looking into the inner workings of the typewriter, figuring out what each of the levers and rods do, how the ribbon advances and reverses, how the tab stops work, or wondering why the engineers chose to built it this particular way. As a programmer, my products all get ingested by this humming black box, then do their job invisibly behind the monitor. I've been disappointed at trying to show off what I consider to be my artful work to other people who can't even see the poetry in the code, only the way the colors and text arranges itself on the screen. Any soul I put into a program lives in RAM until the power supply is disconnected. Nothing I make even has mass. It's not "real".

Not so with the typewriter. As I lift the machine up, looking underneath at the letter bars, or lift up the front cover and peer into the tangle of cogs and ratchets, it's like having a conversation with the people who figured it all out. "That's really clever," I say to the typewriter. "You wouldn't believe how long it took us to come up with that one" the engineer ghosts whisper back. In our word processed world terms like "Tab" and "Carriage Return" have become hollow commands for the army of transistors deep in the CPUs of our computers. My typewriter has a carriage that returns. And tab stops, which are actual metal tabs inserted in certain places along this comb-looking thing at the back of the typewriter.

My slide rule expresses, right there on its unchanging face, in perfect clarity, rules about Mathematics that people don't learn about in high school anymore. Multiplication in a calculator is the result of some commands. Multiplication on a slide rule is law. It's not some obscure method of stacking numbers on top of one another and making them trickle down, it's simple, in-your-face that's-why-it-is-the-way-it-is-edness. Artsy-brained people who don't 'get' math need to get slide rules, because they do it visually. You can literally watch the math happen. As I slide the crosshair up and down, the slide rule instantly calculates results for infinite combinations of numbers.

I guess what gets me is that it was cool once, to somebody. Amazing. Unimaginably useful. The typewriter was a revolution, all by itself. The slide rule got us to the Moon. Both of them have creation in them, and I like it.

What's more, I would wager that both of them continue to operate almost perfectly long after my multi-core computers get sent off to be dismantled, ground up, and recycled. They are always going to be cool. And amazing, if only to me.