#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

Events Archive

XXXth Annual Scientific Conference with International Participation “History. Archeology. Museology” held online

Chișinău, October 29-30, 2020

The annual scientific conference held by the National Museum of History of Moldova over the years has turned into a prestigious forum that brings together famous historians, archaeologists and museographers from the country and abroad. This year's conference communications featured thematic diversity, new methodological approaches, and interdisciplinary research. A significant part of the communications was based on the results of new archaeological investigations, the study of original archival sources, offering new interpretations of known sources.

The conference brought together over 90 participants from 10 countries: Moldova, Romania, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, France, Tajikistan, Lithuania, Georgia, and the Russian Federation.

During the two days of the conference, 65 communications of researchers from different institutions were heard: from museums (Moldova, Ukraine, Romania, Russian Federation): the National Museum of History of Moldova, the National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History, the Odessa Museum of Archeology (Ukraine), the Moldova National Museum Complex Iaşi (Romania), the Arad Museum Complex, the Vasile Goldiş Western University (Arad), the Kuskovo Museum (Moscow), the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences; from universities (Moldova, Germany, Russian Federation, Romania, Poland, France, Georgia): the Moldova State University, the Ion Creangă State University, Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), the Southern Federal University in Rostov-on-Don (Russian Federation), the Wallachia University of Târgovişte (Romania), Université Sorbonne, Paris (France), the University of Bucharest, the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi, the Jagiellonian University, Kraków (Poland), the West University of Timişoara, the Tbilisi State University (Georgia), the Don State Technical University, Rostov-on-Don (Russian Federation), the St. Petersburg University of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia (Russian Federation), the Saint Petersburg State University (Russian Federation), and other academic institutions (Moldova, Russian Federation, Romania, Lithuania, Tajikistan: the Institute of History of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Research, the Institute of Archeology of the Romanian Academy Iaşi Branch), the Olga Necrasov Center for Anthropological Research of the Romanian Academy (Iaşi Branch) (Romania), the Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Russian Federation), the N.N. Miklouho-Maclay Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow), the Lithuanian Institute of History, Vilnius (Lithuania), the Faculty of Philosophy of the Oryol State University (Russian Federation), the A. Donish Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan, the Center for Written Heritage of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tajikistan, the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow, Russia), the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow, Russia). The full program of the conference can be found here.

We express our gratitude to all the participants of this conference.