oz.Typewriter: March 2012

A visitor called FleetCommand from Hungary found my post on “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother Typewriter” and asked about the “when and where” of his Brother Deluxe 220.

This gave me the perfect excuse to complete my post on the history of Brother typewriters. And the most interesting thing I uncovered about Brother is that, by rights, the machines should be called “Sister” – in case you're wondering, the Japanese text in the heading is supposed to read, “Oh Sister, Where Art Thou?”. But something got lost in translation, as Bill Murray might say when in Tokyo. More on that later.

In the meantime, the “where” is easy: the Brother headquarters and factory were in Horita, Mizuho Ward, Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan, where the story of Brother-Sister manual portable typewriters begins and ends.

Typewriters started being produced in the sewing and knitting machine factory there in 1961 for the US market (Webster chain store) and in 1966 a specialised typewriter plant was added at Horita, with production shifting to the new factory in 1967.

In 1986 Brother Industries opened a plant in Bartlett, Tennessee, where it manufactured 600,000 typewriters annually for the US market, and from 1989, Brother progressively transferred what had previously been Japanese production to China. But this was for electronic typewriters only: Brother had stopped making its own manual portable typewriters before then.
Any Brother manual portable typewriter you have was made in Nagoya. See below a description of Nayoga as a Brother (and Sister) city from Office Ladies-Factory Women: Life and Work at a Japanese Company by Jeannie Lo (1990).

As for the “when”, I can only quote Ryan Adney on his Remington Performer: “This Brother mechanism seems to live on in many variations and labels.” Oh so right, Magic Margin! But why single out the Performer Ryan received with such lukewarmness? Because it’s the same typewriter as my Brother Super Deluxe 1450, which, as my typecast below says, I bought on the spur of the moment, thinking to hung this tale on it.

I never knew there was such a thing as a Brother Super Deluxe 1450, or a Remington Performer, until this machine bobbed up on Australia eBay with a Buy It Now tag on it. But I’d be more than happy to bet the money I paid for this typewriter that there are still dozens of Brother manual typewriter models out there that I still haven’t yet laid my eyes on. The “little” gallery below are just some of the range that I have seen.

As FleetCommand says, his Brother Deluxe 220 (“in red, just like Vikram Shah's") also has the sticker "10 million Brother typewriters: 1961-1980". Ten million is a breathtaking number of typewriters, and within in that 10 million there would have to be at least 100 variations on a theme, probably many, many more.
I cannot put a figure on Ryan Adney's point about the number of brands and models, but I can tell you that a staggering 92 per cent of all Brother typewriters were made for export. A lot of these were, of course, relabelled, in the US (as Websters, Sears, Montgomery Wards, K-Mart, Wegefields, Remingtons etc) and Australia (Lemair-Helvetia, K-Mart etc).

And I would (with a reasonable degree of accuracy) estimate that of the 10 million made, at least 40 to 45 per cent were built to the same original Brother design, patented in the US in May 1962 by Akio Kondo, of Aichi. Kondo was working for Nihon Mishin Seizo Kabushiki Kaisha (it means Japan Sewing Machine Manufacturing Co Ltd) of Nagoya when he filed his patent application in December 1960. Earlier that year, the US Patent and Trademark Office had registered Brother as a trading name for Nihon Mishin Seizo Kabushiki Kaisha, of Nagoya, manufacturers of typewriters, sewing machines and knitting machines.

I believe Akio Kondo was the father of Shoichi Kondo (below, born 1958), a Japanese politician. Akio Kondo died on November 2, 2007.

So, FleetCommand, the upshot of all this is that I have to confess nobody – with the possible exception of Brother itself – knows exactly “when”, since nobody has attempted to keep track of the serial numbers for the massive total of Brother typewriters produced since 1973.

Up to that point, some sort of record had been maintained, starting with a guide to prefixes based on A to L for the months of the year (“A” for January to “L” for December) and numbers for the year starting with 4 for 1964, the first year the Brother typewriter was marketed in its own name. The numbers after that were 5 for 1965, 6 for 1966 etc through to 0 1970 and 3 for 1973).

