Typewriter Highlight of 2020: An Underwood 5 in Excellent Condition

Typewriter Topics closed out its last edition of 100 years ago with a full-page colour advert for the Underwood 5, listing its achievements in world speed typing championships since 1906. In the same December 1920 issue, the Corona portable was described as “a small Hercules”, and there was a counter-claim to Underwood’s for the Remington 10, saying it was the “speediest of all typewriters” (holding the world’s record for “actual for gross speed”). Yet in my humble opinion, the Underwood 5 remains the greatest typewriter ever made, the pinnacle of 100 years of American typewriter design, engineering and manufacture. To paraphrase Elvis, “two million buyers could not have been wrong”. And it was in 1920 that the Underwood 5 reached that remarkable sales figure, “equal in quantity to all of the other firms in the typewriter industry combined” according to George Nichols Engler in his 1969 PhD dissertation “The Typewriter Industry: The Impact of a Significant Technological Revolution” (University of California at Los Angeles).

After many years of various frustrations in my hunt for an Underwood 5 in excellent condition, I finally secured one in 2020. Fittingly, the serial number of 1291438 means it was made in early February 1920. My typewriter needs are no longer what they once were, dictated as they now are by financial and storage considerations which once did not apply to the extent they do today. So these days I’m far more selective than I might have been 10 years or so ago. But when this Underwood came up for auction, I had no hesitation in “pulling out all the stops” to get it. And I’m so pleased I did. It now takes pride of place in my smallish collection, alongside a New Zealand Typewriter Company Blickensderfer 5, Miles Franklin’s Corona portable, a Remington Model 2, Raymond Koessler’s Simplex 1 (and maybe one or three dozen others!).