Royal Typewriter Company was founded by E. B. Hess in 1904, in Hartford Connecticut. The company went through various incarnations over the years. Now owned by Olivetti, it still markets Royal, Adler-Royal and Olivetti machines, as well as a whole host of other things like PDAs (?). And – get this! – they have a [...]
The Emerson No. 3, circa 1908:
[Photos & more info at the Virtual Typewriter Museum]
The Kanzler was produced by Kanzler Schreibmaschinen A.G. , of Germany, beginning in 1903 and ending in 1912. Designer Pail Gruetzmann put a premium on stability and speed, claiming 200 words per minute were possible on his machines.
Here she is, a beaut:
Photo & more info: Virtual Typewriter Museum.
Old typewriters, pre-1900, are a baroque bestiary of ideas and mechanisms dreams and tinkerers’ realization of the best way to get words onto a page. We forget that in order for “the way things are” to come into being, there are years of struggle and variety and failed experiments until finally the dominant winners [...]
In 1925 Remington released its Remington Electric, the first electric typewriter. The machine was a modified Remington No. 12, with a power unit supplied by North East Electric Co. It sold only 2,500 units, a small run, but they sold as quickly as they could be produced. The demand was there, the only problem was [...]
E. Remington & Sons, an arms, and later sewing machine company founded in New York in 1816, bought the patent (US. # 79,265) for a new kind of mechanical writing machine in 1867 from Densmore and Yost, who had themselves bought the patent from the inventors Christopher Scholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel Lewis. The pricetag [...]
From On Fiction:
This week, I got a present. A friend came across an old-fashioned typewriter in a yard sale, and $10 later, walked away hauling a banged up box with what she thought would be a wonderful present for me. She was right. It didn’t matter to me that not all keys worked, nor that [...]
The National is an upstrike typewriter — the typebars strike, er, upwards, towards the paper, then fall down again. This means the operator can’t see what they’re writing, hence the machines were called blind-writers, and they were the standard writing machines until the end of the 1890s. This beauty was made by the National Typewriter [...]
I think this is the most beautiful of the typewriters we’ve featured on the Book Oven blog. In any case, it’s among the most beautiful. It’s a L. C. Smith & Corona Sterling, from the 1930s. Smith-Corona (as the company came to be known) continued producing this popular model until the 1950s.
This image is from [...]
Olivetti’s Lettera 32, designed by Marcello Nizzoli for Olivetti in 1963, was a popular portable, weighing in a 5.9 kg. Of the modern typewriter makers, I don’t think anyone touches Olivetti’s classy designs.
[image by Caroline Area Man]
