If you spend any amount of time with Tom Bivins, it’s easy to see his passion for history and antiquity. This passion is infectious — hearing him describe the inner-workings of his authentic Victrola or the quality of his Underwood typewriter, it’s hard not to wonder where you can get one yourself.@@http://journalism.uoregon.edu/~tbivins/bivins/index.html@@
In his Communications History class, he periodically brings these items from his collection of old media apparatuses for the class to examine. In total he has five typewriters, four telegraph keys, two telegraph sounders, a 1950s dial telephone, a radio from 1945, two old cameras, a Victrola and two mechanical clocks.
“I grew up in a family where the past was really important,” Bivins said. “So I grew up appreciating the past but I never started collecting anything.”
Bivins has lived a storied life. After two years at college in Anchorage, Alaska, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force where he spent six years as a broadcast specialist in the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. When he returned to Anchorage, he proceeded to earn a B.A. in English and a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing before coming to Eugene in 1980, where he received his Ph.D. in telecommunications in two years.@@http://afrts.dodmedia.osd.mil/@@
His collection began in 1982, when he was teaching at the University of Delaware. One day, he traded his electric typewriter (rendered redundant by his recently purchased HP computer) for an antique 1927 L.C. Smith that had been acquiring dust in the school reporting lab.@@http://www.udel.edu/@@
“That typewriter had been in that reporting lab since 1927 and had been cleaned every year,” he said. “It was in perfect working condition.”
Bivins’ collection has been growing ever since, acquiring new pieces through antiques shops, serendipitous gifts and the occasional trade. Bivins doesn’t collect blindly; his collection is stocked with functioning machinery and he intends to keep it that way.
“I want something that’s old and still works,” he said. “I don’t want something that just sits there.”
Aside from his clocks, which Bivins has professionally serviced, he understands how to repair and maintain his collection. He’s fully capable of taking apart his telephone and fixing it himself, something few people can claim to do with their smart phones. This is one thing that Bivins thinks is missing from modern technology.
“We’ve lost a feeling of craftsmanship,” he said. “When I was a kid, when you bought something and it broke, you repaired it. (My father) repaired his own cars, clocks, telephone, oven. Everything was mechanical, even if it was electric … We don’t do that anymore.”
With the increasingly digital nature of current technology, Bivins feels that as a culture we have become more separated from the tools we use. It has become much harder to simply swap out a few parts and, in some cases, those parts are so rare and specialized that it might even be impossible for the common consumer to obtain them.
“I think we lost something when you lost the ability to service your own stuff, I really do,” he said.
Bivins acknowledges that the machines he owns were perhaps as mysterious to people of their period as iPhones are to us today, but he still wishes that modern technology allowed more user control. It has become commonplace for electronics to have no user-serviceable parts, for malfunctions to be buried deep in machine code.
“We’ve lost touch with that ability to feel like we’re part of the medium itself because we can put our hands on it and do something with it.”
Blast from the past: Professor Tom Bivins’ antiques collection offers glimpse of bygone era
Daily Emerald
April 28, 2012
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