unpublished reply to u/kinga_forrester at https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageads/comments/1rvqt0e/comment/oayqqbd/
Rightly or wrongly I'm sure a vanishing number of people at that time would have held your view.
You've got to remember the historical context of this ad. During World War II all but one typewriter manufacturer in the US ceased production of typewriters and the one remaining was really producing machines for the military. This ad from 1943 actually says in tiny print at the bottom: "Royal is making bullets, and parts for airplane engines, propellers, machine guns, rifles." Civilian groups did drives to collect typewriters to send them to the war effort. Many of the extant and upcoming generation of typewriter repairmen went off to the war effort. All this against the backdrop of people being used to taking their machines (especially office ones in use 8 hours a day) in for service every year or so for cleaning and adjustment. Most office typewriters of the time were in use for an average of 3 years before requiring complete overhauls or replacement. In addition to all of the other things being rationed, typewriters and typewriter service were also being heavily rationed, particularly because the manpower and steel was being diverted heavily to the war effort.
At the time, most typewriters were in the $125-200 range which is the equivalent to about $1,500 now. They were trying to help people preserve their machines and functionality. This was at a time when almost any sizeable town in the US had at least one repair shop busy with work. A city the size of Chicago probably had several dozens of repair shops working full time and that likely dropped to just a few during the war. (There's only one now, and it's only been open for a few years; it also has a wait list of several months for service because it's so busy.)
The issue of typewriter preservation was so great during the war that the U.S. Navy produced a series of videos about their proper use and maintenance of them *and other expensive office machines of the time). See videos at https://boffosocko.com/2025/06/06/typewriter-use-and-maintenance-for-beginning-to-intermediate-typists/ The government also got involved in creating maintenance manuals like Basic Typewriter Care and Maintenance, Equipment Maintenance Series No. 1 (US FWIP, 1945) and repair manuals like War Department Technical Manual TM 37-305: Typewriter Maintenance (1944) which is essentially the same as the [1945 Ames manual[(https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/AmesVol1-Standards.pdf).
Comparing this with today when the general value of typewriters is almost nil and we're lucky to have a few dozen professional typewriter repair shops still operating, but the rate of retirements and deaths has long been outstripping the replacement rate and you'll understand why self-service is necessary. Even given this, the number of typewriter fora on the internet, Facebook, Reddit, etc. the amount of tinkering knowledge is almost cripplingly bad but seems to chug along. You'll notice that there are an awful lot of people just trying to identify their machines much less carry out the most basic repairs. The number of "broken machines" I've acquired in my collection that only needed the ribbon color selector set to something besides "stencil" is a sad indicator of the state of typewriter knowledge now, much less what it may have been in their heyday, tinkering or not.
Even by 1983 as typewriters were already beginning to feel the pressure from the computer business, books like Bryan Kravitz and Nancy Gorrell's Hints for a Happy Typewriter were attempting to educate people on proper maintenance and light repair before needing to rely on repair shops that were already starting to feel the pinch.
Incidentally, IBM wasn't what put most typewriter companies out of business. It was vicious competition caused by offshoring and the cheapening of parts and materials while computers in general did the rest. And as for all those typewriter repair shops: most began selling/servicing word processors, office machines like fax machines, photo copiers, dictaphones, and even computers.
