Smith Corona

Based on Wikipedia: Smith Corona

Here's a company that made typewriters for a century, then rifles for a world war, then calculators that became obsolete overnight, then word processors that couldn't compete with computers—and somehow survived all of it. Today, Smith Corona makes barcode labels in Cleveland, Ohio. The journey from there to here is one of the strangest stories in American business.

The Smith Brothers and Their Double Keyboard

Four brothers named Smith—Lyman, Wilbert, Monroe, and Hurlbut—founded the Smith Premier Typewriter Company in 1886. Their first machine had a peculiar feature: a double keyboard. Instead of using a shift key to switch between uppercase and lowercase letters, the Smith Premier had separate keys for each. Capital A sat right next to lowercase a. The advertisements boasted "a key for every character!"

This wasn't actually innovative. The Remington Number 2, introduced nearly a decade earlier in 1877, had already figured out the shift key. But the Smith brothers were gunsmiths, not typewriter visionaries. Lyman had run a gun factory on South Clinton Street in Syracuse, New York, and that's where the first Smith-Premier typewriters were assembled starting in 1889.

The real inventor was an employee named Alexander T. Brown. Wilbert Smith financed the prototype, and the brothers handled manufacturing and sales. This pattern—engineers invent, businessmen capitalize—would define the typewriter industry for the next hundred years.

The Trust, the Betrayal, and the Odd Numbering

In 1893, Smith Premier joined the Union Typewriter Company, a trust based in Syracuse that included all the major players: Remington, Caligraph, Densmore, and Yost. A trust, in the language of that era, was essentially a cartel—competing companies joining forces to control prices and divide up the market.

The arrangement soured quickly. Union blocked Smith Premier from using a new technology called front strike, which let typists actually see the paper as they typed. Previous typewriters struck the paper from below or behind, so you couldn't see your work until you pulled the paper out. This was like writing blindfolded.

The Smith brothers quit in 1903 and started over with a new company: L. C. Smith & Bros. Typewriter Company. Their first product was called the Model No. 2. A full year later, they released the Model No. 1. Nobody knows why they did this. Perhaps they rushed Model 2 to market and only later finished Model 1. Perhaps it was a marketing gimmick. Either way, both machines were invented by Carl Gabrielson, and both could see the paper as you typed.

The Portable Revolution

Typewriters in 1900 were massive machines—heavy iron frames, glass keys, dozens of pounds of precision engineering. You set one on a desk and it stayed there. The idea of carrying a typewriter seemed absurd.

Then in 1906, the Rose Typewriter Company of New York City proved everyone wrong. Their portable typewriter was light enough to travel with. Smith bought them in 1909, renamed the company Standard Typewriter, and moved operations upstate to Groton, New York.

By 1914, Standard's Corona model had become so successful that the company changed its name to Corona Typewriter Company. Twelve years later, Corona merged with L. C. Smith & Bros. to form Smith Corona. The arrangement made sense: L. C. Smith made heavy office machines, Corona made portables. Together they covered the entire market.

From Typewriters to Rifles

When the United States entered World War II, Smith Corona stopped making typewriters entirely. In October 1942, their Syracuse factory began producing the M1903A3 Springfield rifle—the standard American infantry weapon. Remington Arms and High Standard Manufacturing provided technical assistance.

The details matter to collectors. Smith Corona manufactured 234,580 rifles, with serial numbers running from 3,608,000 to 3,707,999 and from 4,708,000 to 4,992,000. The company's name appears on the receiver ring. Most Smith Corona rifles used four-groove barrels made by High Standard, though about five thousand had six-groove barrels from Savage Arms blanks.

You can identify a Smith Corona bolt by its blued finish and the letter "X" stamped on top of the handle. Remington bolts were parkerized (a matte gray phosphate coating) and stamped with "R." Some Smith Corona extractors carry an "S" on the bottom. The butt plates have 10 or 11 checkered lines per inch, while Remington used 16.

Rifle production ended on February 19, 1944, when the military decided it had enough M1 Garand rifles. Many Smith Corona Springfields were never issued. Others served overseas, returned, and were refurbished in government armories—often with parts from Remington or Springfield Armory mixed in. Most sat in storage until the early 1960s, when they were sold to civilians through the Civilian Marksmanship Program.

The Electric Era

After the war, typewriter sales exploded. American offices were expanding. High schools taught typing as a vocational skill. Colleges required term papers. Smith Corona responded to demand for faster machines by introducing electric typewriters in 1955.

The difference was profound. A manual typewriter requires finger strength—you physically push each key down with enough force to swing a metal arm and strike an inked ribbon against paper. An electric typewriter does the striking for you. Touch a key lightly and the motor provides the force. Typing speed increased dramatically, and typists went home without sore fingers.

In 1957, Smith Corona introduced portable electric typewriters. These became essential tools for traveling writers and business people at first, then spread into homes. For the next three decades, generations of American students would write high school essays and college term papers on portable electrics.

