Use of Typewriter Still In Its Infancy, Will Definitely Grow

1901

WRITING BY MACHINE

EMPLOYMENT OF TYPEWRITER YET IN ITS INFANCY.

Use Will Increase Until Every Hotel Will Provide Them for Guests, and All Business Men Will Use Them Themselves, Not Depending Upon Others.

Bicycling was a fad, but typewriting is a fact. The typewriter it, he, or she — is in the same class as the telephone, telegraph, and linotype. As to usefulness and universality, typewriting is in its infancy. Thus far it is used only by those who cannot get along without it. The business man puts in a writing machine as a luxury, and regards it as expense. A young woman who learns to use a typewriter feels called upon to explain that she may have to earn her living, and she can equip herself more quickly in this way than in any other. A superintendent or principal who advocates the introduction of typewriting into the schools feels obliged to prove that it is due those who may have to earn a living.

The attitude of business men and school people toward typewriting must change entirely, and the time for such change is already here. Where one writing machine is used now there will be ten in use in the near future. The only trouble up to this time has been that business men, superintendents, and principals rarely use the machine personally and advantageously. The typewriter is a servant, a helper, doing what the proprietor would have it understood that he is above doing, whereas the difficulty is that he cannot do it.

As a Yankee, I venture the guess that in the not-distant future the ablest men and women in home and office, in hotel and train will use the machine. To-day, away from home, if one wishes typewriting, he pays a dollar an hour or more for the service, but soon every first-class hotel will have all the writing machines which their patronage requires in the writing room and free to all guests. Already every first-class new hotel has a long-distance telephone in each room and a man has its use at any hour of day or night at the same rate that he would pay if he went out and sought a "pay station." In the same way one will be able to say when he registers at any first-class hotel, "I would like a room with a writing machine." At first he might have to pay fifty cents a day extra, as he does for a room with bath and lavatory appointments, but that will soon pass away, as the extra charge for the bath is going. Already it is appreciated that a bath is as important as a washbowl, and so the necessity of the writing machine will be early acknowledged.

In a word, the future of typewriting is with the schools. Teach it as universally as you teach penmanship, not for the sake of the girls who are to be typewriters, but for the greater advantage of the boys and girls who are to be the leaders in social, business, and professional life; not for the purpose of helping a poor girl to be independent, but for making rich and poor alike independent. The time has come for a universal and emphatic demand for the writing machine in every upper grade of the grammar school, and in every high school, academy, seminary, college, and university. — A. E. Winship, in Normal Instructor.