The Hermes Featherweight and the Baby Typewriters it Spawned

In my book The Magnificent Five, I rated the Hermes Featherweight one of the five greatest portable typewriters ever made.After receiving a Hermes Featherweight advertising leaflet from the US yesterday, I got my Featherweight out, put a fresh ribbon in, and … WOW!!!

I knew immediately the claim I had made in my book was far from exaggerated.

The Featherweight, I am happy to accept, is the work of Giuseppe Prezioso (above), who was born in 1897 in Taverna, a small village in the Abruzzi. He studied mechanical engineering in Milan and worked at Marelli, a large electrical appliance factory.
After the First World War, Prezioso began to specialise on typewriters and became technical director at the Oliver typewriter factory. In 1932 he joined E. Paillard and Co in Yverdon, Switzerland. He died in 1962 in Yverdon.

There were as many as 4.5 million of the small Hermes portable typewriter made, a number that embraces the Featherweight, the Baby in its very many guises, and the Rocket. And it covers a period of close to half a century - yet, incredibly, in that time the machine virtually remained mechanically unchanged. Paillard had every right to make this claim -

As well as in Switzerland, Babys were made under various model names in Britain, Germany, Poland, France, Italy and Brazil (in the last named by Olivetti, its last gasp).

In many ways, the story of this brilliant little typewriter, from the Featherweight of 1935 through to the Brazilian-made Baby (which doubled as the Olivetti Lettera 82) is like that of the Tippa, the demise of which I covered in a previous post. The Tippa started as a magnificent little typewriter being made in Germany but ended its day less than impressively, being made by Nakajima in Japan for Litton Industries.

For the full story of the Hermes Baby, I thoroughly recommend Georg Sommeregger’s hugely detailed page at http://typewriters.ch/collection/hermes_baby.html