Journalists of a certain age all over the world are feeling a pang or two of nostalgia today, with the news that the last ever manual typewriter has been made in a factory in India.
Godrej and Boyce, the last company to make manual typewriters, has closed its plant in Mumbai, India, leaving the typewriter officially a product of the past.
"We are not getting many orders now," general manager Milind Dukle told India's Business Standard newspaper. "From the early 2000s onwards, computers started dominating. All the manufacturers of office typewriters stopped production, except us.
"Till 2009, we used to produce 10,000 to 12,000 machines a year. But this might be the last chance for typewriter lovers. Now, our primary market is among the defence agencies, courts and government offices," he said.
Responding to the Daily Mail’s version of this story, however, Justin Rorhlich, writing for Minyanville, quotes Ed Michael, general manager of sales at Moonachie, New Jersey-based Swintec: "We have manufacturers making typewriters for us in China, Japan, Indonesia."
Apparently one of Swintec’s major customers is the prison service across the United States. “We have contracts with correctional facilities in 43 states to supply clear typewriters for inmates so they can’t hide contraband inside them,” Michael told Minyanville.
The typewriter per se may not be as dead as we thought—but a closer inspection of Swintec’s product offering shows them to be electronic, not manual typewriters, so for the purposes of this story, I don’t think they count. They don’t make the same noise.
And the Godrej Group has plenty of other things going for it. One of India’s largest conglomerates, it has interests in real estate, FMCG, industrial engineering, appliances, furniture, security and agri care, to name but a few.
