The Last of the Typewriter Men

A lot of us have nostalgia for old typewriters, regardless of how many hipsters put them on display. I have one myself and I was surprised by how much the guy in my local typewriter repair store knew about my machine and how quickly he solved my problem. This is a celebration of “a dynasty of repairmen keeping the world’s typewriters from going obsolete.”    

Mary Pilon focuses her article on typewriter repairman Paul Schweitzer (and his sons) in the Flatiron District, while also granting a history of the typewriter itself. She writes, 

“As the 19th century teetered into the 20th, the clank of typewriter keys went from solo to symphony. They were the weapon of choice for professional writers, the business elite, people with things to say and the need to say them quickly. They unintentionally provided a passageway for women to tread into workplaces from which they had long been banished, and greatly expedited the rate at which human thought could be translated into ink.”

Many of you designheads already know that the QWERTY keyboard was arranged in a purposefully difficult way in order to avoid jamming the gears by typing to quickly.  Take a little time and read the full story on Medium.com.