It turns out that the earliest typewriters were “blindwriters,” like the 1876 Sholes & Glidden No. 1 that is the oldest item in “Click! Clack! Ding!” A large and ornate cousin of the sewing machine, the Sholes & Glidden did not permit the typist to see the surface of the paper, which was imprinted — uppercase only — from below. (The operator could enjoy the golden garlands and rosy blossoms delicately painted on the machine’s black casing, however.) As for the specimens without keyboards, they were the very first portables. Known as “index” typewriters, they work with a pointer-like device that selects a letter and another that presses it into the paper — a perfect machine for the two-finger typist.

These early technologies soon gave way to improvements — uppercase and lowercase in the Smith-Premier No. 1 and the Bar-Lock No. 2; “visible” typing in the Williams No. 4 and the Meiselbach Sholes Visible. “Click! Clack! Ding!” conveys some of the history and significance of the typewriters on view, selected from the nearly 300 owned by a Connecticut collector, Greg Fudacz. There is another Connecticut connection as well: Hartford, the home base for Royal and Underwood, was once called “the typewriter capital of the world.” Other brands came from other towns, including Bridgeport, Derby, Middletown, New Haven and Waterbury.

But the show is not about the importance of the typewriter industry to Connecticut, or for that matter to anywhere else. It’s not even strictly about the typewriter as an example of design, although “Click! Clack! Ding!” certainly makes the case for the visual appeal of these 21 artifacts, whether ornamented or pristinely functional. The spidery keyboard of the Blickensderfer No. 6, manufactured in Stamford in 1911, has something of the sleek beauty of a suspension bridge; the curving elegance of the 1884 Hammond No. 1 calls to mind a miniature grand piano; and the 1888 Art Nouveau furbelows atop the Bar-Lock No. 1B have a wedding-cake exuberance. Even the plainer typewriters from the 1950s display a certain flair — a gold-plated Royal like the one Ian Fleming bought for $174, a snappy red Underwood that might have pleased Miss Moneypenny.

Yet what is most intriguing in these machines is the story they tell about the lurching, incremental way in which technology progresses. The Sholes & Glidden No. 1 was a flawed, primitive machine, but its qwerty keyboard is the one that stuck. The 1906 Chicago Model 1 looks less antique than the 1922 Noiseless Portable. And you can’t help wondering what today’s computers would look like if the Odell No. 2, with its circular base and saw-tooth bar of letters, had won out in the turn-of-the-century marketplace for writing machines.