Recently, I snatched a gem off the internet for a pretty penny. It’s no sparkling ring, but a diamond in the rough. A beautiful piece of mechanical art. What is it?

Here it is:

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, for your delectation and delight, is an Underwood Standard Portable typewriter. From what I’ve managed to find out, it dates to 1926 (Serial No. 4B220153. If anyone can be more accurate with the dating, it’s appreciated; leave a comment under the posting).

What’s with the Typewriter?

What? Don’t look at me like that…they’re cool…

I’ve always admired typewriters. I dunno why. I just do. I guess it’s because I learned to touch-type on a typewriter (albeit an electronic Canon TypeStar…look it up on Google Images and behold it in all its horrific 1980s glory)  and I liked the fact that I could see everything happening in front of me, being transferred in neat rows to a sheet of cloudy white paper.

I love mechanical typewriters. Partially for their style and elegance, their functionality, their durability, but also because they’re so much fun to use. To see everything happen mechanically as a pure extension of your hand.

About the Underwood and a Look at Portable Typewriters

Prior to the 1920s, typewriters were MASSIVE, heavy, bone-crushing monsters. Huge, solid steel typing machines that could weigh anywhere from 30-50 pounds. These typewriters were solid, dependable, and great…so long as you weren’t planning on going anywhere in a hurry.

The problem with desktop or ‘Office’ typewriters, as they were called, was that their huge bulk and massive weights (the lightest I’ve found is probably the Royal No. 10, which weighs in at about 30-odd pounds, and it goes UP from there!) is that they’re a real pain to carry around. But then, they’re not designed to be. They’re supposed to sit in your office and not move. That’s why they’re called office typewriters.

But there was a market out there for a portable typewriter. The problem was trying to find a way to make a portable typewriter so that it functioned practically.

The first ever portable typewriter was the Remington Portable, (yes, names back then were simple, plain, and to-the-point) which came out in 1921. Here it is:

The Remington Portable was considered a typing revolution. For the first time ever, you had a typewriter that you could carry around in a case, just like a briefcase! The Remington was lightweight (comparatively speaking), stylish, easy to use, and featured…most…of the features of a comparable desktop typewriter. Just as how Remington was the first company to mass-produce the modern typewriter back in the 1870s, in the 1920s, just fifty years later, it’s spearheading the design-race in getting the first portable typewriter onto the market.

At once, a typewriter-race was started. Other companies wanted to try and make portables too! And they would find fault with the Remington by pointing out that with THAT typewriter…you had to push the type-bar lever to raise the typebars up before you could type! An unnecessary, and wasteful one second! Other companies could do SO MUCH BETTER!!!

One of the companies that thought it could, was the Underwood Typewriter Co. Originally producing ribbons and paper for Remington, Underwood started making typewriters at the close of the Victorian era. Its most successful desktop model was the Underwood No. 5. An enormous machine (don’t believe me? Go find a picture) that could knock down a brick wall. Wanting to produce smaller, portable typewriters, Underwood introduced its three-bank typewriter in the 1920s.

The three-bank portable was cute and handy, but for portability, it sacrificed keys and features to make the machine small enough to fit into a briefcase. For example, there was no dedicated row for numbers. If you wanted that, you had to hit the shift-key and hit the corresponding top-row key to get a number out.

To try and rectify these shortcomings, in 1926, Underwood introduced the Underwood Standard Portable (now with new, improved, four-bank keyboard!).

At the same time, Remington introduced the Portable Model 2, which still relied on the type-bar raising lever to function properly, something that the new, four-bank Underwood portable didn’t need!

Guess which machine suddenly became wildly popular as a result?

The Underwood Portable of 1926 became one of the best-selling typewriters ever! It didn’t stop manufacture for twenty years (except for a brief period in the 1940s. Don’tcha know there’s a war on?). Other companies such as Smith-Corona and Royal also produced stylish portables, and Remington produced some sleek models in the 1930s, but the Underwood Portable remained popular because it was the first ‘complete’ portable typewriter that didn’t rely on little tricks, levers and gimmicks to do what a full-size machine could accomplish.

Intricacies of the Underwood

Despite its obvious benefits, the Underwood Standard Portable was much like a lot of vintage typewriters, in that it still made certain shortcuts here and there.

Just like every other typewriter of the period, there is no ‘1’ key. To type the digit, you press the uppercase ‘I’, or lowercase ‘l’.

Along with no ‘1’, there is also no ‘0’. A capital ‘O’ was considered sufficient for this purpose.

There is also no exclamation-mark; another thing unique to vintage machines. To type that, you hit the ‘, then backspace, and type a full-stop underneath. The two symbols combined, produce a ‘!’.

Similarly, there is no dollar-sign; ‘$’. To produce that, you type ‘S’, backspace over it, and type ‘I’ or ‘l’ over the top. The result is not as elegant, but it does work.

