As an old fart who actually used a typewriter, I must point out that the bell does not ring when you press the carriage return. The bell rings when you are nearing the end of the line to warn you that you are bout to run out of paper.
On carriage return, the sound should be a slow swing of the heavy carriage physically returning.
This is odd, I could have sworn mine rang the bell when the carriage return returned to the start of the line, so it was more of a "swoooosh ding!", but I watched a video and you're right. Very odd.
The bell was rang (rung?) when you were around ten columns away from the right side of the paper, as a notification to the user to manually use the carriage return bar, or use the return key on the fancy electric typewriters.
> as a notification to the user to manually use the carriage return bar
It also, probably more so, was a signal to the user to start thinking about how to break the current line. You couldn’t type and, upon realizing the word you were typing didn’t fit the line, backspace and type a hyphen.
‘About ten columns’ then is a reasonable number. Of course, longer words exist and aren’t extremely rare, but those would have a reasonable hyphenation point that you could and would want to use.
Our office still has a manual typewriter, and an IBM Selectric.
The bell rings when the Page Stops are reached. These can be manually set on the page. The bell rings, the typist plans for end of line, then they whack the bar and zzzzz-thunk the carriage returns.
On carriage return, the sound should be a slow swing of the heavy carriage physically returning.