Every Time the Typewriter Key Is
Pressed, Several Ounces of Manual
Power Are Used.
If a man realized at the end of the day how much energy he had expended in
normal and almost unconscious physical activities, he would be thankful
for the chance to sleep. The writer who pushes his pen over the paper for
several hours at a stretch would doubtless think he had worked hard if he
had excavated a well in the same time; yet it is believed that the sum of
the energy he uses daily in writing would be enough easily to dig a well.
The following figures are quoted from _Answers_:
Our daily expenditure of force is simply enormous, but it
seldom strikes us that we keep on expending force without
noticing it. The stoker of a locomotive, when on duty, is
said to shovel coal at the rate of about one ton an hour.
Presuming that he works at this rate forty hours per week,
it is obvious that in the course of a single year he lifts
over two thousand tons of coal.
Typewriting is not hard work, yet let us see how much energy
it takes to write forty letters on a machine. Every time a
key is pressed to print a letter a few ounces of force is
used, and every time the carriage is returned to begin a new
line between one and four pounds of force is requisitioned.
Forty letters, averaging twenty-six lines each, would mean
about twenty thousand pounds of force expended. Perhaps this
never occurred to you before.