I looked around, but there was nothing. No plaque. No sign. No hint of the significance of where I was. No other people as excited as I was at that very moment. Nothing. Just a weirdly shaped building hosting a kindergarten, right where Gutenbergstrasse met Wilhelm Haas-Weg. A nearby cow licked my camera lens as if it was something it’s been practicing for months, looked at me with an expression just waiting to be anthropomorphized into pity, and eventually slowly walked away.
Then again, what did I expect? It’d feel foolish to celebrate air. Or electricity. Or gravity. And like all of these things, it seemed to be everywhere. From health forms to iPhone screens. From airlines logos to train station signs. From British pop album covers of the 1980s to that atrocious, stillborn GAP logo. From countless Beatles T-shirt parodies to, albeit in a somewhat mutilated form, this very computer screen.
I always thought—at that funny intersection in my brain where the historian me meets the kid that refuses to grow up—that equipped with a time machine, I’d skip all the splashy, touristy chronodestinations, and visit boring events in unremarkable places that only grew in significance over time. I’d watch Zworykin perfecting the prototypes of first television sets. Harry Beck sketching the map of London’s Underground. John Snow painstakingly counting cholera incidents in 19th-century Soho.
And I’d be right where I was standing too, in a little town called Münchenstein, one hour away from Zürich. Except I’d rewind time to half a century ago, when that same weirdly shaped building served a very different purpose. And there I would see Max Miedinger, hunched over a table, surrounded by sheets of paper, pencil in his hand, sketching shapes that would be revered and ridiculed in the years to come. Shapes eventually replicated in numbers cumulatively rivaling astronomical figures. Shapes designed to be as neutral as inhumanly possible, but still infused with little tidbits of Max’s personality.
But in the present day, on a beautiful, quiet, sunny October Sunday, there was nothing. No hints left of that old type foundry. No plaque. No sign. Just a kindergarten and two cows, one definitely more friendly than the other.
I slowly walked back to the station, more puzzled than disappointed. It was just as I was about to hop on the train that I noticed a jumble of huge letters, painted orange and gray on a couple of concrete pillars supporting the viaduct. Just the letters, without any further explanation. It was easy to realize they spelled Münchenstein, but I was certain the reason they were there to begin with was lost on most people who passed it by and noticed every day.
This was the perfect ending of my little pilgrimage. It wasn’t just that someone else cared enough about that one typeface to pay it homage in a form both spectacular and reserved at the same time. It was also the fact that in the world drenched in Helvetica, 53 years after it was born it still had a capacity—as a wink of an eye from one designer to another—to surprise and delight me.