The Gossen Tippa: The Mighty Mouse of Typewriters

Its Rise and Fall

From a German Gem to Japanese Junk:

5 Backward Steps in 25 Short Years

1950

1955

1960

1970

1975

Paul Friedrich Karl Gossen (above, born Stargard, December 13, 1872), a businessman and electro-technology engineer, established Paul Gossen & Co K-G Fabrik elektrischer Messgeräte in Baiersdorff in 1919. The company moved to Erlangen early the next year.

There are references on other sites to Paul Gossen “working for [typewriter manufacturer] Ernst Voss after the war”. Gossen in fact had a much larger company of his own. And he died before the war ended.

Between 1939-45 his factories had been taken over to be used in the German war effort. When he died, in Nuremberg on June 30, 1942, aged 69, Gossen’s company was inherited by his widow Rosa and children Charlotte Klarner, Elisabeth Seiler and Hans Gossen, with the chief executive officers Hans Gossen (below) and Charlotte’s husband Dr Karl Klarner.

Chief designer and inventor was Erwin Pfaffenberger (born April 4, 1906), who had joined the company in 1924 as a trainee draughtsman. Klarner and Hans Gossen are in this photo taken at a launch of the Tippa:

In August 1945, the American military government allowed the Gossen company to return to its former business.

In 1939 Gossen had bought a former brush factory in the Gluckstrasse and it was in this building that in 1948 the company began planning typewriter production. The factory became known as Tippa-Werkes.

Production of the “office in a briefcase” started in 1950 and so successful was the Gossen Tippa portable typewriter that in October 1951, Gossen was churning out a typewriter every eight minutes.
The little "original" caught on fast, but in the mid-50s Gossen decided to abandon this very basic if effective design for something a little more stylish: the Pilot (also the Tippa B), with its Hermes Baby-like gull-winged ribbon covers. The "look" came at the cost of some of the original Tippa's typeability, however.

This gave the impression of a slightly larger machine, through a much broader "lipped" base, though it was not much higher, if at all. The sturdy and equally stylish Gossen case included compartments for stationery, the "necessaries" (see below) which allowed the company to promote the concept of an "office on a briefcase":

Perhaps the changes impacted on sales, as Gossen decided after just six years of making typewriters (about 100,000 in all) to once more concentrate on what it knew best. In the Autumn of 1956 the license for the Tippa was sold to Adler, although for a time it continued to be made by Gossen.

The new-look Adler Tippa won a design award in Milan in 1960 and another in Germany in 1962. It is a fine writing machine, too, and fully deserved the widespread popularity it enjoyed, rivalling the earlier Tippas.

In 1957 Grundig had taken over the Triumph typewriter brand in Nuremberg and in 1966 the Grundig-owned Triumph company took control of Adler. By the end of 1968, Triumph and Adler were fully merged and in January of the following year Litton Industries took over Triumph-Adler. That same year, Triumph-Adler, under Litton ownership, produced the bright, canary-coloured Tippa S in Holland.

Like its 1969 Olivetti rival the Valentine, the Tippa S is very pretty to look at, but as a typing machine it is a lemon, a real yellow dog. The SCM Super Ghia is superior in all regards to both.
The final step in the decline of the once-glorious Tippa was taken in Japan, where Litton took production of Adlers and Triumphs in the early 1970s. The Japanese Tippas were made by Nakajima. With supreme irony, these were branded the “Tippa De Luxe”. They aren't a patch on the original, "de luxe" or otherwise. Oh, how the once mighty mouse had fallen.

This beautiful example of an original Tippa, albeit without the silver keytops, sold for about $450 on US eBay not so long ago:

Here are Cameron's and Adwoa's Tippa Bs (Adwoa's is the Triumph):