unpublished reply to u/kinga_forrester at https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageads/comments/1rvqt0e/comment/oayqqbd/

Rightly or wrongly I'm sure a vanishing number of people at that time would have held your view.

You've got to remember the historical context of this ad. During World War II all but one typewriter manufacturer in the US ceased production of typewriters and the one remaining was really producing machines for the military. This ad from 1943 actually says in tiny print at the bottom: "Royal is making bullets, and parts for airplane engines, propellers, machine guns, rifles." Civilian groups did drives to collect typewriters to send them to the war effort. Many of the extant and upcoming generation of typewriter repairmen went off to the war effort. All this against the backdrop of people being used to taking their machines (especially office ones in use 8 hours a day) in for service every year or so for cleaning and adjustment. Most office typewriters of the time were in use for an average of 3 years before requiring complete overhauls or replacement. In addition to all of the other things being rationed, typewriters and typewriter service were also being heavily rationed, particularly because the manpower and steel was being diverted heavily to the war effort.

At the time, most typewriters were in the $125-200 range which is the equivalent to about $1,500 now. They were trying to help people preserve their machines and functionality. This was at a time when almost any sizeable town in the US had at least one repair shop busy with work. A city the size of Chicago probably had several dozens of repair shops working full time and that likely dropped to just a few during the war. (There's only one now, and it's only been open for a few years; it also has a wait list of several months for service because it's so busy.)

The issue of typewriter preservation was so great during the war that the U.S. Navy produced a series of videos about their proper use and maintenance of them *and other expensive office machines of the time). See videos at https://boffosocko.com/2025/06/06/typewriter-use-and-maintenance-for-beginning-to-intermediate-typists/ The government also got involved in creating maintenance manuals like Basic Typewriter Care and Maintenance, Equipment Maintenance Series No. 1 (US FWIP, 1945) and repair manuals like War Department Technical Manual TM 37-305: Typewriter Maintenance (1944) which is essentially the same as the [1945 Ames manual[(https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/AmesVol1-Standards.pdf).

Comparing this with today when the general value of typewriters is almost nil and we're lucky to have a few dozen professional typewriter repair shops still operating, but the rate of retirements and deaths has long been outstripping the replacement rate and you'll understand why self-service is necessary. Even given this, the number of typewriter fora on the internet, Facebook, Reddit, etc. the amount of tinkering knowledge is almost cripplingly bad but seems to chug along. You'll notice that there are an awful lot of people just trying to identify their machines much less carry out the most basic repairs. The number of "broken machines" I've acquired in my collection that only needed the ribbon color selector set to something besides "stencil" is a sad indicator of the state of typewriter knowledge now, much less what it may have been in their heyday, tinkering or not.

Even by 1983 as typewriters were already beginning to feel the pressure from the computer business, books like Bryan Kravitz and Nancy Gorrell's Hints for a Happy Typewriter were attempting to educate people on proper maintenance and light repair before needing to rely on repair shops that were already starting to feel the pinch.

Incidentally, IBM wasn't what put most typewriter companies out of business. It was vicious competition caused by offshoring and the cheapening of parts and materials while computers in general did the rest. And as for all those typewriter repair shops: most began selling/servicing word processors, office machines like fax machines, photo copiers, dictaphones, and even computers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/belgium/comments/1ree6u1/grandfathers_dp_index_card/

historical evidence of the scientific shift from Newtonian clockwork physics into an underlying statical mechanical one

The Seeker's Library<br /> by [[Zubair’s Bookshelf]] <br /> accessed on 2025-08-16T15:10:46

Apparently, "dual shielding" is a thing. Using one shield (big) for defense, and another (small) for offense.

Big shields were used in tight formations and for defense whereas smaller ones (bucklers) were more for deflecting close-range attacks (melee) and agility.

for - paraphrase - history of labor - SOURCE - Youtube Ma Earth channel interview - Devcon 2024 - Cosmo Local Commoning with Web 3 - Michel Bauwens - 2025, Jan 2 - to - stats - Gallup Chairman's Blog - world poll 2024 - 15% of employees worldwide are engaged - SOURCE - Youtube Ma Earth channel interview - Devcon 2024 - Cosmo Local Commoning with Web 3 - Michel Bauwens - 2025, Jan 2

paraphrase - history of labor - Michel gives a nice succinct summary of the broad strokes of the history of labor over the last few millennia: - Civilizations have begun as slave-based societies first - Then when the Christian revolution occurred after the fall of the Roman Empire, "Ora et Labora (Pray and Work)" was adopted to transform work into a spiritually meaningful endeavor - Then in the 16th century, this philosophy was replaced by turning labor into a commodity, where it has remained ever since, - resulting in a world where 85% of those surveyed say they are not engaged with their job

to - stats - Gallup Chairman's Blog - world poll 2024 - 15% of employees worldwide are engaged - https://hyp.is/iOlXbNBOEe-t6hdOWtvTYw/news.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/212045/world-broken-workplace.aspx

for - internet - history - Ted Nelson - early pioneer of World Wide Web and hypertext - advocated for visible connections - but failed to materialize

relationship to Eric Hoffer's The True Believer and modern politics?

relationship to the Great Books idea in 1942-1952 and beyond?

repeating history...

