The typewriter has been relegated to the dustbin of history

The last ever manual typewriter has come off the assembly line. The sole remaining maker Godrej and Boyce ceased production and closed its factory in Mumbai, India. No hack however hard-bitten will not have felt a small pang of nostalgia. It is many years now since most newspapermen have slipped a piece of paper into a typewriter’s roll or inadvertently stained their fingers with its ribbon ink and yet the machine has remained, at least while it was still in production, a spiritual part of our make-up. It was what the Tommy gun was to the gangster: an unofficial badge of office. The picture of a scribbler at his machine, from Ernest Hemingway to the Daily Express’s own Frederick Forsyth, remains a visual cliché. Its clattering noise is the singular sound of the 20th century office while its ring for the carriage return can be recollected exactly by anyone over the age of 40.

The last ever manual typewriter has come off the assembly line

And now it has been relegated to the dustbin of history. “There was not enough demand to keep the factory going,” said the general manager of Godrej and Boyce. “We now have only 200 English models left for sale and that will be the end. It is a very sad day.” But while journalists mourn the final tap of the machine that built so many of their careers and ruined others – one hack I knew was fired for chucking his typewriter at the head of a colleague, which missed and instead smashed through the second floor window into Fleet Street – it is perhaps women who should also dab a moist eye at its final demise.

The typewriter allowed many women to enter the workplace for the first time. In 1901 there were 166,000 female clerks, 50 years earlier there had been none. The new employees (called type-writers rather than clerks) were accused of stealing jobs from men, depressing wages and sexually tempting the boss but that said the mechanical wordsmith did more for female emancipation than any number of suffragettes falling under racehorses. It was the American newspaperman Christopher Scholes who invented the first modern typewriter in 1868, although the idea of a writing machine “for impressing or transcribing of letters one after the other” had been patented by Englishman Henry Mill 150 years earlier.

Since Mill there had been the typo-writer and the Hansen writing ball, a bronze half sphere covered with keys. But it was Scholes’ typewriter, which typed only in capital letters, that was truly revolutionary. Most early typewriter keys jammed if they were used by a quick typist because the letters that were commonly used were too close together. Scholes and his business associate James Densmore suggested splitting up the keys to solve the problem and came up with the QWERTY keyboard, or universal keyboard as it is sometimes known. It has been with us ever since. It is still the keyboard on all English language computers and mobile phones even though there is no necessity for it any more.

The computer has now seen off the typewriter as surely as the wristwatch did for the sundial but there are still enthusiasts. Freddie Forsyth for example still uses a typewriter for his novels and columns. “I like to see black words on white paper rolling up in front of my eyes,” he says. And he still has the steelcased portable he used as a foreign correspondent in the Sixties. “It had a crease across the lid, which was done by a bullet in Biafra. It didn’t need power, it didn’t need batteries and it didn’t need recharging.” Claire Askew, a 25-year-old poet, also admits that she writes on and collects typewriters.

“It’s part of my creative process,” she says. “It’s a nice thing that people can respect old technology and are still interested in fiddling around with it. The computer and typewriter can exist happily alongside each other.” But now that co-existence will have to be with a second-hand typewriter. The machine that was the unsung star of films such as All The Presidents Men and Nine To Five, the mechanical device that banged out the greatest works of 20th-century fiction and was the instrument that brought the news to the breakfast table is no more.