#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

Publications

Journal „Tyragetia"

vol. V [XX], nr. 2

The first manifest of 1864 against a possible unification of Bessarabia with Romania

ISSN 1857-0240
E-ISSN 2537-6330

Ion Varta

The first manifest of 1864 against a possible unification of Bessarabia with Romania

Tyragetia, serie nouă, vol. V [XX], nr. 2, Istorie. Muzeologie

Ioan Dabija can be considered rather famous ﬁgure in the history of Bessarabia under Russian occupation. He participated in the events of prime importance for this Prut-Dniester province as well as for destinies of the Romanian principalities. In 1848, being a graduate of the Theological Seminary from Chisinau, he joined the camp ofﬁce of General A. Luders, the corps commander of the Russian army invaded the principalities for the suppression of the Romanian revolution. During the military occupation of the two Romanian states I. Dabija was in Bukharest, performing various functions in the command of the Russian army of occupation, including the post of secretary of the governor of Wallachia.

After the withdrawal of Russian troops from the principalities in 1851 he performed a number of administrative functions in Bessarabia.

In 1853 I. Dabija was employed again in the Russian army service, in the ofﬁce of Field-Marshal V. Gorchakov, the commander of the Russian expeditionary corps invaded Moldova and Wallachia during the Crimean War. At the end of the new episode of Russian military presence in the Romanian territory on the right bank of Prut, back in Bessarabia, he worked for a short time at the county administration.

After the Crimean War Ioan Dabija for many years was a member of the joint Russian-Moldavian, and later – the Russian-Romanian commission responsible for issues of ownerships in the three southern counties of Bessarabia which had been returned to the Principality of Moldova. In the period of membership in the commission he lived in Bucharest. Upon his return to Bessarabia he held various positions in the administration of the province. For ten years I. Dabija sought permission of the Russian authorities to publish a periodical in the Romanian language – a magazine or newspaper – to debate with opponents of Russia from the Romanian principalities. The text given below is a sample of his polemics with those “dangerous” for Russian interests in the Romanian lands.

And the last. Several years ago we had hypothesized that Ioan Dabija could be the author of the novel “Aglaia”, the manuscript of which had been discovered by us in the late 1980-s in the Moscow archives. Subsequently, the novel sustained two editions of the “Arc” Publishing House and was recognized by literary historian and critic Nicolae Manilescu “the best of the ﬁrst ten novels written in the Romanian space”. Thus, in this case, we may have to do with one still unrecognized classic of the Romanian literature.