I met an old friend Wednesday and had lunch with him. During our visit, he said, "I haven't seen any typewriter-related posts lately. I'm starting to get concerned!" My friend, this one's for you.
Today's exhibit is probably the scariest thing I own. It's my IBM Electromatic 01 electric typewriter. I haven't run the serial number on it to know precisely when it was built, but it dates from the mid to late 1930s...and looks it. It's big, it's scary and it's loud. But it's important because it's a direct link to the roots of IBM's electric typewriter business.
In 1933 the International Business Machines corporation purchased the Electromatic Typewriter Company of Poughkeepsie, New York. From what I can put together, early electric typewriters suffered from a form of consumer unease not unlike that the first microwave ovens faced: just as people of the 1970s worried about eating radioactive food, some folks in the 1920s and 1930s didn't completely trust electric typewriters and worried they could get shocked by them. (They were put off by the high cost, too.) While most electric typewriters of the period used electric assist for some elements of their operation, the Electromatic used power assist for just about everything.
Some folks thought IBM was crazy to buy Electromatic, but the acquisition soon paid dividends. The federal government needed a typewriter that could handle making a dozen carbon copies at once (remember carbon paper, kids?), and the Electromatic was just the machine for that task. The electric assist not only helped make high-quality carbon copies, but it also reduced operator fatigue. (All this came with a price, though: a new Electromatic cost $225 back in its day -- about $3600 today -- while a manual typewriter could be had for $75, or about $1200 in modern dollars.)
And the Electromatic did find favor with certain markets. Banks, insurance firms and other companies found that the Electromatic delivered crisp printing. It was so good that it could produce copies that could then be reproduced on a printing press. IBM developed an electrical connection that allowed punch-card data to be sent to the Electromatic for instant camera-ready copy. Given that punch-card operators helped tabulate ballistics and gunnery data, you could make an argument that, in its own little way, the Electromatic helped win World War II.
The Electromatic acquisition paid dividends down the road for IBM, too. There were later refinements of the Electromatic design, then the development of the letter-series IBM electric typebar typewriters. And, of course, without the foundation the Electromatic helped build, there probably wouldn't have been the Selectric series.
(By the way, I'm indebted to a wonderful book titled The Romance Division: A Different Side of IBM by Cornelius DeLoca and Samuel Jay Kalow for the backstory above. Anyone who's interested in the adventures of the IBM office equipment salesforce back in its heyday will enjoy it.)
So, here we are. Here's my Electromatic 01. According to legend, mine used to belong to an IBM engineer who kept it in his collection. Back in the day, it would have been delivered to me in a big wooden crate that had been nailed shut, and an IBM salesman would have set it up for me and taught me how to run it. In 2008, though, it arrived in a big cardboard box that had been delivered by FedEx Ground (and the shipping on this beast cost only slightly less than what I paid for it).
You're first struck by how brutish a machine it looks. It also has some really odd angles. The top cover is angled weird, and also notice how weird the keyboard slope is by modern standards. The power lever is to the left, and in the "off" position it also locks the keys by swinging a metal bar beneath them. Those red keys really pop out against all that black, don't they?
Here's a look under the hood. It pretty much looks like a standard typebar typewriter from this angle. Underneath, though, you get to see all the cams and levers and everything else, and you realize it ain't Grandpa's old Remington. Dig how the ribbon spools are mounted vertically, too.
Does it still work? Kind of. Under the top cover there's a service label that reports it was serviced in 1954, so it's long overdue for a good lubrication. I did fire it up when it arrived, taking my life into my own hands in so doing. There was a whiff of ozone and the sound of an old motor running, and then all the typebars flew forward at once and jammed into themselves. So, yeah, it works, but it needs a good tune-up. Until I have a professional look at it, I'm hesitant to do anything with it, and am content to leave well enough alone.
And here's the first IBM typewriter (well, one of the first, anyway) with what's perhaps the ultimate IBM typewriter, the Selectric III. (Yeah, I know some folks like the IBM Wheelwriter, but as far as I'm concerned IBM lost something after the Selectric III went out of production.) The cat is there for purposes of scale.
:: Never in a million years could I make up a story like this.
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