The late Sir Alf Reed, who became New Zealand's leading book publisher, took over the New Zealand Typewriter Company in Dunedin at the turn of the last century. Sir Alf, who was a typewriter travelling salesman and became the New Zealand agent for Blickensderfer typewriters, is seen here much later in life, surrounded by some of the New Zealand Museum's collection of typewriters.
News items this morning reported "People screamed, dived under desks [presumably with their typewriters still on them] and
sheltered in doorways as a 'severe' magnitude 5.7 earthquake rocked Wellington ... There have been no reports of damage so far, but workers in the
central city have described multi-storey office buildings swaying for at least
30 seconds as the quake hit at 9.06am.
"GeoNet said the 'severe' quake struck 30km
east of Seddon, in Marlborough, at a depth of 8km. There has been a flurry of
smaller shocks since the initial magnitude 5.7 quake, the strongest recorded as
magnitude 3.8 at 9.38am. At least 10 other shocks were recorded in the
Marlborough area by 9.45am.
"A Fire Service central communications spokeswoman
said there were no reports of damage in the Wellington region so far, although
an alarm activation may have been caused by the quake. The quake shook the
emergency services communications centre on the seventh floor of the police
station on Victoria Street in central Wellington for a good 30 seconds, she said."
New Zealand's capital city lies within the earthquake-generating collision zone
between two of the Earth's great tectonic plates, and sits on top of one of the
zone's most active geological faults - the Wellington Fault. The Wellington
Fault forms distinctive landscape features running right through the central
city.
Wellington is
sitting on the relatively light continental crust of the Australian Tectonic
Plate, which is riding over the dense oceanic crust of the Pacific Plate. The
main boundary between the two plates (the subduction interface or subduction
zone fault) slopes westward down beneath the North Island and is about 25-30 km
below Wellington City.
Te Papa itself.
The typewriters are not here, but underground
in a storage building at 196 Tory Street.
At Wellington the two plates are moving against each
other at an average rate of about 3.5 cm per year. This slow collision puts
immense pressure on the crust and has broken it up into several large pieces,
separated along fault lines – including the Wellington and Wairarapa faults that
extend above the subduction interface. When the strain between these blocks of
crust overcomes the resistance that locks them together, they move relative to
each other and Wellingtonians experience the jarring, shaking jolt of a large earthquake.
Among Te Papa's typewriter collection
Te
Papa Tongarewa is built on reclaimed land, so earthquake protection is vital. To
stabilise the site, 30-tonne weights were dropped on the ground 50,000 times,
much to the dismay of nearby residents. Shock absorbers made of rubber and lead
lets the building move in earthquakes – up to half a metre in any direction. In a
major earthquake, Te Papa would be among the safer places in Wellington. In a one-in-250-year earthquake, the building would be unharmed. In a one-in-500-year
earthquake, the building would need repairs. In a one-in-2000-year quake (‘the
big one’), the people and collections inside Te Papa would be safe. However, the
building might have to be demolished.
Safe from earthquakes
Getting right away from earthquakes in New Zealand, here is an interesting story from Typewriter Topics in 1907 about a Yost typewriter salesman travelling in New Zealand, Australia and India:
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