Before we all had computers and Gmail, people doing any serious amount of writing used an almost extinct breed of machines whose heyday lasted more than 100 years. Now, some of these dinosaurs have made their way into a special exhibit at the ROM.
The ancient, sometimes bizarre machines are all housed in a small gallery, strangely appropriate for once ubiquitous fixtures now relegated to the modern mind’s musty corners. Besides, visitors come here to witness small pieces of the past-little machines that would look out of place and silly in a big room.
In the small space, under glass cases lined up against the plain white walls, are twenty-one typewriters dating from the turn of the 19th century.
Some of the machines resemble telephones or waffle-makers more than instruments made for writing villanelles. If not for the brief captions, it would be next to impossible to guess how these contraptions worked, yet despite their diverse appearance, all but one of them used some clever (or not) mechanism to print letters onto paper.
That other one? It was a typewriter for the blind, not unlike modern Braille machines except-claimed its inventor- it was faster. It used a dot system that supposedly took less time to write than the one devised by Louis Braille in 1821. The gizmo gave early Braille writers some competition-the specimen on display once belonged to the New York Institute for the Blind, as a small plaque affixed to the machine attests. An accompanying photo shows a few men sitting around a table at the institute, their trusty Kleidographs arrayed before them. The collection of century-old contraptions showcased in the exhibit gives us a glimpse, however small, into a period in which a little revolutionary machine changed writing forever.
Admission to the ROM’s special exhibits is $10 Friday nights, $17 the rest of the week (with student ID), and also includes access to the permanent collection.
