Typewriters: How typing and writing are no more the same

Godrej made India’s last typewriter three years ago; this week, the UK has also done the inevitable, taking the machine one step closer to oblivion. In the 204 years since it was invented, this squat machine has evoked mixed reactions.

If Jawaharlal Nehru inexplicably hailed it as a symbol of industrialised India, penmanship advocates have constantly railed about its deleterious effect on handwriting, and secretaries and novelists took to it not merely to prevent inky fingers.

The comforting cadence typewriters clack-clacking in unison was once also the background music in countless offices and their replacement by the far softer tap-tap of keyboards has considerably diminished the air of busyness, though it may be business as usual.

The very inflexibility of a typewriter’s construction and functioning imposed a certain order to thought and communication that the advent of new, more accommodating writing machines has ended up destroying.

With technology offering all kinds of options, from spell-checks and predictive text to simply erasing or changing errant lines, writers have been lulled into complacency bordering on laziness.

The downside, of course, is that everything ‘unsaved’ can also vanish at the press of a wrong button, but that has not deterred the onward march of computers. Caution is in-built when using manual typewriters as even ‘whiting out’ liquid offers limited opportunities to alter what has once been committed to paper.

It is unfortunate, therefore, that today’s electronic writing aids are fostering a culture of potentially dangerous, breezy ad hocism by their ability to change or backtrack when what the world really needs is immutable, cogent thought and action — the kind only enforced by soon-to-be extinct steel-bound typewriters