Typing faster than your mind is working

“If you type adeptly with 10 fingers, you’re typing faster than your mind is working.”

— James A. Michener

The doctor’s waiting room was full. People of all ages were sending and receiving messages on cellphones but never making eye contact with each other.

I said “hello” to the man I sat down next to. He glanced my way and went back to his phone without missing a thumb tap.

The “thumb typers” amused me, remembering that I, too, once typed with two digits. It was a well-known hack for those of us who cut typing class in high school. We called it “hunt-and-peck.” Instead of thumbs, huntand- peck utilized two index fingers. The system served me well until I learned to use three fingers, then graduated to four.

I’m up to about five fingers now. I learned on a real typewriter. Today’s thumb typers don’t know what a typewriter is. Seriously. A young student, seeing my grandfather’s old manual typewriter in my office recently, asked me, “What is that?”

“It’s a very old computer,” I said. Then I tried to keep a straight face.

“Wow,” was the response.

“Does it still work?”

“No,” I sadly said. “It needs a ribbon.”

“A what?” he asked. My dad’s father, S.V. Aldridge, retired in 1954 from the Cotton Belt Railroad, which today is part of Union Pacific. The railroad was his sole lifetime occupation, one he embarked on in 1901 at the age of 13 as a rail-crew laborer. The last 24 years of his 53-year career were spent as a section foreman with an office in the small depot that sat between two crossing lines at Quitman and Mill streets in downtown Pittsburg.

When he retired, the typewriter went home with him, where he showed me how to type my name on it as a youngster — slowly, using one finger at a time.

An added delight, sheer magic to a kid, was pushing the metal tab that changed the type from black to red.

After he died in December 1967, I became custodian of the old black Underwood with gold lettering and pin striping.

During the almost 60 years I’ve owned it, it has shared space in my home office alongside a parade of computers from a first-generation Macintosh of the 1980s to the current MacBook Pro laptop I’m typing on now (sometimes using six fingers).

In its day, however, the old manual typewriter was just as revolutionary as computers are today.

Current keyboards are exactly the same as they have been since 1874, when Remington updated the layout by introducing the “QWERTY” arrangement, so named for the sequence of keys that begins the top row of letters.

Therefore, the typing class exercise that is older than I am — “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’s back” — employs every letter of the alphabet typed the same way, whether on a 19th-century typewriter or a 2026 digital device.

Come to think of it, the typewriter was one up on the computer. It had its own built-in printer. Multiple copies? No problem. You do remember carbon paper, don’t you? Plus, power outages and dead batteries were never a problem. A typewriter required neither. Software updates? That was a new cushion for your desk chair.

And obsolescence was never an issue. My grandfather’s 90-year-old machine has never required a software update. In fact, it would produce documents just as well today as it did back then … if it had a new ribbon.

Quaint, but just a relic of the past, you say? Hold on. Just like vinyl records that came back from the dead about the time their obituary appeared in print, new manual typewriters began appearing on the market several years ago.

Specialty retailer Hammacher Schlemmer rolled out one that honestly made it sound like the “newest thing under the sun.”

And speaking of honesty, I came clean with the young man I teased about the old typewriter being a computer. I did caution him, however, to avoid the pitfall plenty of thumb-device typers fall into today.

That is, “Regardless of how many fingers you use, never type faster than your mind is working.”