Antique Typewriter? I think?

It's a typewriter from perhaps the 1950's, not very old in terms of years. They have little value because many thousands were created and you can't get replacement ribbons for them anymore .

This site has some interesting uses for old typewriters:

recycled gifts

Hmm.. oh well.

I couldnt imagine something TOO valuable being stored in the garage. As this was for... goodness knows HOW long.


I like it though.
I think it is beautiful.
It will find a place in my home for display purposes.

Would it be bad if I mentioned that I learned to type on one very similar to that?

I don't know. Lots were made, but few remain so pristine. Just for giggles, check the ribbon size. It's remotely possible you could unwind a current production calculator ribbon and run it onto the typewriter spools, just to have it in service again.

So did I, fishin. The Underwood 5 was the best of the manuals, but Royal was right up there.

All my college papers were typed on a typewriter just like that one. They were solid. Noisy, but solid. Great to see one again.

There are a few sites online that carry old cloth ribbons. Here's one: http://members.aol.com/typebar/collectible/ribbons.htm.

Here's a project for you: converting a typewriter into a computer keyboard.

wow.
That would be neat to have this as a keyboard

but I have tried typing on it, and it wont keep speed with my fingers.
It gets jammed everyother word.

If I take my time and slow down a bit, it works fine.
This could be one of two things... It needs to be lubed? Tuned up.. or..
it cant handle my typing speed. which can reach about 95-100 wpm.

I dont know how to check ribbon size?
Where / how do I do that?

Antique?

Not unless a good section of the A2K membership is antique.

I, too, learned to type on a machine like that.

Shewolf--

Remember that piece of nostalgia has to be dusted--and dusting a typewriter is a major weekly project.

Typewriters such as that were still being used in schools in the 1960s to teach typing, and were still in use in the United States Army in 1970 when i joined the army. It is impossible to tell just by looking at it how old it is, you'd need an expert to determine the age.

In the 1870s, typewriters were being manufactured with the (relatively) "soft" steel in use in industry in those days, and women were typing so fast that they were rapidly wearing out typewriters (typewriters, along with upright pianos, provided young single women a means to get out of the home and find work in a world which otherwise didn't give them employment opportunities--even most school teachers and nurses were male in those days). So, the "qwerty" keyboard was created (look at the upper-left row of letters on the keyborad: q, w, e, r, t, y) to slow them down, and the design you see there remained basically unchanged from about 1890 until electric typewriters began to become common in the late 1950s.

I couldn't see the image well enough, but look at the plate which gives the manufacturers name and address. I was once looking at a portable typewriter in a thrift store, and the people there asked me if i knew how old it was. I looked inside, saw the address, which was in New York, and gave a three-digit zone address (Something like New York, New York, 123--i don't remember the exact number). So, i said it had to be pre-1959, because there was no zip code (ZIP code comes from Zone Improvement Plan--and these were introduced in 1959). The girl who had asked me looked at me blankly for a moment and then said: "Wow, i never thought about there being a time when there weren't any zip codes."

That's about the best you'll do without an expert appraiser physically examining the machine. If the address on the inside doesn't show a zip code, it's pre-1959. But then, it could be any time from 1900 to 1959. Hard to say just by looking at it, that was one of the most durable industrial designs in the modern age.

That label which reads: "AAA Typewriter Company" doesn't even look as though the address gives a zone number (i can't read it clearly), which, if true might mean it is pre-1959.

Of course, you could just cover it. There used to be a small but lucrative industry in making typewriter covers--and when computers first appeared, they used to sell covers for those, too, as well as covers for the keyboards. I haven't seen them prominently displayed for several years, though. It probably isn't all that valuable, and might not be worth the cost of taking it to an appraiser. If you keep in good condition, keep it covered or boxed, in about 100 or 200 years, one of you ancestors might get some money for it as a curiosity. But the point someone made, that millions of them were once manufactured, means that it ain't worth much right now.

I kinda like those typewriters.

My favourite auctioneer offers them up as anchors. Apparently there's a bit of a glut on the market of "mid-century typewriters".

It's the same thing, Boss, the point was that they got "stuck" because people were learning to type so fast, and it was causing wear and tear on the machine. The point of QWERTY was to slow people down. It didn't work, though, because people just got good at the new keyboard layout, and were soon typing fast with the new system. By that time, the machines themselves had been reinforced with stouter parts and a better quality of materials, so they gave up trying to slow the typists down.

I learned to type when I was about fourteen on my mother's old Underwood, which I presume to have been from the thirties. Now I'm curious, will have to check google if I can see any lookalikes that'll help me figure the manufacturing date.

I read that New Yorker typewriter article too, found it interesting.

Wikipedia has more than one version on the origina of QWERTY:

The QWERTY keyboard layout was devised and created in the 1860s by the creator of the first modern typewriter, Christopher Sholes, a newspaper editor who lived in Milwaukee. Originally, the characters on the typewriters he invented were arranged alphabetically, set on the end of a metal bar which struck the paper when its key was pressed. However, once an operator had learned to type at speed, the bars attached to letters that lay close together on the keyboard became entangled with one another, forcing the typist to manually unstick the typebars, and also frequently blotting the document. A business associate of Sholes, James Densmore, suggested splitting up keys for letters commonly used together to speed up typing by preventing common pairs of typebars from striking the platen at the same time and sticking together.

The effect this rearrangement of letters had on maximum typing speed is a disputed issue. Some sources assert that the QWERTY layout was designed to slow down typing speed to further reduce jamming. Other sources assert the rearrangement worked by separating common sequences of letters in English. Ostensibly, the hammers that were likely to be used in quick succession were less likely to interfere with each other.

It has also been suggested the top row was designed to have all the letters for the word "typewriter" so that typewriter salesmen could "peck" the word "typewriter" more quickly and easily without appearing to have to "hunt" for the keys. This was in the period when typing was considered women's work and men rarely could type. However, the first typewriter operators were typically male clerks at railroad offices.

Yep, Underwood No. 5....