The numbering for the years had obviously gone through a full 10-year cycle, 4 back to 3, by 1973, and I can’t say what Brother did after that. To repeat “A4” for 1964 and 1974 would have been confusing. Theoretically, the serial number for a January 1980 typewriter should start “A16 …” But I’m guessing that somewhere along the line the years must have been refigured, because the serial number on my Super Deluxe 1450 starts “J53 …”, and while I can image an October production date, I doubt very much if 64+53 adds up to 2017. My machine looks very “modern”, but not that modern! Maybe the “5” stands for 1975 or 1985? Is it possible the second digit represents the decade – in other words “A42” for January, 1974 and “A43” for January, 1984? Seems possible.

To check that theory, I looked at two other Brothers I have in the house at the moment, the all-black Deluxe 220 (H53 …) and a Echelon 79 (aka Deluxe 1350, an earlier version of the 1450 design) (D13…). And, yes, I could image the first being made in 1985 and the second in 1981 (although the 1350 first came out in 1972; is a nine-year production run likely?). Based on this notion, my Super Deluxe 1450 was made in October 1985 and that it was the 518838th Brother typewriter made that year. At that rate, 600,000 were being made a year, and from 1961-1980 that would add up to 12 million typewriters. Given that typewriter production would have scaled up considerably from 1961 (it represented a mere 12.77 per cent of total Brother products in 1965), I guess a figure of 10 million by 1980 would be about right.

Anyway, hopefully that’s a rough guide as to when your Brother was made, FleetCommand. Oh, and T stands for tab and TR for tab and repeat spacer.

The popular theory is that the mechanic Kanekichi Yasui (1881-1925) left the Atsuta military arsenal in 1908, converted a six-mat room in his home and founded a company which came to be called Brother - because Kanekichi’s business was taken over by his six sons and four sons-in-law.

In fact, only two of the brothers were involved at the birth of Brother. And when Masayoshi and Jitsuichi Yasui inherited their father's sewing machine business in 1925, they wanted to rename it Sister, as a way of paying homage to the women who were using sewing machines. However, it was pointed out to them that Sister was a little too close for comfort to Singer, which had been making sewing machines in the US since 1851.

Thus it became known as the Yasui Brothers Sewing Machine Company. Masayoshi (born April 5, 1904, Atsuta Ward, Nagoya; died Nagoya, August 23, 1990, aged 86) had started helping his father at the age of nine, gaining valuable early knowledge about the selling and repairing of sewing machines and the making of spare parts for them. Masayoshi said he learnt about the technicalities of the sewing machine while “inheriting the soul of the father technician”.

At 17, Masayoshi began an apprenticeship in Osaka, at the time the centre for Japan’s sewing machine importation, assembly and distribution. Masayoshi determined to turn an import-based industry into an export-based industry, he just lacked production facilities and advanced processing technologies.

In 1928 Masayoshi developed and sold hydraulic presses and the Sho-san-shiki chain-stitch sewing machine for producing straw hats.
Meanwhile, Jitsuichi Yasui, Masayoshi’s younger brother, developed shuttle hooks, which are the main components of the sewing machine. In 1932 the Yasui brothers introduced the first sewing machine made entirely in Japan.

The next year the company built a new factory in Mizuho, Nagoya. The Yasui Brothers Sewing Machine Company was liquidated on January 15, 1934, to enable its incorporation under the name Nippon Sewing Machine Manufacturing Company (in other words, Nihon Mishin Seizo Kabushiki Kaisha), which began to manufacture industrial sewing machines in 1936.

In 1941 Brother Sales Ltd was established to develop a sales network in Japan. In 1947, at the request of the Japanese Government, Brother exported 200 sewing machines to Shanghai, the first step in what would a decade later become its massive worldwide expansion.

In 1954, in an effort to increase sewing machine exports, Brother International Corporation was established as an exporting company. It set up a sales base in New York that year, and its first European sewing machine production plant in Ireland in 1958.

At that same time, the US sales company strongly and repeatedly recommended to Brother’s Nagoya HQ that it investigate the possibility of adding to its sewing and knitting machine lines the production of portable typewriters. The New York office emphasised that portable typewriters were in increasingly demand in the US, especially for the trade in cheaper machines in department stores. Webster was already selling Brother-made sewing machines, and the first deal to import Brother typewriters was made with Webster.

