The Typewriter

The typewriter put mechanical, uniform, professional writing on every desk for more than a century, after Christopher Latham Sholes designed its QWERTY keyboard and Remington began selling the first commercially successful Sholes & Glidden machine in 1874. It transformed offices, opened clerical work to millions of women, and gave authors a way to hand printers clean copy — Mark Twain was among the first to submit a typewritten book manuscript. It also fixed the QWERTY keyboard into civilization, a layout we still use on devices with no type bars to jam.

Its killer was the personal computer. A word processor could do everything a typewriter did and undo mistakes, store drafts, and print endlessly. Through the 1990s and 2000s the machines vanished from offices, then homes, then shop shelves. When one of the last factories still making them — Godrej & Boyce in Mumbai — wound down its line, the closure made headlines around the world in 2011. The clack of keys and the ding of the carriage return had become a sound effect, not a sound.