"Inspiration" sculpture depicts a man sitting on stool-like typewriter keys.

Man Sits on Giant Typewriter

Munster, Indiana

The Times newspaper of northwest Indiana had some money it needed to spend (as compelled by a town public-art-for-construction ordinance), and decided the best use would be to fund a sculpture that suggested the importance of news reporting.

The result, unveiled on December 13, 2006, was "Inspiration," an 18-foot-tall, eight-ton sculpture of a man sitting on a giant typewriter.

Sculptor Zachary Oxman crafted the artwork out of stainless steel, both as a tribute to northwest Indiana's steel industry, and as a hedge against northwest Indiana weather.

The man -- a fedora-wearing, 1940s reporter -- sits on the keys of a huge manual typewriter, notebook in hand, pondering how to write his story (The keys, according to Oxman, spell the word, "thought").

Underneath, a similarly giant roll of curling newsprint awaits the reporter's tap-tap-tap, ready to leave the presses.

The sculpture's visual whimsy and abstraction of an old school mechanical tool may not easily communicate its original intent to younger viewers.

The man, a reporter, gazes into the sky from his lofty typewriter perch.

But no worries! The modern world's smart devices seamlessly access the explanation -- scraped by an invisible robot from a crowdsourced free wiki populated with content curated from a newspaper that went out of business for no apparent reason.