Royal Manual Typewriter

The Royal Typewriter Company was a manufacturer of typewriters headquartered in New York City with its factory in Hartford, Connecticut. It was founded in January 1904 in a machine shop in Brooklyn, New York by Edward B. Hess and Lewis C. Myers. By December 1957, Royal produced its 10 millionth typewriter. Now known as Royal Consumer Information Products Inc., Royal’s product line has evolved to include cash registers, shredders, PDAs/electronic organizers, postal scales, weather stations, and a wide range of original and compatible/remanufactured imaging supplies supporting today’s most popular printers, faxes, and copiers.

Royal Manual Typewriter in Supervolcano
One evening, Marshall Ferguson came home and was surprised to find a Royal manual portable typewriter on his desk beside his iMac. His father had found it in a pawn shop and bought it for him since he was fed up with Marshall's complaining about being unable to write when the power went off. Marshall was dubious since editors wanted stories submitted electronically in Word or RTF and the machine had a "monster" touch unlike a computer. His father was unsympathetic, pointing out that editors had the same problem with power outages as he did so if they received hard-copy and liked the story, then they could scan it to OCR when they did get electricity. And if they didn't have power, then they couldn't read Word in the first place.

Since Marshall was living at home and without much prospects of moving out, he shut-up and tried the machine. It wasn't as bad as he expected especially with his index fingers but his pinkies weren't happy. Also, every time he made a mistake, he couldn't just cursor back and retype. He had to use correction fluid on the mistake, let it dry and then write over top of it. However, he quickly adapted and after finishing the first page, he rolled in another and continued working.

When Marshall's sister Vanessa finally got back to Los Angeles, she had to initially stay at the family home. When she brought her stuff up to her old bedroom, Marshall was clacking away on the Royal next door in his room. As was her character, she snarked about the noise and hoped Marshall wouldn't be typing in the middle of the night. Marshall tended to use his computer whenever possible but this got his back up and he replied he would use it whenever he felt like it. Never-the-less, the two did manage to live with each other in relative peace.