Writing on my trusty IPhone after my laptop suffered a nervous breakdown, I began reflecting on all of the changes I’ve witnessed during my 50-year journalism career.
Those technological epochs also came to mind when I recently saw the New York Historical Society’s exhibit honoring the 50th anniversary of Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker,” Caro’s monumental biography of Robert Moses, the imperious unelected master bureaucrat whose projects transformed New York City, destroying neighborhoods and family businesses in the process.
As the exhibit displays, Caro has refused using computers and Internet research in writing his encyclopedic books, including his multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson, the last volume not yet complete.
Caro composes in longhand on yellow legal pads, then switches to a typewriter to refine his elegantly crafted sentences.
Going back to his early days as a newspaper reporter, he makes carbon copies of his work. He hordes now difficult to find carbon paper.
Like Caro, I started my newspaper days in the hot type era, when craftspeople sat at Linotype machines making slugs of type from molten lead.
Printers created the newspaper columns by placing the type into metal trays. They knew how to read upside down.
Every reporter wrote his or her story on a typewriter. The reporters made carbon copies of their articles, inserting two sheets of copy paper separated by a sheet of carbon paper into the typewriter.
Turning a plastic knob, you wound the package around a black rubber roller, securing the blank paper with a metal holder and beginning to write.
After each line of the story was completed, you returned the typewriter carriage to the left margin by pulling a silver lever that rang a merry encouraging bell.
We placed our carbons in a basket on a table beside City Editor Jim Lacaffinie’s desk. The carbon copies were saved in case any cleanly typed pages were lost in the composing room before being set into newspaper type. If so, a replacement carbon copy could be sent down.
A police radio posted above the carbon basket squawked throughout the night. A list of police codes was taped upon the radio platform. I don’t remember the radio bulletins ever leading to a story.
Unlike Caro, I stayed in the newspaper field through the cold type revolution and the use of computers to print newspapers.
Then came the Internet and the death knell of ink on paper newspapers, although they hang on like other nearly extinct species.
AI rises as a transformational economic force whom some fear threatens humanity along with climate change, nuclear war and the invasion of space aliens.
Whatever form AI takes, it won’t match the achievement of Robert Caro.