California Typewriter Page #2

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to send me an email.

Now if they take 70 seconds

to type me out something

on a piece of paper

and send it to me,

well, I'll keep that forever.

Otherwise I'll just

delete that email.

Look, there's always gonna be

great watches that are made,

you'll have to pay

a premium for them.

The truth is, no

good typewriters

are ever gonna be made again.

No matter how much of a premium

you're gonna want

to pay for 'em.

There is no factory, there is

no businessman in the world

who's going to open

up a factory and says,

we

are going to make

the finest typewriter that

will last absolutely forever

and anybody who is

willing to pay the $17,000

for a Hanks Typewriter.

Well, they're gonna pass

it down to their gen...

No, that's not gonna...

They might do that with a watch.

You might do that, there'll

always be a new iPad

that's coming down the pike,

there's always gonna be good

cars and things like that,

but no one is ever going to

make the great typewriter

ever, ever, ever again.

Boo hoo.

(downtempo jazz music)

(scraping)

- When I was a kid I didn't

really think about the future.

We were constantly

building things.

We built go carts,

we built balsa wood gliders,

we built a five-story

tree house.

And it was the house

that the neighborhood

kids came to play.

My parents didn't

care what we did,

they didn't worry about noise

and we could build things

in my father's workshop.

It was a tremendous childhood.

(downtempo jazz music)

My name is Martin Howard.

I've been collecting

19th century typewriters,

from the 18805 and

18905 for 22 years now.

I didn't want to collect

Swiss music boxes

or microscopes, or telescopes,

I wanted to collect something

that was sort of off the radar

in that regard.

The quality of how

things were built

at that time is spectacular.

Cast and machine made

parts beautifully painted.

It's the wild west

of typewriters.

My collection I call the

Martin Howard collection.

They're all typewriters

of nonstandard design.

During the 18805 and 18905,

there were many different

styles of typewriters,

but there were two main

classes of typewriters.

One was the keyboard

typewriter and the other,

what we call are now

index typewriters.

I really love typewriters

that are the genesis

of an idea, the

very beginning form.

(click)

Even if it was a

failure down the road

and died out of the

evolutionary tree,

that's okay, I like the

beginning of any idea.

(ding)

(whirring)

(clicking)

One of the things I love

finding in my typewriters

when I'm working on

them is a dried spider,

a spider from the

18805 or the 18905.

What it tells me is that

nobody has raided the tomb

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