Typing With The Wind: One Underwood Master Typewriter, 12 Typists, 7.8 Million Keystrokes in Two Weeks

Richard Polt's Underwood Master

Using just the one typewriter, an Underwood Master, at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto in 1938, 12 typists typed 1,560,341 words from Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind. The exercise, sponsored by Underwood to prove how efficient and durable its new Willie Dobson-designed standard model was, turned out to be a huge publicity success.

Mitchell’s book, ironically typed on a Remington portable No 3, is 1472 pages long, contains 426,590 words and takes the average reader 28 hours, 26 minutes to get through, at 250 words a minute. The Underwood typing team of 12, six women and six men, completed copying it three times and were up to page 729, going through it a fourth time, when the “world’s first typing marathon” ended.

The typists had completed a first copy of Mitchell’s novel within 94 hours, 22 minutes, on the fifth day of the event. They typed a lot faster after that. The marathon lasted 14 days without stops, from 12 noon on Friday, August 26, to 12 midnight, on Saturday, September 10, 1938. The 12 typists each typed for one hour twice a day, their shifts coming day and night. They changed place behind the one Underwood Master 1295 times. In all they typed for 324 hours, at 4816 words an hour, or 80.3 words a minute. They employed 7,801,705 keystrokes on 5480 sheets of paper.

*This picture was taken before the marathon; there were two changes to the team which typed in Toronto.

The typists were: Men – Charles White (captain) 139,599 words; Alexander Orr 132,077; John Newman 121,474; Edwin Amsden 119,654; Delmar Dodge 116,687; Arthur Ballard 115,554. Total 745,044. Women – Irma Wright (captain, right) 170,402 words; Margaret Faulkner 168,598; Elda McColl 126,637; Margaret Ward 124,326; Wilma Alexander 119,277; Frieda Laidlaw 106,057. Total 815,297. Grand total 1,560,341.

The next year, 1939, the event was turned into a United States versus Canada contest. The US won the first of these, typing a net (after deductions for errors) 1,596,243 words on 7531 sheets of paper from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 348,000 words on 1392 pages (23 hours, 12 minutes to read). Canada typed 1,560,577 words. The US average words per minute was 82.1 and Canada 80.2. In 1940 teams representing to two nations copied from H.G. Wells’ Outline of History, 1170 pages of it. Canada won with a net score of 1,654,744 (87.7 words a minute) to the US’s 1,537,708 (82.2). Katherine Gray, office manager of that year’s New York World’s Fair, used an estimate of three pounds of energy for each keystroke on a manual typewriter to calculate that 24,174 tons of energy would be used in the contest. She claimed an electric typewriter would require only two ounces of energy. Canada retained the international trophy in 1941, typing from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Public Papers and Addresses at an average of 88.34 wpm to the US’s 88.26.

Above, the 1940 US v Canada contest

Below, the 1938 typists

The Toronto typing arena.

One-Claw Typists at an Underwood Portable Typewriter

We’ve had some fishy typewriter stories on this blog over the past 10 years, but this one nips them all. It concerns an Underwood portable typewriter and the catch of some very large marron in the south-west corner of Western Australia, 73 years ago. The longest of the marron measured 21 inches (53.34cm); to emphasis the size, the catch of an 18½in (47cm) marron in Busselton in January 2019 was headline news. They usually grow to a maximum of 15in (38cm).

Now some non-Australian readers may not have heard of marron: they are a tasty crustacean, the largest freshwater crayfish found in Western Australia (and the third largest freshwater crayfish on Earth), endemic to that part of the Indian Ocean coastline between the town of Harvey and the port city of Albany. Fishing for marron has long been a West Australian tradition.

In 1948 a couple of fisherman were so proud of their catch that they took it into the offices of the United Press on Princep Street in Bunbury, to show it off to Henry Roy Golding MBE (1902-90), editor and publisher of the South Western Times as well as the Manjimup-Warren Times, Harvey Murray Times and The Blackwood Times, Bridgetown. Golding (right, right) was hugely impressed by the catch and entered into a deal with the fishermen, by which he was allowed to write about the catch provided he didn’t mention where precisely it was made. Broadly, it had been in the Warren area. Golding then had the problem of illustrating just how big the marron were. He looked around his office, spotted his Underwood portable typewriter, and propped two of the marron up against the keyboard for a photograph. Now, it’s highly unlikely that many of the readers of the Manjimup-Warren Times, Harvey Murray Times and The Blackwood Times in 1948 would have been familiar with the size of an Underwood portable typewriter, given that many of them lived in such isolated inland spots as Jardee, Yanmah, Palgarup and Nyamup (circulation must have been a nightmare). Still, the point was made. These were BIG fish!

