JF Ptak Science Books Daily Dose from Dr. Odd
These would certainly make nice counter stools, if they were a little bigger–but they not, and they weren’t, though they were just what they looked like–typewriter keys–and were part of a working 28,000-pound machine built for the San Francisco Exposition in 1915.
Evidently the machine was operated by using a regular -sized typewriter, the keys working in unison to produce a gigantic text on a big piece of paper. It was an advertising vehicle built by the Underwood typewriter company, and seems to have been a star of the expo–it certainly got a lot of attention, and successfully delivered to itself plenty of hopeful buyers who would round-out the company motto about their product: “The machine you will eventually buy”.
[Source: Technical World Magazine, May 1915, page 346.]
