Then after penis, happiness ensued.
Not at all. I dictate stuff every working day. Clients would tend to get a bit snarky about paying hundreds an hour for me to type things.
Hey, for that kind of money I want to see calligraphy 
Yes, they did – sort of.
For the Declaration of Independence, the handwriting is actually that of professional penman Timothy Matlack, who was commissioned to handwrite (“engross”) the final copy of the Declaration of Independence.
(You can actually buy a font of that handwriting for your computer, as well as Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Lincoln handwriting – vletter.com. $30 each)
My handwriting is not something you’d pay anything at all for. Indeed I’d suspect that unless *I *paid *you *hundreds an hour, you’d refuse to read it. Trust me on this.
An example: in the line “Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.”, the word only is squeezed in above the line, with a little caret mark (^) stuck in between “answered” and “by”.
It’s about in the middle of the page, 10 lines up from the signature of John Hancock.
See image here.
Ancient civilizations always fascinate me.
I still use a typewriter on occasion. A three year old once asked me in total awe “Is that a typewriter?” A 15 year old said “That is so cool.You can see what you’re printing.”
I feel very old.
The really awesome thing is looking at the draft of the Declaration they have on display at the Library of Congress - it’s got stuff scratched out and stuck in and there’s one part where they had to stick a little piece of paper on it to get all the corrections in. It brung a little patriotic tear to my eye, it did. (Seriously, I got a little overcome. It happens to me at the America pavilion at Epcot, too. It’s a little embarrassing.)
I never knew that! Thanks for showing it to us!
Now: Any idea whether that is a correction to the engrosser’s omission, or did they decide to add the word “only” after it was finished?
Another historical document of note:
The German Instrument of Surrender from WWII was a “fill in the blank” document. Apparently they thought it was more important to end the war in Europe than retype the thing. Where were their priorities?
Actually, every $25,000-a-year stenographer was replaced by a $75,000-a-year computer programmer, another $75,000-a-year database adminstrator, and two $60,000-a-year system administrators.
My grandfather’s secretary (yes, I met her - wonderful lady) could remember banging out seven copies of briefs for the Supreme Court of Ohio on a manual typewriter with carbon paper. She said her hands ached at the end of the day.
They probably just didn’t want to have extra copies of a “I hereby authorize the use of atomic weapons against such-and-such a target” order on White House stationary lying around, is all. :eek: 
I remember someone (maybe you?) bringing this fact up in a thread awhile back commenting on an eerily prophetic though laughably outdated “home computers in the future” film that’d been posted online (this one, I think). Said film featured instant written communication to any computer user in the world…via a stylus and some kind of sensor pad. I don’t think it was supposed to use any kind of Optical Character Recognition or transcription, or anything like that…it was apparently just thought more rational and technologically feasible to digitize hand-written script than for users (read: Men) to learn how to type!
I started work at one company right before they got word processors – the most advanced office machine we had was an IBM Correcting Selectric II. At that point we had one support person for seven professionals.
15 years later we had grown significantly and now had a sophisticated computer network – not a typewriter to be found. I counted things up and we still had one administrative person for every seven professionals.
Honey, I get “a little overcome” at the ads for the movie theater they play before the film. It’s just so…majestic! Seriously, I’m not making this up. Century Theater’s screeching searchlights make me teary. I’m such a dork. [/hijack]
What were we talking about again? Oh, right, typewriters. They still use them in both my husband’s offices (one law, one a university) for filling out forms. My kids think they’re the most fun toys ever.
None of the [del]secretaries[/del] administrative assistants in the huge law firm (this firm takes up two floors of a large Loop office building!) know shorthand anymore. I think there’s one senior admin. ass. who’s about 102 who does, but she’s far too highly ranked to actually do it. She herself has several assistants to do transcription these days - from digital sound files.
Clark Clifford, one of President Truman’s top aides, recalled in his memoirs that original documents about U.S. relations with the Soviet Union, IIRC, were held up at the State Department once. Truman had to give a public statement in a hurry without the papers in hand, and was annoyed when he was contradicted by the documents once they were returned to the White House. I forget exactly what the controversy was.
It’s hard to overstate how photocopying has transformed government, academia and business.
In the late '90s I was doing similar work. The older male executives actually did OK, although it took them a while to get used to keyboarding.
The older women executives, on the other hand, had a terrible time. When they were just starting their careers, they were very strongly advised to never learn to type, for fear of being shunted into the steno pool. Many of them had a total emotional barrier about keyboarding, and could overcome it only with great difficulty.
Nowadays, nearly everyone coming into our organization is already well-acquainted with keyboards and computers in general.
I started telling people 35 years ago to learn how to type. It is an easy skill to pick up, and it is never going to be a skill you will regret having.
Nowadays it is damn near mandatory.
When I was in high school (early '80s), my father insisted that I take a semester of typing. I was highly annoyed (mostly because I was afraid it would screw up my GPA), but he figured it would be useful for me to know how to type, so I could type up my own term papers in college, rather than having to hire someone to type them.
I struggled through that semester, barely got my A with 20 wpm on a manual machine…and have been touch-typing for 26 years now. I’m now at 70 wpm, and figure my father was prescient. 