comScore
Uncategorized Tuesday, November 20th 2012 at 9:40 am

End of an Era: United Kingdom Makes Their Last Typewriter

By ( ) Comments

The world of technology moves at a fast pace. Previous inventions and innovations are made redundant or considered outdated almost as fast as we can pump them out. That doesn’t mean that some advances don’t stick around for a while, but the typewriter is one that’s been lingering since the widespread adoption of the computer. It’s like an old family dog: Full of good memories, and a stalwart compatriot in the past, but it’s more or less been dead for years. Brother, the last manufacturer of typewriters in the United Kingdom, has finally ceased production.

The final typewriter from Brother’s U.K. factory was donated to London’s Science Museum, because it’s more or less the end of an era. BBC News explains why Brother finally called it quits:

Brother said it had stopped making typewriters in the UK because demand had fallen sharply in this country. It said that it still had significant sales in the US but its factory in the Far East produces enough typewriters to serve this market.

Emphasis mine. One hopes that “significant sales” is actually a far lower number than the term “significant” might normally imply. Regardless, it means that the United States is still using typewriters on a widespread basis, or hipsters are more affluent than I previously considered.

(via BBC News)

Relevant to your interests

Filed Under | • •
  • doom_n_gloom

    people don’t realize that when the power goes out (indefinitely) we will forget the technologies that existed… no one will know what to do with a cd disk, a PC monitor, all electronics… we will not even know what the letters are on a typewriter… “H. G. Wells The Time Machine”

  • Idlethoughts

    Assuming such an event occurs.

  • Idlethoughts

    But what will we teach children to do when eating corn on the cob!

  • Anonymous

    That the power might go out is, however remote a possibility, still a possibility.

    However, in that event I think we’d have bigger problems than what to write letters on. And if we do write them, what do we do with them? No power = no postal service – apart from the mailman the whole system is mechanised.

    While a typewriter might provide a feeling of security in case our power supply goes down terminally, and takes our computers with it, that feeling is based on a false premise.

  • dr. todd harris

    Freshly impassioned fingers firmly forming new thoughts, striking steel-cast limbs, forming plasma-stormed dots, poets minds still caressing non-digitized spots….