I find it amazing, how quickly we are losing so many aspects of 19th and 20th century technology… While there is a huge net expansion of the technology we use, we never seem to notice now many things are being relegated not to the scrap heap, but to oblivion.
This ‘out with the old, in with the new’ has been a part of human cultures for a very long time (it seems to go hand in hand with progress and change). But I sometimes wonder if there is real value in all of the ‘eccentrics’, and ‘crackpots’ out there who proudly display collections of old: toasters, teapots, typewriters, old radios, and almost anything which we don’t use anymore…
I suppose that this is yet another part of the traditional publishing world which is eroding before our eyes. Yesterday I wrote about how books are poised to become mere data in the cloud for us to access on various eReaders. I wonder if the fact that text files are so compact might be their saving grace. The original structure of the internet was text based , and ANSI and ASCII character sets are reasonably efficient with regard to their size and what they can connote.
As I sit here eulogizing the typewriter, it strikes me that this relatively complicated mechanism could be seen as the epitome of printing technology. The portable (student style) typewriter is responsible for much of 20th century literature, it might be seen as a high point of 19th century technology.
The end of the line: Last typewriter factory left in the world closes its doors
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1380383/Godrej-Boyce-Worlds-typewriter-factory-closes-doors-Mumbai.html
It’s an invention that revolutionized the way we work, becoming an essential piece of office equipment for the best part of a century.
But after years of sterling service, that bane for secretaries has reached the end of the line.
Godrej and Boyce – the last company left in the world that was still manufacturing typewriters – has shut down its production plant in Mumbai, India with just a few hundred machines left in stock.
‘Till 2009, we used to produce 10,000 to 12,000 machines a year. But this might be the last chance for typewriter lovers. Now, our primary market is among the defense agencies, courts and government offices.’
The company is now down to its last 200 machines – the majority of which are Arabic language models.
The firm began production in the 1950s – when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru described the typewriter as a symbol of India’s emerging independence and industrialization. It was still selling 50,000 models annually in the early 1990s, but last year it sold less than 800 machines.
