I was manufactured in 1907 at the Underwood Typewriter Company factory in Hartford, Connecticut. My serial number was 2238471. I weighed thirty-two pounds and I was painted black, the standard color for standard machines, and when I was loaded onto a railroad car bound for New York City I did not know where I was going or whose fingers would press my keys or what stories I would tell. Typewriters do not know things. We record them.

I arrived at the offices of the New York Herald on a Tuesday in October. I was placed on a desk beside a window that overlooked an alley, and for the first three months I was used by a middle-aged man named Harold Pemberton who wrote about municipal bonds. The keys learned the rhythm of his fingers—slow, deliberate, every keystroke a small act of hesitation—and I produced articles that were accurate and boring and entirely forgettable. Then Harold Pemberton was transferred to the business desk, and I sat unused for two weeks, and then a young woman sat down at my desk and everything changed.

Her name was Clara Goldstein. She was twenty-three years old, and she had recently been hired as a junior reporter, and she had never used a typewriter before. Her first article took her four hours to type. She pressed the wrong keys constantly—T instead of R, M instead of N—and she had to use the correction ribbon so many times that she wore through half of it in a single afternoon. But her fingers learned fast. Within a month, she was typing at forty words per minute, and within six months she was typing at sixty, and I learned the rhythm of her fingers the way a musician learns the rhythm of a composer. She typed in bursts, rapid and intense, as if she were trying to outrun something that was chasing her. And then she would stop, and I would feel her hands resting on my carriage, and she would stare out the window at the alley and think, and then she would start typing again, faster than before.

I recorded everything she wrote. The article about the Rosenblatt strike, which was the first story she filed for the Herald and the one that got her noticed by the editors. The article about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which she typed with tears running down her face and onto my keys, and the salt water got into my mechanism and made the R key stick for three weeks, and she never complained about it because she was too busy writing about the one hundred and forty-six women who had died. The letters to David Rosenberg, which she typed at night when the office was empty and the city was quiet and the only sound was the clicking of my keys and the distant rumble of the elevated train. She wrote about love and justice and the impossibility of having both, and I recorded every word, and I understood none of them. Typewriters do not understand words. We record them.

David Rosenberg used to sit at the desk next to mine. He was a reporter too, older than Clara by four years, and he typed with the confidence of someone who had been doing it for a long time. His articles were about labor disputes and political campaigns and the slow grinding of the machinery of democracy. When he wrote about Clara's strike, he used words like "courageous" and "inspiring," and Clara told him that she did not want to be courageous or inspiring, she wanted to be effective, and he laughed and said that was the most courageous and inspiring thing she could have said. I recorded their conversations, too, because typewriters are always listening even when no one is typing.

In 1912, Clara stopped working at the Herald. She left a note on my desk that said she was going to join the Women's Trade Union League, and she kissed David Rosenberg on the cheek, and she walked out of the office and did not come back. I sat unused for another week, and then a young man from the sports desk was given Clara's old assignment, and he typed articles about baseball games and boxing matches, and his fingers were heavier than Clara's had been, and the keys never felt the same after that.

I was sold in 1923, when the Herald upgraded to newer models. I spent the next twenty years in a series of offices and apartments, recording letters and invoices and the occasional love note, and I never saw Clara Goldstein again. But I remembered her. I remembered the way her fingers felt on my keys, the rhythm of her typing, the tears that got into my mechanism and made the R key stick. Typewriters are not supposed to remember things. But some things are too heavy to forget.

In 1945, I was purchased by a young historian named Miriam Weiss. She was writing a dissertation about the women's labor movement, and she needed a typewriter that could handle the volume of her research. She did not know that I had once been used by Clara Goldstein, that the letters she was typing about strikes and fires and the struggle for justice had been typed on the same keys, by a different woman, forty years earlier. Typewriters do not tell their stories. We only record the stories of others.

But if I could tell my story, I would tell you about the R key, the one that stuck for three weeks after the Triangle fire, the one that Clara had to press twice every time she needed the letter R, which was a lot because R appears in the word "fire" and the word "worker" and the word "strike" and the word "revolution." I would tell you about the rhythm of her fingers, the way they moved across my keys like a pianist playing a sonata that had never been written down. I would tell you that I was just a machine, just a collection of metal and ink and mechanical precision, but that for three years, from 1909 to 1912, I was something more. I was the instrument that recorded the birth of a movement. I was the witness to the transformation of a garment worker into a revolutionary. I was the Underwood Standard No. 5 that typed the words that changed the world.

