The Slo-Mo IBM Selectric Typewriter in Action

As promised after my post on this IBM Selectric character selection demonstration machine, brilliantly put together by Perth's Peter Brill, here is video of it in action (now working properly, I hope ...):

The speed of a normal IBM Selectric in action:

The USB Typewriter in Action

Here is my USB Underwood in action. I posted on the machine last year, but didn't include a video of it in use. The USB Typewriter website is here:
It tell us that Jack Zylkin is a founding member of Philadelphia's first and only hackerspace, Hive76. He collects antique typewriters, electric pianos, oscilloscopes, and other specimens of muggle magic. His favorite font is Century Gothic. He loves receiving comments (and criticism) and can be reached at jack@usbtypewriter.com.

Four Generations of the Bijou Portable Typewriter

As I already had the three-bank Bijou (an illegal 1910 take-off of the Corona 3), the first of the four-bank Bijous (of On the Nile fame, my favourite typewriter) and the 1950s Bijou (courtesy of Richard Amery), I couldn’t resist it when this Bijou version of the Erika Model 5 came up for sale on eBay:

It arrived on Friday and I was surprised to discover two things about it: First, it was marketed by the Palestine Typewriter Company, with branches in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem (and elsewhere), whose decal was on the front.

Also, it is some sort of specialist typewriter, perhaps medical or science, with some strange keys on it. The MLS would stand for milligrams, I presume, but I’m not sure what the LP key, or the one with an upright stroke and a figure one over a backstroke, are for.
POSTSCRIPT:  As you will see in the comments below, follower Scott Kernaghan has solved the mystery - it is a Palestinian banking typewriter. The LP stands for Palestinian pounds. Scott points out the old Palestinian pound was broken up into units of 'mils', and each mil was 1/1000 of a Palestinian pound. Thank you, Scott!
"What I think you're looking at is a typewriter used by British banks or government - pre-World War II," wrote Scott. "I'd dare say that this unit was used to log currency exchanges, or accounting between British firms and Palestinian interests." 

Anyway, here are my four generations of the Bijou portable typewriter:

Typewriter Treasures Galore: Tomorrow's Cologne Auction

OK, so here’s the thing. Bill Gates suddenly decides out of the goodness of his boundlessly generous heart to put $10 million in my bank account overnight, I fly to Cologne in the morning and get there by 11.30 sharp, in time for Uwe Breker’s 120^th specialist auction in 25 years. I buy every one of the 80 typewriters that come up for sale.

“Tell him he’s dreamin’,” as they say in that classic Aussie movie The Castle.

Well, yes, I will be dreaming tonight – of all these beautiful typewriters going up for sale tomorrow.

You will be, too, once you’ve feasted your eyes on this little lot.

The 1882 Hammonia is expected to fetch 10,000-15,000 euro, which, depending on how Greece and Spain are going in the morning, is somewhere between $12,600-$19,000. The 1911 Olivetti M1 is expected to fetch 5000-8000 euro, and the 1947 Keaton music typewriter 1500-2500 euro. The 1879 Crandall is expected to fetch 6000-8000 euro and the 1906 Crandall Visible No 4 2500-3500 euro.

Some of the rest are within my price range, with or without Bill's overnight help. And gee whiz, I already have a few of these.

Now ...  where's that damned private jet parked?

Canberra Agog Over Typewritten Chicago Manifesto

Yesterday, May 23, 2012, Australia’s federal capital city celebrated the centenary of the announcement that a Chicago couple, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Lucy Mahony Griffin, had won the international competition to design Canberra.

The Griffins beat 136 other entries and won the first prize of £1750. Strictly speaking, Walter Burley Griffin, after whom Canberra's lake is named, was the declared winner, but quite clearly his wife, Marion Lucy Mahony Griffin, had an awful lot to do with his entry winning.

The 100^th anniversary of this event was marked by the unveiling of a long-lost (and presumed destroyed) document, the Griffins’s typewritten manifesto of their vision for this man-made city. It was described by Australian Capital Territory Chief Minister Katy Gallagher as ‘‘a fragment of Canberra’s birth certificate’’.

The 29 typewritten pages reveal the Griffins’ rush to get the booklet to Australia before entries closed. Toward the end of the document, typed words have been erased, changes made in pencil, and there are spelling errors.

