Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/17/ray-bradbury-used-98-dimes-to-write-the-first-draft-of-fahrenheit-451-on-a-coin-operated-typewriter.html
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Huh. I never knew coin-operated typewriters were a thing.
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There are also coin operated boys, too!
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In his own words:
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In the university library they had six IBM selectrics plugged into things that looked just like this:
the ‘solution’ was to bring a short extension cord, and do a little quiet re-plugging, so that your waited way too long to start essay on “Faulkner’s usage of imagery” wouldn’t be interrupted with finding another quarter. oh, and occasionally mime a coin drop to appear compliant
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Bradbury’s one of those guys who went depressingly wingnut late in life, but I’ve always been able to forgive him because he wrote “Dandelion Wine” and “A Sound of Thunder” and “Homecoming” and “There Shall Come Soft Rains” and “Skeleton.” And because he was in the best ad ever made for Sunsweet Prunes.
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The translation of his almost-ten-bucks in 1949 to about $110 today really gave me pause.
And more importantly I started thinking about public toilets, which were traditionally a dime to use back in 1969 when the “Committee to End Pay Toilets in America” managed to start getting pay toilets banned, resulting in the modern world of pretty much no places to poop without spending about $10 on a drink, which is a lot more than the 90¢ that an inflation-adjusted 1969 dime is worth now…
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That’s a wonderfully weird detail. Maybe “Coin-punk” is a potential genre for speculative fiction; especially if your protagonist uses the coin-operated typewriter at an Automat.
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Less creative, but his reminds me of watching a ‘Carry On’ movie on the pay TV in the bus station. You had these tight little chairs with a tiny built in TV you had to keep feeding Quarters into. After 5 minutes it would turn off - always right before a punchline. Quickly feed in another quarter, but the joke would have passed.
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Word rates weren’t great back then. How much did Galaxy pay him for the story?
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It’s another thing which makes sense when you understand the capital cost of buying a machine for yourself. I wonder if there ever were coin operated sewing machines, for housewives too poor to afford their own.
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And that would not have been an electric typewriter, so you really had to pound those keys.
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And yet the number one complaint about Europe from American tourists are the pay toilets (maybe after the lack of water fountains)
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I don’t know about that: waiters being insufficiently servile? The ice not being icy enough?
Lots of opportunities for complaints and we don’t take complaints seriously.
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Amazed to discover this.
Sometimes reality looks very much like a Philip K Dick’s dystopian novel.
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There’s a novel in there somewhere.
Also @frauenfelder
The story was the bases for his novel, Fahrenheit 451 .
It was the basis. Bases is the odd plural form.
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Get annoyed when a person doesn’t immediately put on a show when a tourist says “Hey talk Irish at me!”
ETA: speling
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