Ubiquity Kills Off The Portables
Most portable desks gradually disappeared during the 19th century, as useful day-to-day writing tools. The introduction of mass literacy during that period, the invention of cheaper and more efficient writing implements, and the mass production of furniture made most portable desks redundant.
With the advent of clean writing surfaces in every home or place of business and of the small and clean pocket fountain pen and the pencil, a gentleman did not need to include a lap desk in his luggage. There was no need for a container for the quill, the blotter, and the sand tray or for the writing surface this container could offer. Ships eventually were constructed with built-in desks, making the portable desk obsolete in maritime environments.
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Famous quotes containing the word kills:
“Politicians—power itself—are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives.... One should be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abjectness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)