Winchester Type Machine

While looking around at the gift shop, waiting for the tour of the Winchester Mystery House to start, I saw this Type Machine that casts type onto a piece of metal of some sort. I wanted to get one printed but I didn’t know what it should say. After returning from the tour, I came back to the machine. I thought that just putting my name would be lame, so I considered putting “I like naps.” but I thought it was too dated.

Then it came to me. What more nerdy string of characters for a designer than the alphabet? Since there were 32 spaces available, I would use 26 for the alphabet, but what about the rest of the 6 spaces? I could put numbers, but it wouldn’t be the whole set. Zero’s pretty much similar to O, so I could take that out, but which else? Since I couldn’t fit the entire set of numbers, I decided to just put the date of my visit: 071116.

So I went for it. It was kind of fun physically making the characters one by one, but I couldn’t actually see it. All I could do was turn the dial to the character I want, then pull the lever to cast it onto the piece of metal. There were a few times where the dial didn’t point at the character exactly and would make it point back to the previous letter like the steering wheel turning back to straight if you let it go from turning left or right. To prevent that, I stopped pulling the lever halfway to prevent the punch from striking the metal, and then I continued. And this is what came out.

Notice that you can’t really tell where “A” and “B” are, and on the spots where “A” and “B” should be, it’s a little muddy. Turns out that when I pulled the lever only halfway to prevent a miscasting, it still counted as one space. As you can tell, after “I,” “T,” and “V,” there’s a space. And since I planned on casting 32 characters, the type went back to the beginning and covered “A” and “B.” I was somewhat disappointed, but I still thought it was cool. It’s one of those things where I don’t get to experience everyday at this day and age anymore, and it’s good to see that back then, you can’t just change something but pressing a “delete” key; you have to start over if you want it to be just right.

Flush.