Last week, while rummaging through some old papers, I came across a document I had typed more than forty years ago. It was on onion-skin paper, complete with a few typos corrected by hand above the lines. Instantly, I was transported back to the moment I received my first portable typewriter as a bar mitzvah gift—a sturdy little machine that helped me through countless papers in high school and college.

Our grandchildren have probably never even seen a typewriter. But for me—and for many in my generation—it was an indispensable tool, despite what we would now consider its many limitations.

There was a time when writing was unmistakably physical. Words didn’t simply appear on a screen; they were struck into existence. Each letter required intention, pressure, and commitment. The typewriter demanded that you mean what you wrote, because once a key hit the ribbon, the page remembered it forever.

Correspondence was slower then, but it was also more deliberate. You didn’t dash off a note and hit “send.” You sat down. You rolled the paper carefully into the carriage, making sure the margins were straight. You thought about your opening sentence, because mistakes were costly. White-out could mask an error, but it never truly erased it; there was always a faint scar—a reminder that writing was a human act, imperfect by nature.

The typewriter itself has a fascinating history. The first practical version was invented in the late 1860s by Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor from Wisconsin. He set out to create a machine that could........

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