Carbon paper and typewriter erasers

I stood in for Ms. Math Teacher today, getting called in at the last minute. School starts at 7:50. I got the call at 7:15. I had been up since 5:30, but hadn't showered or eaten breakfast yet. Yep, I never know what I'm going to get.

She told me to show an episode of the TV show "Numb3rs", but we couldn't get it to work. iTunes insisted on a password that did not exist. Technology is wonderful, but only when it works!

Instead of watching a great TV show, I had study hall all day. Actual teaching was out of the question. I'm not at all qualified to teach math! As I told one student, "Math and I are not friends."

During one "class", a paraprofessional and I started discussing my previous post about technological changes in the classroom.

"Do you remember carbon paper?" she asked.

(It's the blue sheet in this picture. The artist has drawn or traced the image on the top sheet. The pen pressure transferred the ink on the carbon paper to the bottom sheet.)

"I hoarded every piece I got," I said. Carbon paper was relatively expensive and didn't last long.

When I was in high school and early in my college days, carbon paper was the main way to make copies of one's work. It was messy and inconvenient. Mistakes could be erased on the original, but they would still appear on the carbon copy as strikeovers. And if the carbon got too worn, pieces of the original would be missing.

Since the machines had no memory, mistakes could not simply be deleted and redone. Enter the typewriter eraser.

In theory, the typist could use the rubber wheel to erase the mistake and the brush to sweep away any crumbs of eraser material. My eraser hated me. It didn't erase the mistake; it erased the paper! Holey documents just don't tend to be acceptable.

Correction fluid (like Wite-Out or Liquid Paper) was also a mistake-covering option, but it had grave disadvantages as well. Theoretically, white correction fluid matched white paper. But white to one paper manufacturer isn't white to another. And the typist had to wait for the fluid to dry. If she got in a hurry, the ink from the typewriter ribbon would smear.

The fluid often began to dry out before the bottle was empty. Correction fluid that was laid on too thickly made an unsightly bump on the paper. So typists had to keep bottles of thinner on hand. To use the thinner, the typist put her thumb over the top of a pipette and remove it from the thinner bottle. Then she injected it into the opening of the fluid bottle and removed her thumb. Thinner theoretically flowed into the correction fluid and a few shakes would make the fluid reuseable. Note that I said "theoretically". Sometimes the thinner worked and sometimes it didn't. Sometimes I had thinner on my desk instead of in the fluid bottle.

When erasable typing paper appeared on the market, I bought it. That paper was more expensive than regular typing paper, but the lack of aggravation was worth every penny. No more typewriter eraser, no more correction fluid. An ordinary eraser took care of typographical errors. Typos be gone! That paper had one drawback, though. Type tended to smear if handled immediately, but that was a minor issue compared to the alternative.

I was so delighted when memory typewriters appeared on the market and overjoyed when I finally got a computer that could erase mistakes before they ever ruined a piece of paper.

But more about that later.