Manual Typewriter vs. The Computer
Published November 26, 2021 · 11:00 · 149,955 views
About This Video
Five advantages of a manual typewriter over a computer, and the fifth is the one that matters most. Joy of typing. Reliability: this Corona was built between 1936 and 1941 and still works. No electricity needed. Speed of thought without digital distraction.
But the real argument is about voice. On a typewriter you can't delete. When you second-guess a word, you cross it out and keep going, and the correction captures how you think. The machine forces commitment, and the commitment trains clearer thinking, clearer talking, clearer writing. The typewriter captures your voice in a way the delete key destroys.
Transcript
merch drop new olive drab sweatshirts and t-shirts available now link in description this spirited man understands that the manual typewriter has become a symbol of the pretentious hipster for a novel or screenplay with multiple drafts yes a computer eventually yes but for converting ideas into words on paper he begins with a typewriter here are five reasons why number five is simply the joy of typing and the action it reminds me of a firearm in some ways and it kind of sounds like a 22 like being fired maybe a mile away and if you're angry you can really there's like a violence in the keys so number four the great smoky eunuch said reliability above all i mean this particular one was built like right before america entered world war ii it's steel it's not rusty i don't know what the finish is maybe it's um i want to say it's powder coated but i'll bet you it's like enameled i'll bet you it's something enameled there's no rust in this machine the box it comes in the box it came in was leather and wood so the leather and the wood allowed the if if you put this machine in there with condensation on it it allowed it to evaporate you know keeps the roller from drying out and keeps the mechanisms from corroding i have one repair i don't know what this spring came from this return this carriage return was inconsistent it would pop in between double space and single space which is this lever right here i just put some plumber's epoxy right in the action of this return lever and then i put a spring to hold the single space double space selector down and it works perfectly you know it was like a 10 minute 10 minute repair sometimes my son will come and smash the keys and it will detach like basically dislocates the elbow of the keys on the bottom but i can get in there with a precision screwdriver or some some needle nose pliers and just kind of pop it back on and that's really the the worst thing that happens with this machine number three i'm combining two two attributes here but auto save it's just on the paper oh you get a phone you just get up and you get a phone call you just get up and leave and no electricity which sounds trivial like when are you without electricity here in the canyon they shut the electricity off to repair the power lines often because they need to keep the power infrastructure in this neighborhood uh sound because a short could light the whole canyon on fire and could light malibu on fire so we do occasionally get some power outages it's not really an issue but it's more like i don't know there's there's one less there's one less sophisticated set of resources in the chain that you have to worry about it's just there you just sit down and and bang on it number two speed of thought there's this scene in saving private ryan when they're storming the beaches of normandy the men are jumping over into the water and you see the bullets whizzing by their heads underwater that's how my thoughts come to me a lot of like a lot of my creative process is me just keeping if i kept an idea it's like catching one of those bullets underwater and so i have this i keep these on me and i have a pencil on me at all times till i get little tiny little nuggets but if i sit down to write uh sometimes it just comes all in one big rush and um i can keep up with it with the typewriter the computer is the alternative right that the the competitor to this machine is the is the computer and there's a lot of layers in a computer you don't just sit down at a computer you sit down a computer full of distractions there's all the apps and windows and there's news and there's pop-up things with text messages coming in and that can throw you off the trail of your thought that can throw the thought or idea right out of your head but with this thing you sit down and you just go okay and number one this is my favorite reason to own a typewriter i'm talking as opposed to a computer why i prefer the typewriter over the computer and this is something i discovered relatively recently so when you're typing on a computer right you have that delete key and you can seamlessly delete um what you perceive to be mistakes or oh i don't like that so you're typing and you say um uh june was swimming in the pool and she oh wait no it wasn't the pool you got it no it wasn't the pool it was the ty was he was in the hot tub right so then you just delete swimming in the pool and no no no no with this you write june was swimming in the pool comma and then you're like no she wasn't on second thought no she wasn't june was in the hot tub blah blah blah blah now draft after draft you're probably going to take that away but what it does is it captures your voice you see the machine captures your voice and then because you know you can't go back you can't easily go back you have to use you have to use this thing and manually basically paint out your words and then go back and type them back in but what ends up happening is the symbiosis between your writing mind and your or your writing hands and your thinking mind so that you allow yourself maybe to go down a road wrong and then correct yourself on paper it's very hard to describe well i'll look it up i'll look it up i have the i have the script right here so in the so in the last episode of the spirited man the opening sentence is this spirited man really wants to paint a word on the back of this chair but he won't because he did not buy this chair this spirited man really wants to paint a word on the back of this chair but he won't because he did not buy this chair and as i'm writing that i'm like but that's not specific enough he didn't buy this chair he didn't pay for this chair this spirited man really wants to paint a word on the back of this chair but he won't because he did not buy this chair did not pay for it you know it's more specific because you can buy something with someone else's money but if you pay for something you've paid with your own money i think and it's it's sort of reinforcing the thought because the idea is okay he didn't buy this chair and that's why he's not painting on it sets up the whole episode but that's like that's a that's a small example of second guessing yourself and then benefiting from the fact that you couldn't go back and delete the the first guess and i think that's the most important thing of all because you're capturing your voice you're capturing how you think and maybe how you talk and the two things will feed back you will think more clearly and you will talk more clearly and you will write more clearly and they all and i think the voice thing it's it's like an incredible trick but you know i just love it this particular typewriter is a corona it's not a smith corona it just says corona on it that might be the model i don't know but it's a lc smith and corona typewriters and the serial number is in here and i looked that up on google and it said that this thing was made between 1936 and 1941 so this thing is almost 100 years old and i've typed hundreds and hundreds of pages with it without and i realize i'm probably driving up the ebay prices of this particular typewriter right now but now they're like 200 100 200 something like that totally worth it so that's a trick if you're thinking about getting into writing or you sit down at the computer and you hate writing and it it's kind of a trick let me bring my typewriter it's the gift buying season so maybe you want to get somebody one of these or one of these or one of these