But the Griffins’ unseemly haste to get the manifesto completed in time is understandable. Marion Lucy Mahony married Walter Burley Griffin in Michigan City, Indiana, on June 29, 1911, and the couple were on their honeymoon when, in July, they learned of the competition to design Canberra.

The competition had been announced on April 30, 1911, and entries were to be in Australia by January 31, 1912. As it transpired, the deadline was later extended to mid-February, after the Australian government learned entries were on their way from overseas. Nonetheless, the Griffins were described as having compiled Walter’s designs, Marion’s eerily prophetic drawings of what the city would become, and their typewritten documents “in a frenzy”.

Canberra centenary history and heritage adviser David Headon unearthed the typewritten manifesto buried deep in a container of papers held in the Planning Institute of Australia’s storage units in Fyshwick. It is now in an exhibition at the federal Parliament House in Canberra and will later be kept in the National Archives of Australia.

Apparently the document had been disassembled so that city builders could refer to various parts of it when the construction of Canberra started in 1913. The contents were also copied, corrected and printed. But it seems the original typewritten pages were later put back together in the Griffins’ format, and the manifesto promptly stored away – not to be seen again until earlier this year.

Canberra will celebrate its centenary next year. It was officially named on March 12, 1913.

Walter Burley Griffin was born on November 24, 1876,  at Maywood, near Chicago. He died of peritonitis on February 11, 1937, in Lucknow, India. From 1901-06 he was an associate of Frank Lloyd Wright at Oak Park. Marion Lucy Mahony Griffin was born in Chicago on February 14, 1871. She died in the Cook County Hospital, Chicago, on August 10, 1961. In 1895 Mahony was the first employee hired by Frank Lloyd Wright. 

Johannes Krüger: How His Typewriters Ducked Under the Iron Curtain, to emerge as both Olympias and Optimas

Johannes Krüger was a leading designer and design engineer for Olympia in Erfurt in the years immediately before the outbreak of World War II. He is perhaps best remembered for the sublime, slimline Plana, which he designed from 1937-39.

According to the German History Museum, Krüger was also responsible for the 1949 Olympia Elite, a development of Olympia’s first keyboard portables, which emerged in 1931. These included the Elite, the Progress and the Simplex. Whether the museum is suggesting Krüger designed the original machine is uncertain.

In 1951, when Olympia and Optima went their separate ways, divided by the Iron Curtain and an International Court of Appeal brand name ruling in The Hague, the East German company Optima resurrected the Plana. However, it was Olympia in Wilhelmshaven in West Germany which continued to develop the mid-sized portable, taking the Elite and turning it into the start of the SM series (SM=Schreibmaschine Mittelgroß, or medium-sized typewriter). That Optima subsequently made a significantly different semi-portable Elite suggests some sort of equitable division of design patent rights but not existing model names.

It strikes me that Erfurt was left with the model names, a plant, machinery, dies, tools etc, but found itself thin on the ground for designers. Anton Demmel, for one, had gone west to Wilhelmshaven, and others probably followed. This meant that, at least initially, Optima relied on pre-war designs, while Olympia got on with making typewriters with fresh masks (frames). 

I have no idea what happened to Krüger himself. But his designs lived on, in the factories in both Erfurt and Wilhelmshaven, until at least 1959, when the Plana came to the end of its line in Erfurt and in Wilhelmshaven the designs of  Demmel, Peter Sieber and Arnold Schürer started to overtake the first SM series (1-5?), beginning with the SM7.

As well, Krüger’s pre-war patents were to influence such designers as Carl W.Sundberg (Remington), Eliot Noyes (IBM) and Giuseppe Beccio (Olivetti), not to mention Demmel himself.

