What is the colour of this typewriter? This isn’t a trick question. The photo below was taken with my iPhone in my kitchen under 8 x 11-watt high efficiency (fluorescent) light bulbs. If you’ve seen a few of these Erika typewriters before, you probably will have just glanced at it and said ‘Black’. If you…
It has become a sad era for television. I can flick on box on any given night and see an array of cop shows, distorted ‘reality’ and teen-pandering supernaturalism. Outside of that there seems to be only ‘Game of Thrones’, which has been banned at our house (not by me). I’ve watched some incredibly well…
Welcome back to ‘Filthy Labs’! I don’t really need a lot of words to introduce what this blog post is about, as the title is rather self explanatory. So welcome to the interesting, and microscopic world of the typewriter – under a somewhat dodgy and cheap 60X microscope. Type Stubs Crinkle…
I’m on dangerous ground here. For the last 6 months I have been largely concentrating my collecting activity on German machines – specifically Olympias, and I have been trawling ebay.de looking for specific typewriters for my collection. However, focusing on Olympias has introduced me to some interesting aspects of the history of their machines,…
When it comes to Science fiction story-telling, it is hard to remember a world that wasn’t created in a CGI environment. Colour, light and texture-mapping often fades out strong stories and good character development. The bigger the budget, the bigger the wow and the smaller the personal involvement in the story. So I was…
With thanks to Thomas Fürtig. While browsing ebay, it is easy to dismiss many of the machines there as ‘just a re-badged machine’. That phrase itself implies that it has no collectable or desirable characteristics, and is thus regarded as just another ‘also-ran’. It is also a very puritanical view that can leave out significant parts of our…
I’ve personally become very critical of Google of late. While they offer some great and innovative services, they also lead the way in profiteering from mass data. The kind of data that you only become a small piece of, but hands a paying entity (not just commercial) information about you that you’d otherwise not openly present…
For those who aren’t familiar with the story, Rino from the ‘Long, slow {typecast} blog‘ experimented with using an off-cut from a bicycle inner-tube to re-cover (or more accurately, cover) a platen. The idea was to get the typewriter to type quieter, and have a better grip on the paper. In effect, Rino was trying…
The internet has an incredible way of spreading fabrications and miss-truths, often referred to as ‘counter-knowledge‘. Anyone with a barrow to push these days seems to produce a You-tube video, or a pithy slogan pasted over a photo that seems ‘true enough’ to be plausible, but not actually factually correct. All I need to do…
It was just one of those Wednesdays. The kind where you find yourself with a day off in the middle of the week, and you feel the need to get out and just look at the world around you. On this occasion I suggested to Miss Jane that her and I should hop into Ruby…
The Filthy Platen 