The name marron covers two closely related species of crayfish, the critically endangered Cherax tenuimanus and the species that is outcompeting it, Cherax cainii. They belong to the genus Cherax within the Parastacidae family and are decapod crustaceans (10 legs). Marron are considered a luxury food and are the subject of a developing aquaculture industry in Western Australia and other Australian states. Total Australian production of farmed marron was 30 tons in 1996. In Western Australia, recreational fishing for marron is tightly controlled, with a limited season; permits are required, and minimum sizes are enforced. And people who catch large marron still adhere to the tradition of staying silence about where they were caught.

Alan Seaver's burgundy Underwood portable.

1920s Remington Typewriter Adverts

From 1923, the year it marked the 50th anniversary of the typewriter, to the introduction of its electric in 1927, the Remington Typewriter Company advertised heavily in The Rotarian, particularly its 'Quiet' No 12 model. Here is a selection of 20 of the adverts, in chronological order:

1923

                                                                                     1924

                                                                                      1925

                                                                           1926

1927

Revitalising a Reconditioned Underwood "S" Master Standard Typewriter

Because of my wife's renewed battle with cancer, I haven't had a lot of time to spend on typewriters these past two months. But I still manage to get in a bit of light work, and I've been enjoying revitalising this 1949 Underwood "S" Master standard (serial number 6425166). The machine has been handed down through three generations of a family of journalists, Canadian and Australian. It has a sticker on the back saying it has been reconditioned, but apart from the absence of nickel rims around the keytops, I can't find any evidence of changes from the original. It shows signs of having had plenty of use over the past 72 years - perhaps not much in the last 50 - but it has definitely been well cared for. Here is what it looked like when I received it for servicing:

The "S" Master was introduced to the market in the US in 1941, three years after the Willie Dobson-designed Master was first produced. The most obvious difference is the panel which stretches right across the front and which replaced a much more narrow flap. The panel slots into place and is very easy to remove. The Master was first sold in Australia in 1939, when it was described by distributors Stott & Underwood as a "thoroughbred" among typewriters. There's still a bit to do in the "revitalisation" process, but I'm quite happy with progress so far. 

Stiff Bikkies with the Brother M-1500 Portable Typewriter

The words Ettore Sottsass used to describe the original idea for the Olivetti Valentine came to mind last week while I was servicing a bunch of el cheapo portable typewriters, in particular two Dutch-made Adler Tippas and a Brother M-1500. It was the difficulty I had getting the top plate off the Brother, in order to change the ribbon spools, that evoked Ettore. In an interview with Diego Grandi in mid-1999, Sottsass said the plan for the Valentine was “to design a machine as if it were a biro, a tool for everyday life, not a symbol of elegance and power.” When I first read these words all those years ago, my first thought was of a disposable Bic pen, and I tried to image a typewriter that, like a biro, might be chucked away when the ink ran dry. It struck me the idea behind the design of the Brother M-1500 might have been somewhat similar, in that the typewriter's owner wasn’t supposed to replace the ribbon, just throw out the typewriter and get another one.

I could tell that the top plate was slotted in place and was supposed to come off, to enable access to the spools, but how? The marks along the rim of the top plate, where people had previously tried to prise the cover off using the flat end of a screwdriver, were clearly visible. The plastic had been dug into in no uncertain terms. I eventually succeeded in getting the cover off, and could tell that the grips which slotted into the main part of the frame were far too rigid. Badly designed, or a cunning ploy by Brother to achieve what Sottsass wasn’t allowed to do, produce the Bic Biro equivalent of a typewriter?

I have seen similar designs before, notably on a Chevron, as I recall. And there have been many comments on this blog from people asking, “How do I get the top off my typewriter to replace the ribbons?” I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a top plate that was so hard to shift, however.

Sottsass at the time of his 1999 interview.

Sottsass, by the way, told Grandi that “the original idea was to make [the Valentine] from Moplen plastic, the kind they used for buckets [but] we made it from ABS, which cost five times more. Moplen was fine, because it was already a ‘coarse’ material. It was also slightly elastic so it could get knocked about without breaking … The result [of using ABS] was a machine whose design was silly in way because it had been conceived with a certain purpose in mind, to be popular and affordable by everyone, but it ended up being dear.” And, sadly, there’s nothing even “slightly elastic” in the Brother M-1500 top plate.

The portables I’ve been servicing belong to a Canberra woman who plans to sell them at markets. I don’t know what price she intends to put on them, but after the cost of servicing and replacing ribbons, I’m guessing it will be high. In the case of the two Tippas, they’re such poorly assembled machines I wouldn’t be prepared to waste a dollar on them.