Pen and Paper Work Just Fine: The Typewriter’s Near Flop

A wall of vintage typewriters (aren’t they beautiful?) at the Musée de la Machine à Écrire. Lausanne, Switzerland. May 3, 2025.

Sometimes the most niche of museums are the most fun of museums.

By the time I finally made it to the Musée de la Machine à Écrire (the Typewriter Museum), I’d already visited almost all of the museums in Lausanne.

(Side note: Lausanne punches far above its small-city weight when it comes to great museums. Here’s a list of the museums in Lausanne that are worth seeing.)

A TYPEWRITER MUSEUM IS MORE INTERESTING THAN YOU MIGHT THINK

I really had no idea what to expect when I walked into a typewriter museums. Well, typewriters, of course. But would it just be a bunch of typewriters in cases?

I’m a museum nerd, though, and if there’s a museum, even if it doesn’t sound interesting, I’ll go to it.

This one, though, sounded interesting. I’m a writer, after all.

And even I didn’t know how interesting it would be.

I could tell you about the reasons for the keyboard layout (to slow down typists enough to ensure the levers that thwap the letters and symbols onto the page didn’t tangle). I could even explain how the first typewriters worked, even though they didn’t have keyboards. (You used a dial to select a letter or symbol and then pushed a button to imprint it.)

However, what stuck with me the most from my visit to Lausanne’s Typewriter Museum was that the typewriter nearly flopped. That’s right, the world almost didn’t have typewriters.

Can you imagine?

SAVED FROM PERMANENT FAILURE BY A GOOD MARKETING SPIN

When Remington & Sons in Illion, New York, began mass manufacturing a typewriter in the 1870s based on the design of an inventor named Christopher Latham Sholes, no one saw the use for such a thing.

Buying an expensive machine that would take up space and make a lot of noise—not to mention needing to learn how to work an entirely new device—seemed like folly. People could write anywhere and any time with a writing instrument and some paper.

Sure, maybe writing by hand was slower, but it sure wouldn’t be slower until you learned how to use the machine, and that could take ages. Most people, thinking it through, thought the time savings would be pretty minimal.

Even more important to the public consideration: Typewritten text felt cold and impersonal. It also seemed far too easy to forge. If anyone could have typed that message, how can you really know the person who wrote it really did?

Yep, people loved watching typewriter demonstrations, they thought those were great entertainment, kind of like a circus act, but few people could see why they needed one of the machines for themselves.

Finally, in 1880, Remington convinced the evolving U.S. business world that standardizing the writing in documents would make the text more efficient to read, saving valuable work time. Plus, Remington argued, enough training would ensure that employees could create documents more quickly with a typewriter than they could by hand.

Truth, marketing, or both? Whatever the case, the spin did the job. The business world bought the argument and the typewriters.

Offices and homes have different measures of any machine’s value, however. At home, few people needed to standardize the writing in documents or needed to read documents all that quickly. Especially for the cost of one of those newfangled typewriting machines.

Which means most homes never had a typewriter. The ones that did only began to acquire them after 1900, when the typewriter when electric.

SO HOW DID THE TYPEWRITER TURN ICONIC?

That the typewriter never had what anyone would call widespread adoption beyond business purposes and that it got quickly supplanted by the word processor, which arrived on the market in the 1970s, surprised me.

How did it become so iconic in such a blip of a time and in so few hands?

Wonders, they never cease. This one included. No reliable source I could find posited a viable answer. Perhaps it’s just that they’re so darn pretty? (Come on, I know I’m not the only one who thinks that. Look at that photo up there!)