Brother took two full years to carefully develop a machine that was patently different from others on the market, and came up with Akio Kondo’s design in 1960. The first machines off the production line differed not one jot from Kondo's design, right down to the hooped wire paper rest.

It sold first in the US as a Webster in 1961. The Australian market soon opened up, with the Brother initially disguised as a Lemair for department store sales.
In 1962, coinciding with the early exports of portable typewriters, Nippon Sewing Machine Manufacturing Company changed its name to Brother Industries Ltd.

Brother’s engineering team had developed what, by its own description, was a lower-cost typewriter which was comparable with the quality of the typewriters built by its competitors – companies with well-established brand names. Notably, these were Remingtons made in Britain, since Underwood was in its death throes (to re-emerge later as Olivettis), and Royals and Smith-Coronas had become too expensive to produce in the US. Given the challenge thrown down by Brother, Remington and Royal moved to Holland and SCM to Britain, all in the early 1960s and all with the idea of producing cheaper machines. For one thing, labour costs were lower than in the US.

What’s more, Brother believed the portable typewriter it could produce would prove to be more durable – and I suspect they have been ultimately proved right in that.

The impact of Brother typewriters was, to put it mildly, hugely telling on the entire industry. Litton Industries took over Royal in Holland and Imperial in Britain and, aware of the far lower cost of typewriter production in Japan, moved operations there. Meanwhile, SCM complained bitterly to the US Government that Brother was flooding the US market with cheap machines – so cheap SCM believed they were being sold below the cost of their production (a situation SCM itself had been forced to face in Britain by Woolworths' hard bargaining. See SCM Courier). But the Japanese company had been only too willing to admit that flooding the US market was Brother’s No 1 objective all along; and it achieved this was completely undercutting the opposition. By 1971, Brother was making typewriters in more than 20 languages and exporting them to 110 countries.

In 1974, SCM, which had become a division of Kleinschmidt (see Donald Murray) and had abandoned manual and electric standard office typewriters to concentrate on portable manual and compact electric typewriters, filed a complaint against Brother.

This began what SCM calls a “20-year imbroglio between itself and the Japanese competitor”. Specifically, SCM charged Brother with "dumping" portable typewriters, exporting the machines for sale in the US at prices below cost. Arguing that Brother was in violation of the Antidumping Act of 1921, SCM saw its sales decline in the face of what it deemed an unfair trade practice. In 1979, the US Government imposed an import fee on Brother's typewriters, and throughout the 1980s the courts modified these antidumping orders and import fees to include new products such as Brother electronic typewriters and word processors.

Driven to the wall by Woolworth's demands for cheaper typewriters, SCM cut its losses in 1981 after 21 years in West Bromwich in England, and then failed to make a go of it after buying Olivetti's Glasgow factory. When, in 1986, the London-based conglomerate, Hanson PLC, acquired SCM Corp, SCM left Britain and began manufacturing typewriters in Singapore for export to the US. At the same time, Brother Industries opened a plant in Bartlett, Tennessee, where it manufactured 600,000 typewriters annually for the US market. It was Brother's turn to file dumping complaints against SCM.

In February 1994, SCM and Brother Industries finally ended litigation over the dumping issue, admitting in a joint statement that it was better to direct energies toward the marketplace rather than the courtroom. The two companies asked the US Commerce Department to cease its investigations of typewriter dumping and revoke the added import taxes. All too late, though, I’m afraid.

In one last-ditched effort to keep portable manual typewriters competitive, Brother introduced in 1973 what was probably the final significant mechanical innovation to a machine which had begun life exactly 100 years earlier in Milwaukee.

This was the repeat spacing mechanism, developed in Japan in 1969 and patented in the US by Tomoyoshi Watanabe and Masao Jozuka for the Brother Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha (Brother Industries Co Ltd) of Nagoya.

A BAND OF BROTHERS
At least the ones I know
(There are 58 varities here, 20 of which use the original Kondo design.
and I'm sure I've only scratched the surface.
If anyone knows of any models I have missed, please let me know)

Original Webster