https://themechanicaltype.blogspot.com/2019/10/a-comprehensive-history-of-royal-model-p.html?m=1
- Sep 2025
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themechanicaltype.blogspot.com themechanicaltype.blogspot.com
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xoverit.blogspot.com xoverit.blogspot.com
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Olympia SM series (part 1, 1948-1964)<br /> by [[x over it]]<br /> accessed on 2025-09-05T17:14:33
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- Aug 2025
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davistypewriters.blogspot.com davistypewriters.blogspot.com
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Portable Typewriters Today - February 2015<br /> by [[Will Davis]] on 2015-02-10<br /> accessed on 2025-08-05T16:35:48
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- Dr. Leonard's Health Care catalog
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- read
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- Jul 2025
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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An Orga Privat and its History by [[Will Davis]]
Bing Werke was the manufacturer and Orga was the distributor.
Piece of wood used to replace the rear legs of the typewriter to set it up by whittling.
A cut-rate typewriter without all the bells and whistles.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
- Jun 2025
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typecast.munk.org typecast.munk.org
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typecast.munk.org typecast.munk.org
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www.uppercasetypewriter.com www.uppercasetypewriter.com
- Apr 2025
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Peter V. Tytell, a Typewriter Whisperer, Is Dead at 74 by [[Richard Sandomir]]
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- Mar 2025
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Indy Type Shop will be at 2621 Shelby St., which used to be a gun shop and then a cell phone store.
Usually it might have been typewriter shop, gun shop, then cell phone store, so it's intriguing to see the opposite ordering.
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www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
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In 2013, jaw-dropping details emerged about the extent of US intelligence agency surveillance programmes. This prompted the Russian Federal Guard Service (FSO) to revert to typewriters in an attempt to evade eavesdropping. German officials were also reported to be considering a similar move in 2014. (During the Cold War, Soviet spies actually developed techniques for snooping on electric typewriter activity, a form of "keylogging" technology – where the keystrokes inputted on a keyboard are captured. US operatives also reconstructed text from typewriter ribbons – meaning that even typewriters aren't completely safe.)
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- Feb 2025
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www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
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Yankees, Typewriters, Scandals, and Cooperstown: A Baseball Memoir by Bill Madden<br /> Release date: April 1, 2025 (hardcover)
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- Jan 2025
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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The machines were first designed in 1951 at Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, Massachusetts, where they have been made ever since.
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- Dec 2024
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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The markets and level of ubiquity of these items in their heyday are so dramatically different that this is certainly an apples and oranges comparison.
However, if you want to compare the artist/users of the instrument to their machines, which is a way of potentially intuiting a potential answer to your question (one which is highly subjective), you might go by who was using particular typewriters of the time. Here's some data to consider: https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/typers.html
For that rough era in American-made machines, you'll see peak engineering/manufacturing in the 1950s out of the Smith-Corona Super Silent, the Remington Quiet-Riter, and the Royal Quiet De Luxe. Design, touch, and tuning can all be such subjective measures here so as to heavily Muddy (the) Waters ('52 Gibson Les Paul Gold Top/'58 Fender Telecaster) on style, quality, and popularity amongst the cognoscenti. Peak quality in the 60s had broadly moved to post-war Germany and Italy with machines from Olympia (SM3, 4, 5, 7, etc.) and Olivetti respectively.
For my personal money, in American machines of the time, I love the design and performance of my well-tuned, and mostly restored 1950 Royal KMG. However, the current market certainly wouldn't indicate a broader beloved status for these the way you'll see for Stratocasters. (You'll also find some horribly maintained and un-tuned machines out there on the market, which is why so much of the antique and vintage typewriter market pricing is so wildly out of whack.)
A separate flavor of question certainly, but if you're looking for a solid performing typewriter to pair aesthetically and temporally with a '64 Strat, I'd go with a Royal FP ('57-62) (which came in Royaltone or Pearl Dark Gray smooth, Royaltone or Pearl Light Gray smooth, Willow Green smooth, Sea Blue smooth, Cameo Pink smooth (Petal Pink) , Brushed Aluminum, Sandstone smooth, and Coral Rose) or the smaller Royal Futura 800 ('58-'63).
