Discovering Historic Tools: A Royal Typewriter

“Click, click, clickity, click. Ding. Thunk, zip, zip. Whoosh....”

My 9 year old asks, “What is that?!” 

“An old typewriter. A manual mechanical typewriter. A keyboard without a computer sort of...” I’m trying to explain—“You push this key down and it strikes the ribbon here and the key and the ribbon hit the paper and there you go, there’s the letter “e” on the paper!”

“Oh. I wanna try!” my daughter replies.

So our writing adventure began. We took turns on our "Royal Blue" typewriter creating short stories.

The first Royal typewriter rolled out in 1906. It was nicknamed the “Royal Loyal” because it was such a dependable machine. Famous wordsmiths on this machine were American journalist Herb Caen, author Ernst Hemingway and British novelist of the James Bond fame, Ian Fleming.

In 1927, a grand scheme at Royal was created—something to rival Amazon and it’s drones—200 Royal typewriters were delivered to stores by air. Royal’s then President, George Edward Smith came up with this gimmick to pack the typewriters in crates and parachute them down to dealers. The new delivery method was expanded to 11,000 typewriters delivered by “air” and only 10 were damaged.

We found our “Royal Blue” on vacation near Bend, Oregon at the Habitat for Humanity Resale Store. We only needed a new ribbon and we were off click clickiting. Now if we just had some ditto paper...

Resources:

Typewriter Repair Shops near Seattle:
• CPR Computer & Printer Repair 
• Bremerton Office Machine Company
• Bob Montgomery: 92 year old typewriter repairman, KOMO News
• Royal Typewriter Company

Writing with your kids:

Write a short story using a historic tool such as a manual typewriter, a fountain pen or a feather dipped into an ink well. It'll be fun…really!

#showyourwork