of
would be good enough?"

"Certainly," assented Mr. Cameron. "Many persons who do a good deal of
work use the little machines from preference. They take up less room and
are lighter and more compact to carry about. In these days almost nobody
is without a typewriter, especially persons who write to any
considerable extent. Those who write for publication find a typewriter
practically imperative. Editors will not fuss to decipher hand-penned
copy. The time it takes and the strain on the eyes are too great. A
professional writer must now turn in his manuscript neatly typed and in
good form if he expects to have it meet with any attention. The old,
blotted, finely written and much marked-up article is a thing of the
past. Typewriters are so cheap in these days and so simply constructed
that there is no excuse for people not owning and running them."

"I wonder who thought out the typewriter, Dad," mused Paul.

"That is a much mooted question, my boy," Mr. Cameron answered. "There
is an old British record of a patent for some such device dated 1714,
but the specifications regarding it are very vague and unsatisfactory;
there also was an American patent taken out by William A. Burt as early
as 1829. Fire, however, destroyed this paper and we have no positive
data concerning it. Since then there have been over two thousand
different patents on the typewriter registered at the Government Office
at Washington,--so many of them that any person applying for a patent on
a new variety must have a great deal of courage."

"I should say so!"

"Generally speaking, all typewriters resolve themselves into two styles
of keyboard machine: in one the type bars strike the paper when the keys
are depressed; in the other the type is arranged around a wheel which
rotates in answer to the depressing of a keyboard letter, and prints
the corresponding type which is thereby brought opposite the printing
point. Either variety is good. It is a matter of preference. Possibly
the type-bar kind is the more common. There is, too, a difference in the
manner of inking the type. One machine inks the letters from an inked
ribbon that is drawn along by the action of the machine between the type
face and the paper; the type of the other machine is inked from an ink
pad that strikes the type before it is brought in contact with the
paper. Sometimes this ribbon or ink pad is black; sometimes blue, green,
red, or purple. Sometimes, too, a ribbon is so con