Shortcomings such as this were common to almost every typewriter up until the 1960s (a notable exception is the Imperial Model 50 from the 1920s, a desktop model with a full range of numerals on its keyboard, from 1-0). Where-ever shortcuts could be taken to reduce weight and size, without also impacting on quality and function, shortcuts would be taken!

One of the selling-points to me about this machine is that it has traditional, round glass-and-steel typewriter keys, a staple of pre-war mechanicals. After WWII, the design was considered antiquated and keys made of plastic became all the rage. But the old glass ones remain highly popular. But they are getting harder, and harder to find, on account of key-choppers who saw off old typewriter keys to use them in making steampunk computer-keyboards. They look vaguely interesting, but for every nice computer keyboard, there’s now a worthless, useless antique typewriter lying around somewhere. If keys must be taken, better that they be harvested from a typewriter that’s completely broken up and trashed, rather than from a working antique…like mine!

The machine features a ribbon-reverser, and adjustable right, and left margins, a carriage-release, and a left margin-clear switch (found that out purely by trial and error! Originally I thought it was a tabulation key!). It also has a TINY little switch on the left-hand side, which is the line-spacer, for Single, Double, and even Triple-Spacing! The ribbon-reverser, and the up-down ribbon-selector are two really nifty features. They allowed you to type in both red and black, and wind the ribbon onto either side of the machine. But if you’re using an all-black ribbon (as you can see in the photos), it allows you to get twice as much use out of the ribbon than you usually would, because you can type all the way along one direction, on the bottom half of the ribbon. Then all the way back, on the top half, simply by switching the ribbon-reverser, and ribbon-selector, to opposite sides of their respective settings. A real money-saver!

The typewriter also features, rather bizarrely, perhaps, a backspace key! No, it doesn’t delete letters from your paper…it’s used to reverse over your typed work to either cross it out (which in the day, was literally done by typing ‘X’ repeatedly over mistaken words), or to restrike letters that had come out faint on the paper during the first run past, and make them darker and more legible. This happens more often than you might think…

Finding Bits and Pieces

There is a resurgence in a lot of vintage things in recent years. Wet shaving, fountain pens, vintage clothing, sewing-machines, cars, instruments…and typewriters are no different.

One thing that holds people back from buying or using a typewriter is that they don’t know where to find typewriter ribbons.

There are still companies that manufacture old-style typewriter ribbons. One of them is the European pen-manufacturer, PELIKAN. Most typewriters (unless it’s a really weird one!) use a standard, 1/2-inch typewriter ribbon, that any place selling typewriter supplies WILL have.

Brands such as Underwood, Royal, Remington, Smith-Corona/L.C. Smith, Olympia, Olivetti, and so-forth, will generally all use 1/2-inch ribbons. Sometimes, you can be really lucky, and your local stationer’s shop will still stock them (or if they don’t, they can easily order them in for you). But you can also buy them online from typewriter repairers. They’re also extremely easy to find on eBay for just a few dollars each.

If the spools that the new ribbons come in do not fit into your typewriter, you can fix that simply by winding the fresh ribbon onto your existing spools and threading it through the ribbon-grooves on the typewriter. It’s a bit messy, but it works!

You should NOT use oil on typewriters. Not even really thin machine-oil, like for sewing-machines. This is because the lingering moisture of the oil will act as a dust-trap for any particles in the air. And dust will jam up the typewriter in ways that will anger and frustrate you.

Instead, you should use methylated spirits to flush out any gunk in the typewriter. The spirits will wash away (sometimes with encouragement from a brush, and gentle scrubbing) the gunk stuck to the typewriter keys, the typebars and so-forth, and then simply evaporate, leaving no residue that might cause problems later on.

Using a Typewriter

In this age of computers, iPads and text-messaging, using a typewriter to write is like using a horse and cart to go on a road-trip. It’s just so anachronistic!

But, that’s what makes it fun.

Typewriters have their place in modern society, and not just as pretty paperweights and conversation-pieces. They’re handy as the ULTIMATE laptop-computer. No power-cords, no electricity, no fading batteries, no viruses, nothing like that at all. All you need is paper, a fresh ribbon and you can literally type anywhere on earth, for as long as you have those two things. No laptop can boast of that, no matter how good its battery-life is.

Typewriters are handy for short jobs. Letters, one-off reports, lists, etc. It’s faster than writing, and you can just crank in the paper, type it out, crank out the paper and you’re done. No checking to see if the printer’s hooked up right, or if the paper’s aligned properly so that it doesn’t jam…and in our world of natural disasters, a typewriter is your best friend when the power goes out.

Here’s one last shot of the typewriter:

Why is it called ‘Atticus’?

It’s called ‘Atticus’ because in a stroke of sentimentality, I named it after Atticus Finch, the lawyer in Harper Lee’s famous novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird”. In ‘Mockingbird’, the character of the local newspaper reporter is named…’Mr. Underwood’.

That, and ‘Mockingbird’ is one of my favourite books.