Typecast by colour

Net Results:In an era when every desktop machine came in the exact same shade of black, one company decided rather daringly that people might actually go for colour. And not just one colour, but a kaleidoscope of colours, writes  Karlin Lillington.

Sound familiar? It shouldn't, because the year was 1925, and the company was Remington. As in typewriters.

I stumbled across this fascinating snippet of information on a website dedicated to Remington portable typewriters, which includes some lovely pictures of these old machines (see it here: http://tinyurl.com/374dsz).

I have a soft spot for manual typewriters, especially the uprights with those precipitous keyboards. When I first worked as a journalist for my university newspaper, we all worked on those uprights.

I'm sure they had all been in the newsroom for aeons, tolerating several decades of tentative student hands hunting and picking their way across keyboards in search of a scoop.

I loved the slightly oiled, metallic smell they gave off, the smooth, cold metal and enamel of the keys, the slight give as you struck each one, the crisp rat-a-tat-tat.

When we made the big move to computers, our staff adviser let us editors buy the old typewriters for $35, if we wanted one.

I debated the purchase, but there were lots of things I could spend $35 on that seemed more important at the time and, anyway, I had a new portable typewriter I'd received for my high-school graduation, so I stuck with that.

I've been kicking myself ever since because, of course, my tinny little portable was not a solid machine and has long since vanished, whereas I'm willing to bet those old uprights, like cockroaches, will be here long after a nuclear conflagration. They were the typewriting equivalent of sumo wrestlers, and weighed a ton.

A few years ago I mentioned my annoyance at not having bought one of those uprights to my mother, who in turn mentioned it to a friend of hers who ran a consignment shop full of nice second-hand things.

And one day she rang my mother to say she had a typewriter I might want.

It was an old portable Remington Rand, she said, and was still in its carrying case. It had been a gift to a young woman heading off to college, and had belonged to that one owner since. It was in pristine condition, had a solid matte black body with those enamel keys and an upright keyboard. Love at first sight, for me.

About $80 later, it was mine. Not that I do much with it - I open up the case and look at it now and then, occasionally longing for a form that needs to be filled or something else I could type that would recall it to life, but no one types anything anymore.

Then I happened to mention my machine to friends. One gave me the link to the Remington website. There, I discovered that my Remington Rand Deluxe Model 5 was built about 1945. It's also where I learned about the colourful Remington Portable 2, built between 1925 and 1928 and available in a wide range of single and two-tone hues.

They aren't muted shades either - they are bold and bright. Their names suggest a world of luscious colour that has little to do with the mundane task of typing: No 17 came in "tan and Pompeiian red"; No 18 came in "nyanza and Cellini green"; No 19 in "Colette and endowa blue"; No 20 in "light and dark orchid"; and No 21 in "mountain ash scarlet". And no, I have no idea what "nyanza" is or why a shade of blue would be called "endowa".

You'd be hard put not to think of a certain big company whose name begins with "A", though, wouldn't you?

Which all goes to show that good ideas tend to come round more than once. They did for Remington, too - it continued offering lines of brightly-coloured typewriters during the Depression, for example (certainly doesn't fit one's mental image of those grim days, does it?).

Here we are, thinking we

are astonishingly innovative with technology design in our era, when our greatgranny may well have been typing on a nyanza and Cellini green Remington.

Thinking different, way back when.

blog: www.techno-culture.com