It's Hard to Say — Jeff Hurlow

It’s Hard to Say
2026

IBM Wheelwriter 3,
Raspberry Pi,
Arduino Nano RP2040,
Desk and table,
Paper

My mother and stepfather started a freight forwarding business in the 1980s. At some point, my sister and I both worked there, and I think my dad made some extra money making deliveries for them. We used a typewriter exactly like this one.

What we typed were airway bills... documents that spelled out every detail needed to move cargo from one place to another. The language fascinated me. "Bill of lading." "Consignee." It felt like connecting directly into an old world... a system of protocols that existed long before any of us. The first three copies were originals. Green for the issuing carrier. Pink for the consignee. Blue for the shipper. Then yellow, then white. Each copy goes somewhere different... each one carrying the same information to a different set of hands.

I've been thinking about letters lately. The kind that took days to arrive and left you suspended in the silence between sending and response. Going through a box of old letters I had received from family, old friends, old lovers... people who were too far to reach. I still have them stored in a box. I'm not sure they kept mine.

I used to think that by now I'd know better. That time gives you clarity about what mattered and what didn't... what you should have said and why you didn't. I'm not sure that's true. Maybe what age actually gives you is the willingness to admit you still don't know. That the revisionist version of yourself... the one who would have said the right thing at the right moment... is a fiction you keep updating.

A viewer approaches the machine. It wakes up and types a question. They type their response on the original keys. The machine thinks, then types back... not an answer, just recognition. At the bottom of the page, a signature. They tear it off and take it with them.

Build process notes

This is the largest and most mechanically complex object in the series so far. It arrived with its keyboard separated... decades of use and storage had worked the assembly apart until the keys no longer sat flush or responded reliably. Before any electronics work could begin, the keyboard had to come completely apart. Every key. Every mechanism.

Putting it back together required bolt-modding the assembly... a process of replacing the plastic rivets with metal bolts to hold the keyboard springs and the electronic pad together. It is, in the most literal sense, a resurrection. The machine had to be made to work again before it could do something new. Much like Doubting Thomas, I couldn’t believe it worked.

The electronics layer connects a Raspberry Pi to the Wheelwriter's internal bus through an Arduino Nano RP2040, which handles the timing-sensitive communication the typewriter's 1984 circuitry requires. The Arduino translates between the modern and the antique... a small act of interpretation happening invisibly inside the machine every time a character is typed or received.

IBM Wheelwriter III with the main components and machine parts exposed.

Some of the plastic rivets from the undercarriage of the original keyboard had broken off, causing a failure in some of the keys’ ability to reach the sensor pad.

Close-up of the IBM Wheelwriter III’s J1P connector. A 10-pin interface at the back of the unit allows the typewriter to function as a printer and to receive input.

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