"And the bell warns them that they are approaching the end of a line, even if they don't see that they are," Paul added.
"Precisely!"
"It is a great scheme, isn't it—a typewriter?" declared the boy.
Mr. Cameron nodded.
"What wouldn't the old monks have given for one?" went on Paul mischievously. "Think of the years of work that would have saved them."
"Yes, that is true. But if we had no fine old illuminated manuscripts, we would have lost much that is beautiful and interesting. There is no question, though, that typewriters accord with our generation much more harmoniously than do painfully penned manuscripts. In our day the problem is to turn out the most work in the shortest time, and the typewriter certainly does that for us. It is a very ingenious device—a marvel until one sees a modern printing press; then the typewriter seems a child's toy, a very elementary thing indeed."
"I'd like to see a big press sometime," Paul observed. "I have been trying to get my nerve together to ask Mr. Carter for a permit to visit the Echo printing rooms."
"The Echo—humph!" laughed his father in derision. "Why, my boy, much as we esteem the Echo here in Burmingham, it is after all only a small local newspaper and very insignificant when compared with one of the big city dailies. You should visit the press rooms of a really large paper if you want to see something worth seeing. The Boston Post, for example, has the largest single printing press in the world. It was built in 1906 by the Hoe Company of New York and is guaranteed to print, count, fold, and stack into piles over 700,000 eight-page papers an hour."
"Great Scott, Dad!"
"It is tremendous, isn't it?"