Milwaukee’s inaugural QWERTYFEST celebrates the invention of the typewriter. The world’s oldest national newspaper has produced its final print edition after 320 years. “People are paying to break printers with sledgehammers in smash rooms.” Graphene-based “e-skin.” Aqualamb brings back album art in the age of streaming. Noise-canceling headphones for dogs. The flying car is almost here! Italian automotive hackers create the lowest drivable car, for some reason. Mushroom-based coffins for the burgeoning “green burial” trend. Enter “Tim Burton’s Labyrinth.” Burger King’s “real cheeseburger.” All that and more in WhatTheyThink’s weekly miscellany.
Every so often someone has an ingenious idea — ideas that change lives. Sometimes these changes are lost to history; some never recognized. Other times, these ideas revolutionize life.
National Typewriter Day 2023: The typewriter, a mechanical instrument that allows users to type directly onto paper, revolutionized the world of writing
Updated: July 16 2021, 12.36pm
Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, left, type up Nixon s downfall in All The President s Men.
It is one of the most famous sequences in movie history: Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffmann typing as if their lives depended on it, as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in All the President’s Men.
The film, which chronicled the investigative journalism of the duo that exposed the Watergate scandal and eventually sparked the resignation of White House incumbent Richard Nixon, highlighted a world before desktop and laptop computers when newspaper reporters, often with a cigarette dangling from their mouths, battered out the brass tacks of their latest exclusives and sent them to the sub-editors.