VISIBLE TYPEWRITER ADVERTISING GALLERY
all illustrations courtesy Peter Weil
Peter Weil sent me a large amount of varied advertising materials during the work that eventually produced the feature concerning "Visible Writing Machines" on this site.  Some of that material was used there, and a great deal more is now presented in this special gallery.  The advertising materials can take many forms, including magazine and newspaper ads, trade advertising catalogs, cards and even postage stamps.  Readers are advised to consult both the article on Visible Writing Machines and the wholly separate website of the European Typewriter Project for information on various machines.  On the left, we begin with a 1910 postage stamp displaying the German-made Continental.
Front and rear of 1895 Daugherty advertising trade card.
On the right, an interesting 1910 stamp showing both the Ideal (standard) on the left, and the Erika (portable) on the right, both manufactured by the same firm (Seidel & Naumann, Germany) -- the stamp advertises a distributor in Nurnberg.
On the left, a very early trade catalog illustration (from the front cover) showing the L. C. Smith & Bros. No. 2 machine.  The title of the catalog (or brochure) is "Jeweled," referring to the patented ball-bearing type bars employed in this machine.  Like a number of other early frontstrike machines, the L. C. Smith did not employ a type alignment fork; it relied on the strength of its type-bar bearings to preserve alignment.  Some early ads refer to this machine's type-bar bearings as the "patented Gardner ball bearing design."
On the left, an impressive illustration for the French-made M.A.P. machine, showing various peoples around the world reaching for the machine.  The phrase "mon reve" translates roughly as "my dream."  Circa 1921.

Below, a postal stamp from about 1920 showing the German Mercedes and an attractively rendered typist.
On the right, a quite self-explanatory advertisement for the Monarch, which displays a Monarch No. 1.  Note that the Monarch employed no type alignment at the print point, just as the L. C. Smith seen earlier and states this clearly.  The advertisement is from 1905, immediately after the introduction of the machine.

Below, another early US-built visible, the Oliver No. 2 is shown along with ad copy mentioning the Oliver having won a gold medal at an exposition in Paris, and also that it had won top honors at an event in Omaha.  Further:  "Adopted by largest Railroad systems and most important business houses in Europe and America."  This ad dates from 1902 -- the time when the Oliver's future was seemingly expanding at a never-ending rate.
On the left, a catalog cover illustration showing the Reliance Visible.  This illustration is different from that shown in the article on this site for the Reliance; note that the cover indicates copyright by Montgomery-Ward.  Peter Weil's catalog states clearly the ownership of Reliance by Montgomery-Ward, a fact hinted at strongly but not openly stated in the earlier version we have here.


On the right, a magazine ad from 1915 showing the then-new Remington Junior.  This machine was manufactured at the Smith Premier plant and employed rear-mounted ribbon spools like that of the Smith Premier No. 10.
On the left, an impressive 1910 catalog rendering (probably an airbrushed photo) of the Remington Model 10 Standard.  This was Remington Typewriter Company's first visible machine, and while it differed in this aspect it was still in all other aspects a Remington and included many similar operational features.  This machine is labeled as having "Carriage A," which in Remington parlance is the standard carriage.  On some machines of the Union pantheon, carriage width is noted somewhere on the machine with the model number (ie the Smith Premier 10-A as an example.)
On the left, an advertisement from 1909 for the Royal Standard typewriter.  Many people forget, today, that the Standard was a lower-priced machine and the short-lived Grand a fully competitive "hundred dollar" machine.  The machine shown here evolved through model 5, essentially, until replaced by the much more conventional Royal Standard No. 10 (seen below in a postal stamp from Europe.)