The Underwood Typewriter Company was a manufacturer of typewriters headquartered in New York City, New York. Underwood produced what is considered the first widely successful, modern typewriter. By 1939, Underwood had produced five million machines. The Underwood typewriter is the creation of German-American inventor Franz X. Wagner. The name Underwood comes from John T. Underwood, an entrepreneur who bought the company early in its history. (The Underwood family was already a successful manufacturer of ribbons and carbon paper. Its said that when Remington decided to produce its own line of ribbons and carbon paper, Underwood responded, All right, then, well just build our own typewriter!) The scarcest and most valuable Underwoods are the No. 1 and No. 2. About 12,000 of these were made between 1896 and 1900. They are labeled Wagner Typewriter Co. on the back, and differ in subtle ways from later Underwoods. One difference is the absence of the see-saw ribbon color selector that you can see on the right side of the machine pictured at the top of this page. Underwood Models 3, 4, and 5 were made from late 1900 until late 1931 or early 1932. The No. 3 is a wide-carriage machine, the No. 4 types 76 characters, and the No. 5 types 84 characters. The No. 5 was the quintessential Underwood. Millions of these machines were used by secretaries, journalists, government officials, and writers throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Later Underwoods were superficially modernized, but retained the same basic mechanism. The name No. 5 was even given to some of these later typewriters, in honor of the model that made the companys fortune. The company was eventually bought by Olivetti, and in the early 1960s, the name Underwood finally disappeared from the typewriter world.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 18:07:07 +0000
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