Their clickety-clacks once filled steno pools around the city, a kind of reassuring elevator music for generations of office workers.
Today, in most places where paper is still shuffled, the noisy clatter of typewriters has largely fallen silent, having given way first to the low buzz of electric models and more recently to the hum of computers.
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These days, only the Italian firm Olivetti and a small Polish company still make manual typewriters. Olivetti said most of them go to the world`s armies, which need to keep grinding out paperwork even in places where electricity is unavailable or unreliable.
Such is the steady march into the dim dreamland called Nostalgia.
The other day, a woman walked into Mayer Cavalier`s office supply shop on East 42nd Street with a 25-year-old Royal in need of repair. Could he do the job? He could-not that he gets much call for such work these days.
”I could not support myself fixing manual typewriters,” said Cavalier, 54, who learned his trade in his father`s shop in Egypt. ”I would be dead. I would be begging in the streets.”
Cavalier sells no more than eight or 10 manuals a year-mostly to older people who don`t want to know about electronic models.
Even the New York Police Department, which still relies on typewriters at the precinct level, uses just a fraction of the machines it once did.
”I don`t know how many of the old reliables-the Underwoods and Royals and Remingtons-are still out there,” said NYPD spokesman Sgt. Nick Vreeland. The decline in typewriter use in general has sounded the death knell for the old-style mom-and-pop repair shops that once were staple storefronts in every neighborhood.
Two weeks ago, the last of America`s old-time typewriter makers, Smith Corona Corp., announced that it will close its last domestic plant. Eight hundred seventy-five workers-down from a high of 4,200 in 1979-at Smith Corona`s assembly facility in Cortland, N.Y., will lose their jobs.
The company hopes to cut production costs by 80 percent and save $15 million a year by moving to Mexico.