The restored Empress
This 50th anniversary of the Moon landing has
been both a joyous and eerie time. The eeriness is mostly typewriter related.
Some weeks ago an older lady I only know as Mrs Miller (with
no connection to a McCabe, as far as I know) contacted me out of the blue with
the offer of a “fairly modern” Royal typewriter. Given that description, I was
expecting a Nakajima portable, but Mrs Miller’s gift turned out to be a hefty 32lb
standard – which I soon discovered to be a mid-60s Empress.
Mrs Miller's gift
The machine was in serious need of restoration, so I took it
completely apart, repainted it and reassembled it. It now looks absolutely splendid,
but the tab set and tab clear buttons were missing when I took possession of it,
plus the small knob on the ribbon colour selector switch. As well, the two ends
of the platen knobs were broken. I attached some ad hoc buttons and repaired
the platen knobs as best I could, but it still seemed a pity the gorgeous-looking
restored Empress was not as manufactured and sold in every way.
I had photographed the typewriter in the shabby state I
received it, throughout the restoration process and the finished – or so I
thought at the time – product. I was planning to publish a blog post on the
work, but Instagram was as far as I got. I would probably have got around to
posting in the next week or so.
In the meantime I have come down to the town of Kyneton in
country Victoria for a family gathering. On Friday, the eve of the Moon landing
anniversary, I popped into the Salvation Army op-shop to see it had any
typewriters – as one always does - and lo and behold there was another Royal
Empress. It has all the buttons and knobs intact, so naturally I’ve grabbed it
as a spare parts machine.
The Kyneton Empress
Mrs Miller’s gift was the first Empress I’d ever seen – and,
as I thought back then - the first time I had ever even been aware of the Empress
(there’s a very interesting story behind its production, by the way). Anyway, upon
researching the model, I discovered that three years ago I had identified it
for Steve Kuterscz (“writelephant”) in Western Australia. Steve had written a
blog post about a 1968 episode of Star Trek, “Assignment Earth”, in which the Enterprise
time travels back to Earth and an interstellar agent called “Gary Seven” (Robert
Lansing) plans to intervene in 20th Century events. Incidentally,
that blog post was only added to a month or so ago, with a comments exchange
between Steve and Ted Munk. (Ted’s online repair manual for the
Empress was really helpful when it came to me reassembling my machine – for once, not a single spare screw was left over!)
A scene from Star Trek.
The missing buttons and broken knobs aside, there was only
one problem with my restored Empress – the carriage lever wasn’t turning the
platen as it should. One part of the eeriness of all this is that a small part
of the platen assembly had fallen off. Mysteriously, it suddenly turned up on one
of my typewriter workshop benches weeks later, but I’ve yet to work out exactly
where it fits to make the Express fully operational. I’ll be able to do that
when I take my latest Empress apart.
The clincher in this series of weird but happy events is
that, with the Moon landing anniversary in mind, I looked up my blog post from
August 2015 – about the tracking stations in the Canberra area which were used
to transmit images from the Moon on July 20, 1969. The key – and almost
universally forgotten – link in the transmission was Honeysuckle Creek. And on
my post from four years ago was an image of a station support worker.
What typewriter was she using?
Yes, you guessed it – a ROYAL EMPRESS!!!
To add to all this spookiness, we found a great urban
winery in Kyneton yesterday (July 20) and sampled red wine with labels showing the Earthside and
Farside of the Moon. What else were we to do?
The Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station, such an important part
of the first successful Moon landing, is no longer. The facility which received
the first 8½ minutes of footage of Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon has sadly
been dismantled.
Honeysuckle Creek came into being when, on March 6, 1963,
the Australian and United States governments jointly announced a deal to
construct three US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) deep-space
tracking stations just outside Canberra, in what was then termed the
Tidbinbilla Valley. These stations would be at Tidbinbilla itself, completed in
1965 on the edge of the national capital, Honeysuckle Creek and Orroral Valley.
All that remains of the three stations is what is now called the Canberra Deep
Space Communication Complex, centred at Tidbinbilla. It is part of the Deep Space
Network run by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is the only NASA tracking
station still in operation in Australia. Australia's Commonwealth Scientific
and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) manages most of NASA's activities
in this country.
Honeysuckle Creek as it was.
Honeysuckle Creek was completed in 1967 and was built
primarily to support the Apollo Moon missions, mainly communications with the
Apollo Command Module. It was home to the antenna which received and relayed to
the world the first historic television images of Armstrong setting foot on the
Moon.
Image received at Honeysuckle Creek.
At least in the initial 8½ minutes of Armstrong's descent
from the lunar module and his walk on the Moon, Honeysuckle Creek was able to
receive and send (to Sydney and through Sydney to Houston) far clearer images
than the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas. However, nearby
Parkes in New South Wales was then able to provide the better images.
Honeysuckle Creek and Tidbinbilla also had voice and
telemetry contact with the lunar and command modules. After the Apollo Moon
missions ended in 1972, Honeysuckle Creek began supporting regular Skylab
passes, the Apollo scientific stations left on the Moon by astronauts, and
assisting the Deep Space Network with interplanetary tracking commitments, in
support of the Viking and Voyager projects.
Honeysuckle Creek was closed in 1981 and its 85-foot antenna
was moved to Tidbinbilla.
Honeysuckle Creek as it looks now.