#Exhibit of the Month

Manufactured in 1902 by AG vorm Siedel & Nauman in Dresden, Germany.

Dimensions: Length - 38 cm, Width - 35 cm, Height - 20 cm. Weight - 16 kg. It entered the museum collection in 1984, transferred from the National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History.

The typewriter features a standard carriage mounted on ball bearings and rollers, along with a keyboard equipped with 42 keys. These contain two complete sets of Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, punctuation marks, numbers, and mathematical symbols, enabling the typing of 126 characters. Beneath the metal casing, the type bars are arranged in a fan-like pattern, holding embossed characters and ink ribbon rollers. When the keys are pressed, the type bars strike the inked ribbon, imprinting characters onto the paper tensioned in the machine's roller system.

The side panels are elegantly decorated with refined cast-iron elements in the Art Nouveau style, displaying the brand name - "Ideal." The Polyglott model, featuring a bilingual keyboard patented in the United Kingdom by Max Klaczko from Riga, Latvia, was produced between 1902 and 1913, marking the first typewriter capable of writing in two languages. The "Ideal Polyglott" typewriter was actively sold in the Russian Empire and gained significant popularity in Poland, Bulgaria, and Serbia.
The typewriter - a mechanical device used for printing text directly onto paper - ranks among the most important inventions of the modern era, as it revolutionized communication. From the late 19th century to the early 21st century, it became an indispensable tool, widely used by writers, in offices, for business correspondence, and in private homes. The peak of typewriter sales occurred in the 1950s when the average annual sales in the United States reached 12 million units. In November 2012, the British Brother factory produced what it claimed to be the last typewriter, which was donated to the Science Museum in London.
The advent of computers, word processing software, printers, and the decreasing cost of these technologies led to the typewriter's disappearance from the mainstream market, turning it into a museum exhibit.
June 23 marks Typewriter Day, commemorating the date when American journalist and inventor Christopher Latham Sholes patented his typewriter. This day celebrates the simple yet revolutionary device that has become history, as well as the remarkable literary achievements it has enabled since 1868.

Virtual Tour

Exhibitions

“Childhood in the Gulag”

National Museum of the Union Alba Iulia

May 23 – June 30, 2023

On May 23, 2023, at the National Museum of the Union in Alba Iulia, Romania, the inauguration ceremony of the photo-documentary exhibition "Childhood in the Gulag" (curator Ludmila D. Cojocaru) took place. The exhibition presents images about the life of Bessarabian children condemned by the totalitarian-communist regime of the Moldavian SSR to deportation, starvation, Russification, indoctrination, forced excision from their own families, during the years 1940-1941 and 1944-1953.

At the opening of the event, the vice-president of the Alba Iulia County Council, Mr. Dumitru Fulea, greeted the guests and thanked the National Museum of History of Moldova and the National Museum of the Union in Alba Iulia for the joint effort in presenting the traumatic pages of the past toward a large audience. The concept of the exhibition was presented by Dr. Ludmila D. Cojocaru and Dr. Virgiliu Bîrlădeanu, relating on the actuality of the recovering, documentation and historical investigation of the testimonies of the victims of the totalitarian-communist regime in Bessarabia. The director of the National Museum of the Union Alba Iulia, Mr. Gabriel Rustoiu, referred to the prospects of bilateral cooperation regarding the dissemination of historical knowledge through museographical activities, especially among the young generation on both banks of the Prut River.

The exhibition brings together about 180 photo-documentary images, accompanied by memories and archival documents from the collections of the National History Museum of Moldova, the Edineț County Museum, the Museum of History and Ethnography in Soroca, the INIS ProMemoria Archive of the MSU, as well as from the archives of the communities memory and of the survivors of the totalitarian-communist regime in the Moldavian SSR.

The exhibition presented in Alba Iulia is a homage to the children who went through the atrocities of the totalitarian-communist regime in the USSR, as well as an action condemning the war launched by the Russian Federation against Ukraine.

The photo-documentary exhibition „Childhood in the Gulag" can be visited between May 23 - June 30, 2023, at the headquarters of the National Museum of the Union in Alba Iulia (str. Mihai Viteazul 12-14, mun. Alba Iulia, Romania).

The Opening of the photo-documentary exhibition „Childhood in the Gulag" was organized within the project „Edification of a European culture of memory by promoting intergenerational communication and cross-border cooperation. Exchange and implementation of the best practices between Lithuania and Moldova", with the support of the „The Development Cooperation and Democracy Promotion Programme" of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania.

#Exhibit of the Month

"Ideal" Mechanical Typewriter, Model A Polyglott

“Childhood in the Gulag”

National Museum of the Union Alba Iulia

May 23 – June 30, 2023

#Exhibit of the Month