by old technology
I have been revisiting some of my husband’s photos taken inside the Sointula Museum. He only had his camera phone so unfortunately they are not very sharp. I’m quite intrigued by a couple of examples of very old technology.
The card on the switchboard says:
Telephones first came to Sointula January 23, 1956. This is the ORIGINAL SWITCHBOARD used by the North-West Telephone bilingual exhange telephone service. Sointula jumped from eight telephones on one party-line to one hundred telphones and a switchboard managed by operators who were fluent in both Finnish and English. It is believed that Sointula is B.C.’s first bilingual telephone exchange.
Below, as labelled, is a Finnish typewriter, patented 1912.
I asked myself, does it have a Finnish keyboard? I blew up the image to try to read the worn out keys. I could tell it’s not our current English keyboard. With the help of a little photoshop sharpening, I think that the two lower left keys are an ä and ö, very important letters in the Finnish language.
November 17, 2013 in Canada and BC, Finland, Estonia & Finno-Ugric, History, Tools and technology by Marja-Leena
Marja-Leena!
I think I know what went on. When I came to America in 1969, I had broken my Olivetti Lettera Finnish typewriter because it took and fell on the ferry between Kapellskär (Sweden) and Naantali (Finland) in small summer storm from the hat rack to floor. All went bent. I had been working in Sweden to get money for the flight.
In Portland I then found a typewriter repair place somewhere in downtown (I bet it doesn’t exist anymore). A very handy guy. He somehow managed to get most everything back in the Qwerty-keyboard places, but Ä, Ö and Å were on lowest row on the right. Originally they were on the middle row on the right. I don’t know how he managed to make it a working machine yet.
I still have that typewriter, unused, left lonely, in our summer shack (these days we call it super shack, because it has a sun panel), and so is the whole place, probably shivering in our first big fall storm.
The repair guy in Portland didn’t take hardly no money for the work neither. He had some foreign accent, I don’t know which one. Maybe he thought to help out this poor immigrant.
Ripsa, kiitos tarinasta! Thanks for the story of your typewriter’s travels and travails, mirroring that of the humans sometimes? You’ve given me the answer to how this typewriter became a Finnish one.
I’ve been reading about the horrific windstorms in Finland, with trees blown down and causing power outages. You sound like you were unaffected though Vaasa was hit. I wonder how my relatives fared in eastern Finland.
Even in southern Ontario telephones were still rare enough in 1958 when my parents first got one that we were on a party line the first few years. Everyone’s phone had a distinctive ring pattern. How strange to see such an old switchboard and perhaps stranger still our house phone was one we bought 25 years ago. It works well so why change?
I too hope all is well with your family in eastern Finland.
I remember we had those party lines in Winnipeg in early days too. We still have some old rotary dial phones which surprisingly came in handy some years ago when we had power outages, whereas the push button phones needed electricity.
No news from Finland so they are probably fine – hardy people that they are.
The small company I worked for in the late 50s had a switchboard just like that. It was run by an operator/receptionist. All the work she did, as well as that of an office manager and three of us bookkeepers and a secretary could now be done by one person.
Hattie, those were the days when women held many office jobs. My husband still remembers the secretaries who did the typing of reports and all the filing. All gone when computers came along.
Love the STANDARD VISIBLE WRITER! Oh, to have a non-standard invisible!
Marly! Yes, me too! How about those voice-recognition kinds (for I’m a terrible typist)?
Oh my! My Olivetti Lettera is in love!
Rouchswalwe, he may be old enough to be your Olivetti’s great-grand-papa! At least in looks 🙂