Schweitzer and Gramercy Typewriter Co. have experienced much of that evolution firsthand. In 1932, Paul’s father, Abraham, found work during the Great Depression in what was considered at the time to be a growing business. At 18, he began learning the trade, then struck out on his own.

“He was busy all the time,” Schweitzer said of his father. “You figure that if you look around the city of New York, every desk in every office in the city had a typewriter.”

From the age of five, Schweitzer said he spent evenings at home working on machines with his father at a workbench and watched as his father manufactured typewriter ribbons in the basement. By 10, Schweitzer was spooling ribbons and taking off cover plates, from the start deriving a sense of satisfaction from taking the gadgets apart and puzzling them back together again. Schweitzer joined his father in the trade full-time in 1959.

In the early decades of the business, Abraham relied on monthly contracts where he would go into an office, clean the keys, change the ribbons and do basic repairs. Competition for clients was thick, and he landed some single accounts that put 50, 100 or 300 machines in his care. As the years went on, some typewriters translated to electric machines, and a monthly contract became a quarterly one, then many vanished.

Today, the steampunk, technological dodo may enter someone’s life at the beginning (maternity wards) or the end (funeral homes). Typewriters are still used by a handful of accounting and law firms and some government agencies to fill in specific forms. Schweitzer said he fields calls from elderly people around the country who want to keep their machines in form or restore one found in a basement. This week, a Corona to Tennessee. Some machines are orphans, fixed up but never retrieved by their owners. After 90 days, Schweitzer tells his customers, the machines go up for sale.

In addition to repair, Schweitzer restores and sells machines, a shelf of them gleaming as though fresh from the Sears Catalog. In the last five years, he said they have proven to be a draw for younger customers.

“They have their iPhones, they have their iPads, they have their computers,” he said. “But they still want a typewriter. If you want to concentrate, if you want to write in your own mind, write with a typewriter. You see the words hit the paper. There’s no distractions.”