The break between Olympia and Optima was legally sanctioned in 1951, but Erfurt had become part of the Soviet Zone of occupied Germany on July 3, 1945, when American troops left the city. Just before the arrival of the Soviet occupying force, there was an attempt to transfer 1.8 million Reichsmarks, or 35 per cent of the share capital of the Olympia works, to Hamburg. Because of a suspect processing error, this did not materialise. From 1946 the works belonged to the Soviet stock company Staatl Aktiengesellschaft (SAG) and, along with Rheinmetall typewriters, Olympia was incorporated into the Soviet "parent" joint stock company group Totschmasch. The Erfurt operation was then Olympia Büromaschinenwerk Sowjetische AG für Feinwerktechnik Erfurt (office machines per precision engineering plant Soviet Erfurt). After the transfer to public ownership, the operations of Olympia Erfurt and Olympia Hamburg-Wilhelmshaven were judicially reconstituted. As a result of the product name dispute, the Erfurt company was renamed in 1950 as Olympia Büromaschinenwerk Erfurt, in 1951 as Optima Büromaschinenwerk VEB Erfurt, in 1952 as VEB Mechanik Optima Büromaschinenwerk (this was when my Plana was made, as one can see above) and from 1953-69 as VEB Optima Büromaschinenwerk Erfurt I hope all that is as clear as mud!

Interestingly, Demmel had worked alongside Krüger at Erfurt in the late 1930s. Demmel obviously made it into West Germany in the early 1950s, I wonder if Krüger also did?

Bakelite segment on the Schmitt Express (see below)

I feel certain that one significant difference between the pre-war Olympia Plana and the post-war Optima Plana was the use of Bakelite. Smaller, lower, more compact portables were the rage in mid- to late-30s Europe. To make them even lighter, Bakelite masks and segments became an experimental option.

I am not sure whether the mask of the original Plana was made of Bakelite, but at least the segment was.

I recall that earlier this year a German eBay seller contacted me about a Cyrillic keyboard Olympia Plana he had for sale. One collector who had it on his watch list pointed out that there was, not unexpectedly (given it was Bakelite), a small crack in the segment. On the Optima Plana I have, the segment is made of metal. I will return to the Bakelite segment shortly.

Let’s first look at the Olympia Plana, which was presented for review in 1939, at the Leipzig Spring Fair.  According to Eberhard Lippmann’s 2008 The History and Development of Optima Erfurt, the Plana was “a sensation in terms of size, weight and mechanism.”

My research into Krüger’s work became quite serendipitous for me, because in looking at his patent for the Bakelite segment I finally discovered the name of the inventor of the Bakelite typewriter, the Schmitt Express. Heinrich Schmitt, of Frankfurt am Main, assigned his designs to Rudolph Wittich of Frankfurt in 1951-52. 

Hitherto, almost nothing was known about the history of the Schmitt Express, even by Uwe Breker (and that’s saying something, as Uwe is a fount of typewriter knowledge). I think it’s fair to say that in the post-Ernst Martin period of 1949 onwards, some German typewriter history is very hard to trace.

Rudolph Wittich inherited the company Wittich Fertigungstechnik GmbH which Franz Wittich had started in Kamnitz, Sudetenland, in 1918. The business relocated to Bavaria and set up shop in Atzmannsricht. At the time of Schmitt’s typewriter design, it had been re-established to manufacture “rubber vehicles” (?) by Rudolf Wittich in Gebenbach. In 1955 Wittich, still based in Frankfurt, himself took over development of the Bakelite typewriter.

I was able to track down Schmitt's Express designs because he had referenced 

Krüger’s pre-war Bakelite segment.

I am indebted to Eberhard Lippmann’s Optima history for the following charts.

 OPTIMA-OLYMPIA TYPEWRITER MODELS

1924-1959

It should be noted that the move to Erfurt from Berlin, where “the physical capacity allowed no more expansion of manufacturing”, coincided from the switch from the AEG Mignon index typewriter to the first of the Olympia keyboard machines. This period from 1924 marks the beginning of Olympia’s keyboard typewriter history.

I have included these lists here because I suspect they may be valuable references for those wanting to know some of the history of the models they own. It should also be noted that “mit Eisenverkleidung” refers to “with iron trim” and “mit Druckgussverkleidung to “with die-cast casing”.  The Bambino (1954) is the Bakelite version of the Frolio 5. The one below sold on Australian eBay a month ago for $200:

The second list gives a run down of the various company names, leading up to Optima in 2004.

Johannes Krüger assigned his patents for the Plana to Olympia  Büromaschinenwerk  AG, Erfurt, including for the segment and the ultraflat typewriter’s case.

In terms of the Bakelite segment, Krüger had some interesting comments to make about the way segments had been made up to that time:

On the Plana’s typing action, Krüger wrote: