If you wanted to learn how to type 75 years ago, the mere fact that you didn’t own a typewriter was no obstacle. For a mere two dollars, you could get yourself a Tuch-Rite, shown here. The Tuch-Rite was advertised in many publications, and the ad shown here appeared in Short Wave and Television magazine, August 1940.

The Tuch-Rite consisted of a cardboard typewriter keyboard, with cutouts for each letter.  Underneath each cutout was a sliding plastic piece.  The patented Tuch-Rite came with an eight-page book that promised to let you master the typewriter in no time.

The Tuch-Rite apparently held on for quite some time.  This typewriter blog shows a nicely preserved specimen from 1957.  In the 1950’s, the Tuch-Rite apparently came with a phonograph record with which the whole family could learn how to type, as a smiling mother and children are shown on the cover mastering the art of typing.

That site also includes a scan of the booklet, which comes with a stern warning not to move too quickly to a real typewriter:  “Do not attempt to practice on a typewriter until you have mastered the TUCH-RITE lesson completely.  Remember that TUCH-RITE is your learning instrument; the typewriter is your writing instrument.”

And sure enough, the Tuch-Rite is patented, as US Patent 2141747, which lists the inventor as Philip S. Gross.

I doubt if there’s much of a market for the Tuch-Rite these days, since almost everyone has a box full of old keyboards in their garage.   But cardboard technology did not end with the Tuch-Rite.  In a future post, we’ll take a look at the CARDIAC cardboard computer.

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