I wonder if the typewriter will become the record player of the literary world: a dusty old contraption that becomes fashionable among a generation of people who have always had access to newer, sleeker versions of the same thing.
But the greasy old contraption became a danger in its declining health, as frayed lines leading to the propane tank and a faulty igniter button left my wife and me with a scary alternative: placing lighted matches onto the gas jet atop the grill, which sometimes led to bright orange flames bursting from the unit, with the potential for setting our wooden deck and the rest of our home on fire.
The 110-year-old contraption is undergoing a €500m ($715m) modernisation; it drains €27m a year from the city's budget.
A man was hovering over an 80-year-old contraption called a jump iron, hot enough to mold fabrics into shapes they will be unlikely to forget.
Thus the lodge: a low, flat, brown-shingled building, and the chairlift, a forty-year-old contraption with shiny red metal slats for seats.
And what will Telegraph readers do with the old wire contraptions?
Because board employees find computers bewildering, they decided to abandon modern scanning machines for the city's primary elections this year and bring back the old mechanical contraptions first used in 1910.
But two months ago, the 6-year-old received one contraption that, unlike all the rest, has enabled him to walk on his own two feet.
Carl Djerassi, who has bright-white undulating hair, a neatly trimmed beard and an assertively charismatic manner, puts down his cane (he recently broke his hip, he explains) and removes from a leather case an old-fashioned steel contraption on which he rests his leg.
Houdini also became famous by taking himself handcuffed and dipping into water, invoking a fear of drowning — he had studied old waterboarding-like contraptions used to torture people in the middle ages, and knew the audience would be captivated by the sight.
It's the old story: humans build contraptions, and contraptions become self-conscious, which means spending hours in front of the mirror, refusing to dance at parties, and, in a climactic tantrum, cleansing all humans from the spotty face of the Earth.
