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| 1941 Underwood Universal (U.S. Navy) F1429518 |
There is a pleasing seriousness to this specific version of the Underwood portable, with its black crinkle paint and shiny black striping, metal-rimmed keys, and the balanced asymmetry of the keyboard, with the shift lock, backspace, and margin release on one side, and on the other, touch selector and color selector.
It is well-known now that the lower case alphabet is more easily readable than the uppercase, which is why guide road signs today (and for the past 60+ years) use both cases. Around the time of WWII, guide signs often used all-caps, as did all the mills and telegraph equipment. I wonder if proper research had been done into readability of upper vs lowercase before the war, the mills would not have been only uppercase?
Sent from my Underwood Universal navy mill