In 1882, ads proclaimed that the typewriter could be used as an aid in learning to read, write, spell, and punctuate. Now, eighty years later, the typewriter is used only in experimental classrooms. The ordinary classroom still holds the typewriter at bay as a merely attractive and distractive toy. But poets like Charles Olson are eloquent in proclaiming the power of the typewriter to help the poet to indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspension, even, of syllables, the juxtaposition, even, of parts of phrases which he intends, observing that, for the first time, the poet has the stave and the bar that the musician has had. The same kind of autonomy and independence which Charles Olson claims that the typewriter confers on the voice of the poet was claimed for the typewriter by the career woman of fifty years ago. British women were reputed to have developed a "twelve-pound look" when typewriters became available for sixty dollars or so. This look was in some way related to the Viking gesture of Ibsen's Nora Helmer, who slammed the door of her doll's house and set off on a quest of vocation and soul-testing. The age of the iron whim had begun. The reader will recall earlier mention that when the first wave of female typists hit the business office in the 1890s, the cuspidor manufacturers read the sign of doom. They were right. More important, the uniform ranks of fashionable lady typists made possible a revolution in the garment industry. What she wore, every farmer's daughter wanted to wear, for the typist was a popular figure of enterprise and skill. She was a style-maker who was also eager to follow styles. As much as the typewriter, the typist brought into business a new dimension of the uniform, the homogeneous, and the continuous that has made the typewriter indispensable to every aspect of mechanical industry. A modern battleship needs dozens of typewriters for ordinary operations. An army needs more typewriters than medium and light artillery pieces, even in the field, suggesting