Lacy, Tim. The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. https://amzn.to/3R2rCox.

Adler & Hutchinson's Great Books of the Western World was an encyclopedia-based attempt to focus society on a shared history as their common ground. H. G. Wells in his World Encyclopedia thesis attempts to forge a new "moving" common ground based on newly evolving knowledge based on distilling truth out of science. Shared history is obviously much easier to dispense and spread about compared to constantly keeping a growing population up to date with the forefront of science.

How could one carefully compose and juxtapose the two to have a stronger combined effect?

How could one distribute the effects evenly?

What does the statistical mechanics for knowledge management look like at the level of societies and nations?

link to https://hypothes.is/a/abTT1KPDEe6nqxPx4fXggw

Wells, H. G. “The Idea of a World Encyclopedia.” Harper’s Magazine, April 1937. https://harpers.org/archive/1937/04/the-idea-of-a-world-encyclopedia/.

H. G. Wells and the "World Brain" or "World Encyclopedia" : History of Information by Jeremy Norman

https://phys.org/news/2022-08-ancient-soldiers-enemies.html

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/historians-reaction-to-history-of

Interesting to watch Dan Allosso watch this video and see which parts he responded to.

There are definitely some nice stopping off points in this overview which may make for some useful research for viewers. It also highlights in its negative spaces and non sequiturs areas which need more research and study to be better understood by historians.

Design for the Real World

by Victor Papanek

Papanek on the Bauhaus

Many of the “sane design” or “design reform” movements of the time, such as those engendered by the writings and teachings of William Morris in England and Elbert Hubbard in the United States, were rooted in a sort of Luddite antimachine philosophy. By contrast Frank Llloyd Wright said as early as 1894 that “the machine is here to stay” and that the designer should “use this normal tool of civilization to best advantage instead of prostituting it as he has hitherto done in reproducing with murderous ubiquity forms born of other times and other conditions which it can only serve to destroy.” Yet designers of the last century were either perpetrators of voluptuous Victorian-Baroque or members of an artsy-craftsy clique who were dismayed by machine technology. The work of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Austria and the German Werkbund anticipated things to come, but it was not until Walter Gropius founded the German Bauhaus in 1919 that an uneasy marriage between art and machine was achieved.

No design school in history had greater influence in shaping taste and design than the Bauhaus. It was the first school to consider design a vital part of the production process rather than “applied art” or “industrial arts.” It became the first international forum on design because it drew its faculty and students from all over the world, and its influence traveled as these people later founded design offices and schools in many countries. Almost every major design school in the United States today still uses the basic foundation course developed by the Bauhaus. It made good sense in 1919 to let a German 19-year-old experiment with drill press and circular saw, welding torch and lathe, so that he might “experience the interaction between tool and material.” Today the same method is an anachronism, for an American teenager has spent much of his life in a machine-dominated society (and cumulatively probably a great deal of time lying under various automobiles, souping them up). For a student whose American design school slavishly imitates teaching patterns developed by the Bauhaus, computer sciences and electronics and plastics technology and cybernetics and bionics simply do not exist. The courses the Bauhaus developed were excellent for their time and place (telesis), but American schools following this pattern in the eighties are perpetuating design infantilism.

The Bauhaus was in a sense a nonadaptive mutation in design, for the genes contributing to its convergence characteristics were badly chosen. In boldface type, it announced its manifesto: “Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all turn to the crafts.… Let us create a new guild of craftsmen!” The heavy emphasis on interaction between crafts, art, and design turned out to be a blind alley. The inherent nihilism of the pictorial arts of the post-World War I period had little to contribute that would be useful to the average, or even to the discriminating, consumer. The paintings of Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, et al., on the other hand, had no connection whatsoever with the anemic elegance some designers imposed on products.

(Pages 30-31)

Scott Sampson has argued that we should subjectify nature rather than objectifying it. People are a part of nature and integral to it. We are not separate from it and we are assuredly not above it.

Can the injection of multi-disciplinary research and areas like big history help us to see the bigger picture? How have indigenous and oral cultures managed to do so much better than us at this? Is it the way we've done science in the past? Is it our political structures?

This page has an audio clip of the speech, but the US National Archives has captioned video as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVvTk9ThEG4

the Guardian. ‘Unicef to Feed Hungry Children in UK for First Time in 70-Year History’, 16 December 2020. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/16/unicef-feed-hungry-children-uk-first-time-history.