[Deathwatch] Martin Tytell, Typewriter Wizard, 94

[Deathwatch Central]

September 12, 2008
Martin K. Tytell, Typewriter Wizard, Dies at 94
By BRUCE WEBER

Martin Tytell, whose unmatched knowledge of typewriters was a boon to
American spies during World War II, a tool for the defense lawyers for
Alger Hiss, and a necessity for literary luminaries and perhaps tens of
thousands of everyday scriveners who asked him to keep their Royals,
Underwoods, Olivettis (and their computer-resistant pride) intact, died
on Thursday in the Bronx. He was 94.

The cause was cancer, said Pearl Tytell, his wife of 65 years. She said
that her husband also had Alzheimer’s disease.

When he retired in 2000, Mr. Tytell had practiced his recently
vanishing craft for 70 years. For most of that time, he rented,
repaired, rebuilt, reconfigured and restored typewriters in a
second-floor shop at 116 Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, where a sign
advertised “Psychoanalysis for Your Typewriter.”

There, at the Tytell Typewriter Company, he often worked seven days a
week wearing a white lab coat and a bow tie, catering to customers like
the writers Dorothy Parker and Richard Condon, the newsmen David
Brinkley and Harrison Salisbury, and the political opponents Dwight D.
Eisenhower and Adlai E. Stevenson. Letters addressed only to “Mr.
Typewriter, New York” arrived there, too.

Mr. Tytell worked on typewriters that could reproduce dozens of
different alphabets appropriate for as many as 145 different languages
and dialects — including Farsi and Serbo-Croatian, Thai and Korean,
Coptic and Sanskrit, and ancient and modern Greek. He often said that
he kept 2 million typefaces in stock.

He made a hieroglyphics typewriter for a museum curator, and
typewriters with musical notes for musicians. He adapted keyboards for
amputees and other wounded veterans. He invented a reverse-carriage
device that enabled him to work in right-to-left languages like Arabic
and Hebrew. An error he made on a Burmese typewriter, inserting a
character upside down, became a standard, even in Burma.

Martin Kenneth Tytell was born on Dec. 20, 1913, the next-to-last of 10
children whose Russian Jewish immigrant parents lived on the Lower East
Side of Manhattan. Eventually, going to school mostly at night, he
earned a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University and an M.B.A.
from New York University.

But as a boy he worked in a hardware store, carrying a screwdriver
everywhere, and one day in school he got himself excused from gym class
by volunteering to answer the telephone in a nearby office. Sitting on
a desk was an Underwood typewriter, which he took apart. The man who
came to fix it gave him his first lesson in typewriter repair. Before
he was out of high school he had the typewriter-maintenance account for
Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.

In 1943, a contraband shipment that included 100 Siamese typewriters
was seized by the federal government, and with typewriters needed by
overseas forces and typewriter producers having largely converted to
other wartime manufacturing, Mr. Tytell, then in the Army, was asked to
convert the Siamese typewriters for the Office of Strategic Services,
the World War II precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. His
machines, capable of reproducing 17 different languages, were
airdropped to O.S.S. headquarters at various war fronts.

In 1950, lawyers for Alger Hiss, the former State Department official
who had been convicted for lying to a grand jury about passing secret
information to a Communist agent, Whittaker Chambers, hired him to
prove that unlike a fingerprint, a typewriter’s writing pattern is
reproducible.

Hiss had been convicted largely because the government presented expert
testimony maintaining that the documents passed to Chambers were
written on a typewriter owned by Hiss and his wife, Priscilla. At his
sentencing, Hiss famously accused Chambers of committing “forgery by
typewriter.”

Afterward, to prepare for an appeal, Hiss’s lawyers hired Mr. Tytell to
build a typewriter whose print pattern would be indistinguishable,
flaws and all, from that of the Hisses. It took him nearly two years,
but he succeeded. His work became the foundation of Hiss’s plea,
ultimately unsuccessful, for a new trial and, after his release from
prison in 1954, of the debate over his guilt, which goes on to this
day. Hiss died in 1996.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Tytell is survived by a daughter, Pamela,
of Paris, and a son, Peter, of Manhattan. Peter Tytell, who closed the
store about a year after his father retired, is a forensic document
examiner who frequently testifies in criminal trials, a natural
offshoot of the family business. Mrs. Tytell said on Thursday that she
had met her husband in 1938 when he went to an office she was managing
and sold her a typewriter.

“And he said, ‘Come work for me, and I’ll marry you,’ ” Mrs. Tytell
recalled. “And I said, ‘That’s no inducement.’ ”

Mr. Tytell was proud of the rarity of his expertise, and relished the
eccentric nature of his business. “We don’t get normal people here,” he
said of his shop. And he was aware that his connection to the
typewriter bordered on love.

“I’m 83 years old and I just signed a 10-year lease on this office; I’m
an optimist, obviously,” Mr. Tytell told the writer Ian Frazier in a
1997 article in The Atlantic Monthly, commenting on the likelihood that
typewriters weren’t going to last in the world much longer. “I hope
they do survive — manual typewriters are where my heart is. They’re
what keep me alive.”


Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary