In the 1890s, Ramasamy Pillai, a Tamil entrepreneur, acquired two printing machines manufactured in Denmark and London to set up a private press. If he foresaw these machines, along with his press, lasting over a century and still being fully functional, he must have been quite the visionary.
Tharagampadi, a coastal town in Tamil Nadu's Mayiladuthurai district, houses these 133-year-old hand-operated printing machines. The Pillai family has kept, operated and maintained these machines for over a century. The printing press uses wooden blocks and requires no electricity. Although they own modern offset machines as well to serve customers with a smaller time constraint, they are dedicated to preserving the old-fashioned methods.
It comes as no surprise that historians and museums are ready to pay a hefty sum for this piece of history, but the family who sees these machines as ones that gave them life has too much of an emotional attachment to let them go.
