Oliver Typewriter

Oliver typewriter was formed in 1895 and produced a million machines. Thomas Oliver was a Methodist minister in his younger days and designed a typewriter to improve the legibility of his sermons. He was awarded a patent in 1891 and found investors willing to finance manufacture. On a trip to Chicago, Oliver met Delavan Smith, a businessman and philanthropist who was enthusiastic about the machine, bought out the other investors and financed expansion. The Oliver is a Down Strike machine, with keys arranged in two rows above the platen, rather than coming from below as previous machines had done. This gives early models their distinctive look and has two advantages:

• The typist could see what was actually being typed, which was not possible with previous designs.
• The keys gave a hard strike against the paper, which was better for multi-part paper and stencil cutting.

Visual typing was a strong sales feature and other manufacturers began to reorganise parts of their designs to provide this. So the Oliver machine influenced designs to come. Oliver was influential in another way, Charles and Howard Krum used an Oliver typewriter as the basis for their early teleprinters.

Oliver marketed machines in various ways over time as competition increased

• From 1899 the company encouraged customers to become local sellers. Sales were made door to door and after 1905 on credit.
• From 1910 on the local salesman were dropped an the $100 price of machines was halved by eliminating sales commission. Sales increased.
• In 1917 they shifted to mail order sales.

Thomas Oliver died of a heart attack aged 56 in 1909

In 1921-22 A minor recession meant the repossession of typewriters from customers. By 1926 there were financial problems and the board voted to liquidate the company rather than borrow money.

British Oliver

The assets were bought by investors who formed British Oliver Typewriter Company. British Oliver were based in Croydon and traded until 1959.

The new company were tempted by new designs. In 1931 the company dropped the 3-row original design for a 4-row German design called the Fortuna, then in 1935 they added the Halda-Norden design. However at the outbreak of war the British Government placed large orders for the old 3-row Oliver design.

In 1958 British Oliver bought Byron Typewriter of Nottingham, previously Bar-Lock. They also aimed to licence the Oliver name. A problem seems to have been that by 1959 they had no worthwhile technology or patents that others much needed (a peril of licensing designs). In 1959 the company collapsed. The Croydon works now belongs to a removal company.

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