The Psychiatrist of the Typewriters

Typewriters are close to my heart. My father was a typist, and he used to bring the typewriter home when he had extra work to do. The incessant and purposeful rattle of the keys translating into words held a fascination to me. They still do.

Even now, I have a portable typewriter at home though I rarely use it. I got it from a freind whose brother brought it home from Kenya. It is a Smith-Corona, and it is a marvel. I maintain it in a working condition, its keys hit the carriage with a muted 'click!', and the stately movement of the carriage itself gives me some pride that I now own it.

So, it came as a pleasant and happy surprise when I found an obituary in the September 20, 2008 issue of The Economist. It reported the sad demise of Martin Tytell at the age of 94. He had repaired typewriters for about fifty years. I felt grateful that a magazine as famous and powerful as The Economist had taken notice of an ordinary mechanic.

In the obituary, The Economist calls Tytell "their (typewriters') last and most famous psychiatrist', who could, "draw from them after a brief while of blue-eyed peering with screwdriver in hand, when they had left the factory, how they had been treated and with exactly what pressure their owners had hit the keys".

This is a man who deserves any amount of praise. He re-engineered the ordinary typewriter into slot machines for use in Railway Stations, he made the American Typewriter speak 145 different languages, made the carriage move right to left so that it could type Hebrew and Arabic, and enabled it spew out musical notations and even hieroglyphs!

When he closed his shop in 2001 after 45 years of service, he held a stock about 2 million pieces of type in his office. Such dedication!

Tytell assisted the FBI in garnering proof by identifying which machine had been used to type out which letter. But his greatest moment came when he assisted the defence attorneys of the infamous Alder Hess, who had spied for Russia, in replicating a typewriter to prove that it is possible to build an exact copy of the typewriter that Hess had used. Tytell spent more than 2 years to construct such a machine, and succeeded in reproduced every smudge and flaw of type that was found in the Woodstock N230099 that Hess had possessed.

I think the kind of appreciation that The Economist has for high achievers in ordinary life such as Martin Tytell is proof that its heart in its right place.