The view in the looking glass

A few bytes ago, I was listening to The Door into Summer by Robert Heinlein. This book is still with me as I wander through my gadget happy home. He wrote this in 1957 and the story involves--I won't give anything away--time travel, both forwards and backwards. Before the main character figures out how to time travel, we hear about his life as an engineer who loves to create gizmos to make daily tasks chores no more. For example, the one that makes his company a success is a window washing robot.

Throughout the story, we hear of his other ideas for gadgets that will help women (!) by relieving the burden of domestic engineering. There is the robot that will vacuum independently and return to its hut for recharging after its daily rounds, during which it has carefully and tactfully avoided rooms where humans are socializing. I would like to take this time to reflect on Heinlein's ability to predict the Roomba while my own scurries away after bouncing off my foot and puttering away to suck up the paw posse's daily hair droppings. Since the main character spends a good deal of time drawing his plans for future inventions, he ponders about how this arduous task of putting pencil to paper can be eased. Heinlein also foresaw CAD systems (and, by default, the downfall of superb penmanship amongst designers and architects).

The one gadget of the era when Heinlein lived which does not get upgraded in the future he writes about is the electric typewriter. My lack of history knowledge harms my understanding here. Was the electric typewriter such a huge advancement that it cannot be seen past? Living now, I can see the progression from typewriter to electric typewriter to the use of a keyboard to blog. OK, I admit that progression is sketchy at best and even now the keyboard is being left behind for sketchpads and other interfaces with which to communicate with a personal computer. The steps from typewriter to computer is not obvious. In the story, the next step is a verbal interface; the dictation turned to type by the electric typewriter that is spoken to.

My question is this: was the electric typewriter such a breakthrough that even Heinlein was blinded to further evolution in the niche it filled? Sputnik hadn't yet beeped at the time of publication so the focus on technology and education geared toward cranking out engineers and scientists hadn't bloomed. Computing and computers may still have seemed like alchemy and magic icons to John and Jane Doe even though computers helped end WWII when used to break codes (only one use of computers, I know). But even when the main character is day-dreaming about his utopian home managed by a myriad of robots, an electric typewriter is mentioned. I found it fascinating as I was listening to the book and am very curious about the writer's context as he was writing the book.

I guess I'm off to the library for some tome entitled: Life in the Fantastic '50s: It was So Much More than a Beaver and his Mother's Pearls!