Typewriters sold

As bald eagle nesting pairs in the United States recovered from near-extinction to over 30,000 pairs, typewriter sales did the opposite: they quietly declined toward zero with the dignity of a medium that knew its time had passed. The negative correlation of -0.97 suggests that every new eagle nest corresponds to the retirement of several Remingtons. Conservationists and typewriter collectors have yet to formally acknowledge this relationship, but the data is patient.

This is a clean negative correlation between a conservation success story and a technological extinction event, both playing out across the same 2005-2021 window. Bald eagle recovery has been one of the great US conservation achievements, with nesting pairs growing steadily following the 1972 DDT ban and 1973 Endangered Species Act protections. Typewriter sales, meanwhile, declined from a small but meaningful market to near-irrelevance as digital word processing completed its replacement of physical typing. One line trends up through deliberate human intervention; the other trends down through deliberate human preference.

Not all correlations point in the same direction, and negative correlations are no less arbitrary than positive ones. The bald eagle did not kill the typewriter, but it is worth appreciating how neatly their diverging trajectories fill a chart.