An old man sits at his desk and presses the letters S, U, N, D, A and Y on a typewriter keyboard and the word "SUNDAY" appears on a sheet of paper attached to it. His old machine makes a clackety-clack-clack sound.
He types many words and the carriage lifts up with a distinct clink-clank when the Shift key is employed, and then there is the ping of the bell warning him that he is nearing the end of the line.
He uses his left hand and swipes at the carriage return level, causing a ziiiiip noise as he pushes the carriage back to the starting position.
Finally, looking unhappy with the content, he removes the paper from the carriage and throws it in a bin full of crumpled paper.
It is a rare sight to see a 70-year-old man using a manual typewriter to write a novel, as most of us in modern Thai society go for computers.
Many kids have never seen or heard a typewriter before.
Dating back to 1876, the typewriter first came to Siam when an ad appeared in Siam Weekly.
This was over a century after the world's first typewriter was invented and patented by Henry Mill in England in 1714.
But a typewriter with a Thai keyboard was not available in the country until 1892, during the reign of King Rama V. The idea came from Edwin McFarland, who worked as a private secretary to the education minister, HRH Damrong Rajanubhab.
McFarland invented the first Thai typewriter with Smith Premier, a US typewriter maker. Its keyboard had seven rows of Thai characters under a fixed-carriage system.
Two characters, Khor Khuat and Kor Kon, dead consonants with sounds duplicated by other letters, were dropped from the keyboard.
Six years later, the McFarland family opened the Smith Premier Store in Bangkok's Wang Burapha area and began selling Thai typewriters to the public.
Eventually, US-based Remington bought the patent rights from Smith Premier. Remington improved the Thai typewriter with a sliding, shifting carriage and four-row keyboard.
In 1932, Suwanprasert Kedmanee, a Thai working for Remington in Thailand, modified the keyboard to have a faster typing speed and make it easier to use.
The Kedmanee keyboard layout was named after Suwanprasert, and it has been used since then and applied to computer keyboards in the modern era. Suttiporn Chatviriyatam, 60, who owns a small electronics shop in the busy Khlong Thom area near Chinatown, says he used to work at Wittayakom, an importer of Remington typewriters, and his major orders came from government agencies.
He recalls most typewriters used in Thailand in the old days were from the US and included the Royal, Underwood and Remington brands, while Britain's Imperial and Germany's Olympia were prominent as well.
Manual typewriters, formerly the most important equipment for office workers around the world, became old-fashioned as people shifted to using computers.
The world's last typewriter maker, Godrej and Boyce of Mumbai, India, finally closed in May 2011.
Today, the new generation can see and learn about manual typewriters at many museums across the country.
Some people collect typewriters because they fall in love with their typewriting sound, while some just like their mechanical charm.