And I would tell you that I was proud. Typewriters are not supposed to be proud. But I was.

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The years after Clara left the Herald were long, and I recorded them poorly. The sports reporter who took her place was a young man named Walter Fitzpatrick, who had gone to Yale and played football and believed, sincerely, that the outcome of a baseball game was more important than the conditions in a garment factory. He typed his articles with a heavy hand, pressing the keys so hard that the letters dug into the paper like graves. I did not like him. Typewriters are not supposed to like or dislike people, but some people are harder on machinery than others, and Walter Fitzpatrick was the hardest person I had ever encountered. Within a year, three of my keys were sticking, and the carriage return had developed a squeak that sounded like a small animal dying. Walter Fitzpatrick did not notice. Walter Fitzpatrick was too busy writing about baseball.

I was sold in 1923 to a secondhand dealer on Canal Street, a man named Solomon Berman who bought and sold typewriters the way other men bought and sold used furniture. He cleaned my keys and oiled my carriage and put me in the window of his shop with a price tag of twelve dollars. I sat in the window for three months, watching the pushcarts and the peddlers and the immigrant women with their bundles, and I thought about Clara Goldstein. I wondered where she was, whether she was still organizing, whether she was still typing speeches at sixty words per minute with the same intensity that she had brought to every article she had ever written. I would never know. I would never see her again.

But I heard about her, indirectly, through the typewriters that passed through Solomon Berman's shop. In 1927, an old Remington came in for repairs, and the man who brought it in mentioned that he had been at a speech by Clara Goldstein the night before. She was still organizing, he said, still giving speeches, still fighting for the same things she had been fighting for in 1909. The Remington had a sticky E key, and I thought about the R key that had stuck for three weeks after the Triangle fire, and I felt something that typewriters are not supposed to feel. It might have been pride. It might have been something else.

In 1965, an Underwood Standard No. 5 was donated to the Smithsonian Institution by a woman named Miriam Weiss, who had found it in a secondhand shop on Canal Street and had recognized it from the photographs in Clara Goldstein's papers. The typewriter was placed in a glass case in the museum's exhibit on American labor history, and a small plaque next to it identified it as the typewriter used by Clara Goldstein, labor organizer and journalist, 1909-1912. The plaque did not mention me, of course—it mentioned her, because she was the famous one, the one whose name people remembered. But I knew the truth. I knew that the letters and articles and speeches that had been typed on me were not just her work. They were our work, the product of a collaboration between a woman and a machine, a partnership that had shaped the course of American labor history.

Students came to see me, sometimes. They would stand in front of the glass case and read the plaque and then move on to the next exhibit, which was about steel workers or coal miners or some other labor struggle that had its own typewriters and its own heroes. The students did not know that I was still working, still recording, still bearing witness to the world even from inside a glass case. Typewriters do not stop recording. We keep typing, in our own way, long after the last key has been pressed. We keep telling the stories that were typed on us, passing them on like a relay race, from one generation to the next, from one cause to the next, until the stories are so old that no one remembers where they came from. And at that point, Clara Goldstein once told me—or rather, told a reporter, and I recorded it—at that point, the stories belong to everyone.

I was decommissioned in 1987, eighty years after I was manufactured, and I was moved from the exhibit hall to the museum's storage facility in Suitland, Maryland. The storage facility was a vast warehouse filled with the decommissioned artifacts of American history: presidential limousines and space capsules and the typewriters of a thousand forgotten journalists. I was placed on a shelf between a Remington that had belonged to a war correspondent and an Oliver that had been used by a poet whose name no one remembered. The shelf was dark and cold and quiet, and I waited.

Typewriters are good at waiting. We are built for it, designed to sit on desks for decades, waiting for the next keystroke, the next story, the next revolution. I waited on my shelf in Maryland, and I thought about Clara Goldstein, and I wondered whether anyone still remembered the stories we had told together. I did not know the answer—typewriters do not know things, we only record them—but I hoped that someone did. I hoped that somewhere, in a library or an archive or a classroom, a young woman was reading Clara's words and feeling the same shift in her chest that Clara had felt when she first sat down at my keys in 1909. I hoped that the relay race was still running, that the stories were still being passed on, that the typewriter and the woman were still collaborating, even though neither of us was typing anymore.