Standard (or office or desktop) typewriters were designed and meant for use in a stationary location, most often an office where they would be used for 8 hours a day (or more), every day of the work week. These typewriters, often tipping the scales at 25-40 pounds each, were made to take the heavy abuse of a daily typing and could be “pounded out” for 3-4 years before they were often given overhauls or remanufactured.
Portable typewriters were designed for greater portability and began appearing in the 1920s and in much greater numbers into the 1970s and early 1980s. Their sales were geared toward people who needed greater portability or who didn’t need a machine out on a daily basis the way in which businesses did. They were most often sold in small rectangular cases to aid in their portability as well as storability in cars, trains, airplanes, or even one’s closet when they weren’t in use. They often ranged from 15-25 pounds including their case. Most of these machines were sold to individual users for occasional rather than daily typing, and they often had a broader range of styling and colors throughout the years to appeal to the individual buyers.
Ultraportable typewriters were designed for the typist or writer constantly on the go. They typically had a low profile, were lightweight (under 15 pounds with their cases), and obviously easy to carry around on a regular basis. These machines generally didn’t have all of the frills or features of their larger counterparts but obviously got the job done well enough. Traveling journalists were originally one of the primary audiences here.
Which is better?
The “best” typewriter is going to be a highly personal choice. It will be based in part on a wide variety of factors and variables including:
- the condition (does it function? how does it function? how clean is it? have parts been replaced, repaired, or restored? is it serviced? is it well adjusted?);
- what your preference is in terms of functionality (do you need tabs? bichrome ribbon? card fingers? typeface? other?);
- your personal touch preference (how it feels to you when you type on it, how you enjoy and appreciate it);
- the price;
- your personal aesthetic (do you like older machines, newer machines, something with a pop of color versus industrial office drab, crinkle paint versus flat, metal versus plastic, and a slew of other design sensibilities, etc.)
- how are you using your typewriters? Are you actively using them to write, collecting them, displaying them, or a combination of all of these?
Beyond these variables the three broad categories of typewriters will differentiate themselves along the lines of size, portability, and design, and manufacturing quality, functionality, and durability.
Size, Portability, and Design
Obviously the smaller and lighter a machine is, the easier it is to carry. The ultraportables and portables will win out here. They’re designed to be moved around easily: pop it out, write, put it away when you’re done. Collectors love them because you can store or display them easily on shelves or stack them up in closets or other storage spaces. You can keep several dozen machines on a shelving unit or tuck them away under a bed or behind a couch.
Standard machines are moveable, but require some additional reasonable effort. It’s more bothersome to pick up a Royal HH, especially with a wide carriage, and move it across the house from your office to your living room or out onto the porch. It’s equally as bothersome to swap one standard from a display shelf with another so you can use it. This doesn’t mean that it can’t be done, but you’re not as likely to want to do it every day. With standards you plan to actively use on a regular basis, you’re going to want a permanent desk or typewriter stand to keep it on. If you’re storing or displaying standards, they require dusting maintenance or covers and take up much more space as they aren’t easily stackable. Standards tend to be deeper and require a larger shelf if you’re going to display them that way. (Be sure to measure as most standard bookshelves aren’t deep enough for most typewriters if that’s how you intend to display them.)
If you’re a day-to-day typist with only one or two typewriters, these problems aren’t terribly bad. If you’re a collector with 5-10 machines these considerations start to become more bothersome. Once you’ve got more than 25 machines in your collection, you’re going to want to start making different choices and plans about storage and display versus use.
When it comes to design, there are a lot more choices of body styles, colors, materials, and variety in the portable and ultraportable space. Even if the internals of a portable were relatively stable, the body styles and shapes changed every year or two. By comparison, the standard typewriters meant for office use tended to have more limited color palates (if you could call industrial blacks, grays, and browns a palate) and body stylings.
As an example, in the Royal line of standard typewriters, almost nothing changed functionality-wise from the Royal Ten through the H (and related KH, KHM, and KHT variants), KMM, KMG, HH, FP, Empress, and 440. This covers from about 1912 to 1968 with the same internal mechanics. It was just small changes in the body styles which moved very slowly and were generally only offered in one or two colors until the more colorful options on the Royal FP were introduced in the very late 1950s.
Manufacturing, Quality, Functionality, and Durability
The level of manufacturing and quality when it comes to typewriter categories is a much more subtle subject as it’s not as immediately seen as the size and portability factors.