The Conglomerate Years

The late 1950s and 1960s were the age of the conglomerate—the idea that a well-managed company could succeed in any business. Buy enough diverse operations and downturns in one sector would be offset by growth in another. The theory sounded elegant.

Smith Corona went shopping. In 1956, they bought Kleinschmidt Corporation. In 1958, they acquired Marchant Calculator, changing their corporate name to Smith-Corona Marchant, or SCM. That same year, they bought British Typewriters, Ltd., a company in West Bromwich, England, that made small portables.

The power carriage return arrived in 1960. Previously, when you reached the end of a line, you manually shoved a lever to return the carriage to the left margin. The power return did it automatically with the press of a button. That same year, SCM moved from Syracuse to Cortland, New York, and opened corporate headquarters on Park Avenue in Manhattan.

The acquisitions continued. In 1960, SCM entered the photocopier business with machines called Vivicopy. They bought St. Louis Microstatic Company in 1961, which led to the Model 33 Electrostatic Copier in 1962. Suddenly SCM was a major office equipment supplier—typewriters, calculators, and copiers all under one roof.

Then things got strange. In 1967, SCM bought Allied Paper Corporation for $33 million. That same year, they merged with Glidden, the paint company. Why would a typewriter manufacturer want to make paint? The official reason was that Glidden's research into paper coatings might help with copiers. The real reason was defensive: Glidden preferred SCM's offer to hostile bids from Greatamerica Corporation and General Aniline & Film. By merging, both companies became too large for hostile takeovers.

One product from 1967 captures the era's experimental spirit: the Letterpack. It was a handheld device for recording voice messages onto small tape cartridges. You'd record a message, mail the cartridge to someone, and they'd play it back on their own Letterpack. Cartridges lasted three, six, or ten minutes. A pair of handsets cost $70—about $640 in today's money.

In 1966, SCM bought Proctor Silex, which made toasters and can openers. By the mid-1960s, the company that started with four brothers in a Syracuse gun factory was selling typewriters, calculators, copiers, paper, paint, and kitchen appliances.

The Collapses

Electronic pocket calculators destroyed the mechanical calculator business almost overnight. In the early 1970s, a mechanical calculator cost hundreds of dollars, sat on a desk, and required training to operate. Then Texas Instruments and others flooded the market with electronic calculators that cost a fraction as much, fit in a pocket, and were simpler to use. There was no transition period, no gradual decline. The market simply vanished.

The typewriter business took longer to die but eventually suffered the same fate. First came competition from cheaper imports—Brother Industries, Nakajima, and Silver Seiko from Japan. The West Bromwich plant in England closed in 1981. Then personal computers with word processing software arrived.

Smith Corona tried to adapt. In 1985, they launched portable word processors—typewriters with small screens that let you see and edit a few lines before printing. They added electronic spelling functions. But these were incremental improvements to a dying technology. Word processing on a computer was simply better: unlimited editing, easy corrections, the ability to save and revise.

The conglomerate structure that was supposed to provide stability now made the company a target. In 1986, Hanson PLC—a British conglomerate specializing in buying and breaking up other conglomerates—took over SCM. Hanson immediately sold off divisions, including the Park Avenue headquarters, for significant profits.

The Final Acts

In 1995, Smith Corona moved its remaining typewriter manufacturing from Cortland to Mexico and cut 750 jobs. Sales kept declining. The company declared bankruptcy.

A second bankruptcy came in 2000. A private company bought what remained and moved everything to Cleveland, Ohio. Within five years, Smith Corona stopped manufacturing typewriters entirely. The typewriter supply business—ribbons, correction tape, accessories—continued to shrink.

Here's where the story takes its final unexpected turn. Smith Corona had decades of experience making thermal ribbons—the technology that transferred ink onto paper in their electronic typewriters. Thermal transfer also happens to be how barcode printers work. Instead of dying with the typewriter, Smith Corona pivoted to industrial labels.

Today, Smith Corona manufactures thermal labels, direct thermal labels, and thermal ribbons used in warehouses for barcode and shipping labels. Their competitors are Zebra Technologies, Uline, and various packaging companies. The Cleveland facility hums with production, but nothing being made there has anything to do with typing.

What Elizabeth McCracken Typed On

For writers of a certain generation, the Smith Corona portable wasn't just a tool—it was a companion. You learned its particular rhythm, the weight of its keys, the sound it made in an empty room late at night. Elizabeth McCracken, like thousands of other writers, produced drafts on these machines before computers made typewriters obsolete.

There's something lost in that transition. A typewritten page is final in a way that a Word document never is. Each keystroke commits ink to paper. Mistakes cost time and correction fluid. You think before you type, or you learn to think while typing, because going back is painful.

The Smith Corona portable taught a kind of writing discipline that's hard to replicate on a screen. You planned your sentences. You committed to your words. And when the page came out of the roller, it was done—a physical object you'd made with your hands and a machine designed by people who started out making guns and somehow ended up making instruments for literature.

That company now makes barcode labels. The typewriters that remain are in attics and antique shops, waiting for someone who wants to learn what it felt like to write before everything became infinitely editable.