{"id":689,"date":"2012-07-18T17:18:51","date_gmt":"2012-07-18T16:18:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/potbanks.wordpress.com\/?p=689"},"modified":"2012-07-18T17:18:51","modified_gmt":"2012-07-18T16:18:51","slug":"clockwork-typewriters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/2012\/07\/18\/clockwork-typewriters\/","title":{"rendered":"Clockwork typewriters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Readers of my novel <em>The Spyders of Burslem<\/em> may remember that there was a very casual passing mention of &#8220;clockwork typewriters&#8221;.  In the novel these were spotted by the hero on a brief visit to the office of <em>The Burslem Cosmograph<\/em> newspaper.  My thanks to Steve Sneyd, who has mentioned this &#8220;clockwork typewriter&#8221; notion to a typewriter collector contact of his in the United States.  He had a lengthy reply on the topic, from which the following&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>the only typewriter on the market at that time [1869] was the Mailing-Hansen &#8220;typing ball&#8221; which resembled clockwork, in that it was made of brass and had a mainspring and an escapement.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>[If what was] meant by \u201cclockwork\u201d [was] that a typewriter was automatic, that was actually done. It was cumbersome and I don&#8217;t think it was widely used, but there was a device on the market &mdash; made by Hoover, I think, that generated punched paper tape, and this [tape] could then be used in an automatic typewriter to type the same letter as many times as needed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/oldimages\/hansen1.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"hansen1\" width=\"360\" height=\"360\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-690\" \/><br \/><em>Above: the Mailing-Hansen typewriter. Hansen&#8217;s first model was built in 1865, and many hundreds were sold.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The novel is of course, set in an &#8220;alternate&#8221; semi-steampunk 1869.  The hero has only a very brief and flustered look inside the offices of <em>The Burslem Cosmograph<\/em>, and is anyway recounting past events from a distance of over 40 years afterwards.  Which might account for his vaguely remembering the office&#8217;s typewriters as being of a generally &#8220;clockwork&#8221; design.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Readers of my novel The Spyders of Burslem may remember that there was a very casual passing mention of &#8220;clockwork typewriters&#8221;. In the novel these were spotted by the hero on a brief visit to the office of The Burslem Cosmograph newspaper. My thanks to Steve Sneyd, who has mentioned this &#8220;clockwork typewriter&#8221; notion to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}