Apr 26, 2011

World's last typewriter factory is selling its final batch of 500 machines

10:29 AMPrint Share By Douglas Stanglin, USA TODAY

The world's last typewriter factory is selling its final batch of 500 typewriters to concentrate on building refrigerators, ending an era that began in 1867 with the production in the USA of the world's first commercial typewriter, India's Business Standard newspaper reports.

Godrej and Boyce, an Indian company that makes the Godrej Prima, says it stopped production in 2009 and won't make any more after it unloads the final 500.

"From the early 2000s onwards, computers started dominating," Milind Dukle, the company's general manager, tells the Standard. "All the manufacturers of office typewriters stopped production, except us."

Until 2009, he says, the company produced as many as 12,000 typewriters a year, a fraction of the golden age in the 1990s when it would turn out 50,000 annually.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities ... titialskip