Because of their use cases, standard machines were built with more solid materials using higher manufacturing tolerances and usually better quality steel (or other materials). They were designed to be pounded on every day for 8 or more hours a day for years at a time. While some portables may have been used this way, most weren’t and surely almost no ultraportables were. Most of the serious abuse that smaller and lighter machines took was generally to their cases in being moved around as well as to the various body panels from being put into and out of their cases. (Smith-Corona portables are notorious for scratches on the rear panels from the rear metal cleat in their cases and some of the Remingtons’ front “chins” from the late 40s case designs.)
Standards use in business also meant that the alignments and visual outputs were held to higher standards than their lighter counterparts which were more often used for personal correspondence or draft quality work. This required better tolerances to allow for the abuse versus the expected type quality and alignment. The quality differences are less apparent on some of the 1950 American made Smith-Corona 5 series or the incredibly well engineered German Olympias and Swiss Hermes portables of the 1950s and 1960s.
The quality issue becomes rapidly more apparent into the 1970s and 1980s when cheaper materials and plastic were being used in portable typewriter manufacture as machines were being mass produced by only a few companies and primarily only out of Japan. These quality issues are now at their zenith in the new millennium with cheap typewriters made by the Shanghai Weilv Mechanism Company in China. Their new typewriter offerings under a variety of brand names including Rover, Royal Epoch, We R Memory Keepers, Royal Classic, and The Oliver Typewriter Company are widely known in the typewriter community for their dreadful quality control, cheap plastic, and both poor and unserviceable type alignment issues.
Because they had additional interior space and engineering capacity, standards also have better adjustment points for accommodating a variety of touch needs for the end user. At the time, most standards were generally serviced in-house by travelling repair people who had the ability to help typists adjust the machines to their particular touch needs. I’ve yet to run across a portable Smith-Corona whose primary touch control actually effectuated any difference at all, though they do have a variety of other more subtle/hidden touch controls which require advanced knowledge of the machines.
From a functionality perspective also differentiated across their use cases, most standard typewriters came with the full component of features offered in typewriters of their respective times. As an example, standards almost always came with tabulators and easier exchangeability of platens. Portable models often used tabulators as an additional mark up feature that cost more if you wanted them and platens were not easily swapped except on the highest end models and generally not until later into the 1950s. Here the range of subtle feature differences seen on the Smith-Corona 5 series portables is illustrative with the Clipper at the low end followed by the Sterling, the Silent, and the Silent Super at the highest end with the most features. On the German Olympias, the primary differentiating feature between the SM2, SM3, and SM4 is tabulator functionality and how easy it is to use if it’s available. Other features like bichrome ribbon, sturdier paper bales, paper table alignment features were considered optional on some portables and wholly missing on ultraportables which may have left them out completely. If you’re looking for a machine that has everything, usually a standard typewriter is your go-to choice. One of the few options on standard machines was a decimal tabulator for aligning accounting-based work.
While it may not have been as obvious in the midcentury, there are very subtle functionalities that standard typewriters offer to modern users who are looking for distraction-free writing affordances. While all typewriters have a greater level of distraction-free affordances in comparison to computers, standards offer two additional ones which may be wholly overlooked. As they’re less portable, they usually require a dedicated space for use which tends to call out to (or alternately guilt) the writer to sit down and concentrate on writing. The other is that the standard’s significantly larger size takes up a larger amount of area in your field of view while sitting at it. This tends to cut down on other visual distractions to the writer while sitting at the machine and working. Less distraction helps the concentration and, ideally, your ultimate output.
Finally, it bears a moment to look at typewriter serviceability. This is especially important now as the once ubiquitous typewriter repair shop doesn’t exist and aficionados and hobbyists do a lot of home repair. Since standard office machines saw near-constant use, their size made them much easier to get into and service, particularly by traveling repair technicians. Portables and ultraportables are much smaller and far more compact which requires more work and effort to open up and service when things go wrong or need repair. This size difference also means requiring a lot more patience and care as well as possibly smaller and/or different tools when doing service work on portables and ultraportables.
Hopefully this covers most of the finer points in choosing between the three broad types of typewriters for both the novice typist as well as the more practiced hands. If you’ve got questions or have noticed other subtleties in the differences between the three, I’d love to hear them.
Matthew Weaver
