#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.

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Exhibitions

"Memory of an Undeclared War" (2012)

On March 2, 1992, when the President of the Republic of Moldova Mircea Snegur was speaking at the plenary session of UN General Assembly the speech of thanks on the occasion of receipt of Moldova to the United Nations, groups of guardsmen and Cossacks armed with submachine guns and armored cars stormed the district police department headquarters at Dubăsari. The first victims were killed. To the south, in Vulcănești, another armed group attacked the police district headquarters. The same happens simultaneously to Bender, Grigoriopol, and Cocieri... Mentions and more detailed reviews of those dramatic events can be found in various sources: albums, books, collections of documents, memoirs, newspaper accounts. The commemorative exhibition "Memory of an Undeclared War" offers us a photo-documentary chronicle of this war.

It was conceived as a tribute to all participants in the struggle to protect the integrity and independence of the Republic of Moldova and, above all, those who sacrificed their lives for the freedom of the motherland. The exhibition brings together over 250 museum objects: photographic images, fragments of arms and ammunition collected from the battlefield, documents and personal objects of the combatants fallen in the fighting on the Dniester, books and newspapers that depict cruel realities of the war.

Stunning images made by photographers N. Pojoga, M. Venger, T. Iovu, A. Mardare, S. Voronin, T. Anghel and some others reflect the ordeal the defenders of Moldova have gone through in the battles of Dubăsari and Tighina, on the plateaus of Cocieri and Coșnița, they immortalized heroism and courage of the Moldavian policemen and volunteers and showed hardships and humiliations of the war, destroyed families, homes and villages in ruins, faces of women and children distorted with pain of loss of those they loved.

A separate section of the exhibition is dedicated to police officers killed in the fighting for the independence and integrity of the Republic of Moldova.

The content of the exhibition is complemented by a collection of papers and memoirs about the armed conflict on the Dniester signed by researchers, participants and eyewitnesses of the events: Valentina Ursu, Ilie Ilașcu, Mircea Radu Iacoban, General Ion Costaș, Colonel Anatol Munteanu, Anatolie Moraru, Nicolae Ciubotaru, Gh. Budeanu, Vlad Grecu, and others.

The exhibition "Memory of an Undeclared War" is organized in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the armed conflict on the Dniester and is dedicated to all defenders of the integrity and independence of the Republic of Moldova.

#Exhibit of the Month

"Ideal" Mechanical Typewriter, Model A Polyglott

"Memory of an Undeclared War" (2012)

#Exhibit of the Month