Typewriter Art

Handwriting Evidence: Terminology

At the same time as the body was being archived by Alphonse Bertillon and Francis Galton in the late nineteenth century, so handwriting itself was opened up to analysis and as evidence. One early handwriting expert, Professor Persifor Frazer of the University of Pennsylvania (a chemist and geologist), proposed a specific vocabulary for the newly emerging scientific study of documents and handwriting:

• ‘Bibliotics’ – the study of documents and their writing.
• ‘Grammapheny’ – the methods of determining the individual character of handwriting.
• ‘Plassopheny’ – the process of detecting fraud and forgery.

(Mnookin 2001, 1792)

Whither scientist?

Although the invention of the term scientist is usually credited to William Whewell and his 1840 book Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, the real credit belongs to ‘some ingenious gentleman’ present at the 1833 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in Cambridge. As Whewell himself writes, in reporting the meeting and the discussion of what those who practiced science should be called:

“Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term, and was very properly forbidden them by Mr. Coleridge, both in his capacity of philologer and metaphysician; savans was rather assuming, besides being French instead of English; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist, economist, and atheist – but this was not generally palatable.”

Quoted in Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture, p.7

Rabbit with Typewriter

 

 

Rabbit with Typewriter
Originally uploaded by State Historical Society of North Dakota

From the Typewriters Yahoo Group, a rabbit on a typewriter. It is not actually writing on the typewriter, but on a dummy machine created from a typewriter box – specifically a box  from the Jackson Typewriter Company, which ran from 1898 to c. 1906.

Something of a hiatus

There has been something of a dramatic pause in posting to Writing Acts for the last year; but now, in the busy period of writing up the thesis, ready for full final draft submission in January, I hope to get my typing fingers warmed up with more occasional posts on topics that fall out of the thesis as it is edited down, and various stories and images that have been stored up somewhere in the cortex of this writer. To start with, here is a submission from the competition Vintage Ads From the Future run by Mark A. Rayner. Mark’s brief was for competitors to:

“… find a vintage ad, and then create a product from a created world — it can be from a book, movie, TV, etc. It doesn’t have to be science fiction; you could go with a fantasy world, an alternate reality, whatever.”

Submissions drew on Aliens, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Time Machine, A.I., and The Wizard of Oz, amongst others. This particular ad’s inspiration was slightly left-field of the sci-fi references, with David H. imagining an ad for ‘Gonzo’, having taken his inspiration from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. A typewriter is absolutely necessary when discussing the truth. Of course if the truth is dangerous, then the typewriter has to be tied up.

Also worth seeing is the ad called Lady GaGalaxy.

Classical Technology: Heron’s List

Technological devices listed by Heron of Alexandria in his book Pneumatics:

• A vase that makes a bird sound or a whistling sound when someone fills it with water.
• A vase that emits water in quantities proportional to the coins inserted – a kind of vending machine.
• Figures that dance when a fire is lit on an altar.
• Statues of animals that cry out and drink.
• A pus extractor (aka a syringe).
• An hydraulic organ.
• An apparatus that suspends light balls in the air on a jet of vapor.
• The eolipyle – possibly the first steam engine.
• A maintenance free oil lamp – as oil is burnt, the wick moves automatically.
• Compressed air chambers that shoot liquid (???).
• Pumps with suction and pressure that can shoot water in any direction because of a flexible head. Used to fight fires.
• A sucking device that does not rely on fire.
• A solar powered device for running water.

From Henri Boch’s Exposed: Ouija, Firewalking and Other Gibberish, p.118-9.

Photophones: A Promise from 1890

In 1890 the journal Review of Reviews, in its opening issue, promised its readers cross-continental ‘photophones’, which Roger Luckhurst in The Invention of Telepathy describes as “trains travelling at 300 miles per hour and telegraphing without wires – even telegraphic facsimile handwriting, tastes, and smells.” A little over a century later, photophones are part of our media landscape (although they are not trains) and can transmit handwriting (if you have a touchphone and stylus; or if you just photograph your handwriting and use MMS).

But maybe the past can guide us a little more into the future? For the noticeable omission in our slightly-differently-realised telegraphic/phonic media is the transmission of tastes and smells. Would seem a good project for Apple, no?

The Typewriter, The Gun and The Movie Camera (1996)

As paradigms of modernist technology, guns and typewriters share a cultural terrain. This landscape is shaped not least by the arms manufacturer Remington & Co. switching to typewriter production after the end of the American Civil War, but also by phenomenological issues in the machines’ use and construction; with typewriters we fire off words as firing off bullets from a gun.

The title of the above documentary on movie maker Samuel Fuller draws through these technologies and places them aside image making technologies. Sam Fuller was a writer and filmmaker, with a specialty in war films. That these tools of his trade should form a title for this documentary by Tim Robbins  (pt 1; pt 2; pt 3; pt 4; pt 5; pt 6) is almost commonsensical. However the title resonates in ways that lie under or rather away from the documentary; for all these technologies fire themselves in their relationality into the cultural landscape in the late nineteenth century.

Whilst the movie camera would seem to be exceptional, it is in fact fundamental, a phenomenological sibling to the gun and the typewriter; think of Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotography and his photographic gun (Fusil Photographique). We still shoot a photo, the rapid opening of the lens referred to as a firing, as fast and as hard as the ejection of a bullet, or the strike of type on platen.

Current Visual Obsession

These last few weeks have seen the graduate shows of art and design schools across the UK. At the RCA, Hector de Gregorio, a printmaker, produced a series called Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination. De Gregorio states his aim is to seduce the viewer and with his densely rich images, specifically the one above called Lee Adams, Performer, he has completely seduced me. It is my current obsession and I am finding it difficult to look at anything else.

Bind me; or ways in which we dress our books

A collection of unusual bindings over at Abebooks. With prices.