New Type for Best Print

It’s obvious that no matter how good a typewriter might be – that is to say, no matter how good the design, the condition, the maintenance – it’s really no better than its printing.  No one wanted any correspondence coming out of an office to look sloppy, and bad or dirty type on a machine could easily lead to that appearance if allowed.

This is exactly why we see the 1924 image above; in the plant of the Shipman-Ward Manufacturing Company, we see founder E. W. S. Shipman inspecting the work of one of his craftsmen who is soldering new type onto the type bars of Underwood machines deep in the process of being completely rebuilt.  The technician has a torch in his right hand, supplied by lines visible on the wall (with cutoff valves); a type bar is being held in a fixture or jig on his bench while a new type slug is being applied.  More type bars are hanging on pegs at his station, on the wall board.  Shipman himself, having been in the industry for many years, truly knew that the print work of his machines was perhaps the final aspect a buyer could or would analyze and knew it had to be perfect.

Of course, such an operation wasn’t always due to damage; many rebuilders offered special keyboards (such as mathematical) or foreign language keyboards, and these might often have required the operation seen here (as well as the application of the appropriate ‘keyboard’, or set of keytop legends to match the type slugs.)

All New Rubber

Here we see E. W. S. Shipman, founder of Shipman-Ward Manufacturing Company, inspecting the work being performed to put all new platen rubber and feed roller rubber into his company’s rebuilt Underwood typewriters.

The company had originally begun as Typewriter Emporium, but the early 1920’s saw a change in name to Shipman-Ward (along with new co-owners) and a move to rebuilding only Underwood machines.  Previously, the company had rebuilt all make and manner of machines; the trend generally in large rebuilders was to steadily reduce the variety of machines taken in.

The open windows of the plant – one of the largest, if not the largest typewriter rebuilding factories ever built – add to the atmosphere of the photo, as of course does the business and work clothing styles of the day.   Unlike some rebuilders’ facilities, this plant was large, roomy and well-lit.

Take ’em apart

When a rebuilder of typewriters received and categorized machines to be rebuilt, the first serious step in the remanufacturing process was disassembly.  Here, we see the disassembly department of the Shipman-Ward Manufacturing Company in 1924.  E. W. S. Shipman, founder of the company (originally “Typewriter Emporium,” founded in 1892) is standing beside one of his technicians performing the disassembly of an Underwood standard machine.  By this date, Shipman-Ward was handling the Underwood exclusively.

In large factory settings such as this firm’s, the disassembly was performed by a bank of dedicated persons; the parts and the frames were then passed on to different divisions for special work. Badly worn parts were immediately discarded.  This differed considerably from the method used in the early years of factory rebuilding in which one technician handled each machine from start to finish.  The general factory method was almost wholly adopted prior to the outbreak of the First World War; only local dealers who rebuilt machines had a technician handle each machine all the way through – a practice of course that holds today as the factory rebuilding of typewriters is long gone.

Below, an example from a 1924 Shipman-Ward catalog showing a finished rebuilt Underwood No. 4.  The only way to tell this machine from a factory Underwood is the insert in the right-hand shift key.