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oztypewriter.blogspot.com oztypewriter.blogspot.com
- Nov 2024
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www.mortati.com www.mortati.com
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susaneliamacneal.blogspot.com susaneliamacneal.blogspot.com
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Mr. Churchill's Typewriters by [[Susan Elia Macneal]]
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writingball.blogspot.com writingball.blogspot.com
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The infamous Apple typewriter memo is 40 years old ... by [[Richard Polt]]
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- Oct 2024
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The Time I Met New York’s Patron Saint of Typewriters by [[Thaisa Frank]] March 12, 2019
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- Sep 2024
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davistypewriters.blogspot.com davistypewriters.blogspot.com
- Aug 2024
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCScn9kxUjOfDNJk3Z-1NWKA Old Typerwriters and Calculators
The YouTube Channel of fausto tomesani https://typewriterdatabase.com/typewriters.php?hunter_search=7180
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Needs better sourcing, but
Henry Dreyfuss added crinkle paint to his Royal Quiet De Luxe typewriter design to diffuse reflected light so that typists who worked at their machines all day wouldn't have headaches from the glare reflecting off the fronts of their machines.
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https://workpad.co.uk/properties/45-bedford-row/
45 Bedford Row was the address for the Durable Supply Company which distributed Orga typewriters in Britain in the 1930s.
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typewriterdatabase.com typewriterdatabase.com
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https://typewriterdatabase.com/1924-orga-privat-2.11451.typewriter
Some scant history of Orga typewriters without sourcing.
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One large study by Ben D. Woodand Frank N. Freeman in 1932 paved theway for acceptance in elementary schools.The study included 14,947 children ofelementary-school age in an experimenton the effect of the typewriter on class-room performance (3). The children whohad typing instruction actually spent onlyan hour or two a week at the typewriter,yet at the end of the first year they out-performed the nontyping pupils in read-ing.
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In articles published in theearly 1890's William A. Mowry and FrankPalmer both advocated the use of typing inthe secondary-school curriculum
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- Jul 2024
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Local file Local file
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Weller, Charles Edward. The Early History of the Typewriter. Chase & Shepard, printers, 1918. http://archive.org/details/earlyhistorytyp00wellgoog.
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- May 2024
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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You can cross check the data in the typewriter database for most of the big US and European brands to see the slow merging and dying out of the typewriter through the late 60s and early 70s onward. See, for example, Royal: https://typewriterdatabase.com/royal.72.typewriter-serial-number-database which has buyouts and mergers listed at the top. The database also has a huge volume of references for how it was compiled which will give you additional history.
The early 70s saw a lot of plastic entering the space where more durable steel used to be. Most major US firms were shifting to electric after IBM in roughly 1961. Post war manufacture of machines picked up significantly in Italy, Spain, Holland, and even Wales which displaced some of the manufacturing in the US, where solid machines of the prior generation still worked and only needed servicing rather than outright replacement. (Planned obsolescence wasn't as much of a thing during the 30s and 40s, and in fact, [maintenance was heavily highlighted during the war](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocdxgkxKAKo) when most US manufacturers ceased production of most models.) Eventually Japan displaced the business followed by India (which ceased in 2009) and China. Wrexham, Wales ceased manufacture of electronic Brother typewriters in 2012.
Ever decreasing costs of materials and manufacturing, improved manufacturing technology, increased competition in the space, combined with containerized shipping, competition from computers, etc. all contributed to the cheapening of the typewriter and hastened the death of manufacturing (though not the use) of manual typewriters.
Richard Polt's The Typewriter Revolution (2015) has a "microhistory" of typewriters in chapter 2 with references to some addition histories if you're interested.
Your question about Olympia manufacture dates (and more) can be found via: https://typewriterdatabase.com/olympia.61.typewriter-serial-number-database
x over it has a good two part series about the evolution of Olympias at:
https://xoverit.blogspot.com/2015/02/olympia-sm-series-part-1-1948-1964.html
https://xoverit.blogspot.com/2015/04/olympia-sm-series-part-2-1964-1980s.html
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