Writing and Printing Once Happened in the Same Stroke
For about a century, the company sold a machine that wrote and printed in one motion. It filed for bankruptcy in 1995, and its name survives on labels and ribbon.
The Night Before It Was Due
Every September, the case came down from the closet shelf.
It was hard plastic with a handle on top and two latches that snapped open like a briefcase.
Someone checked the ribbon. Someone bought a fresh bottle of correction fluid at the drugstore.
Then the first term paper waited until the night before it was due, the way term papers always did.
The kitchen table became an office. The machine hummed when it was switched on, and every key landed with a sound you could hear from the hallway.
A typo on the last line of page nine meant page nine again.
The name stamped above the keys belonged to a typewriter company from upstate New York: Smith Corona.
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One Case Held Two Machines
The company began in 1886 in Syracuse, New York, when Lyman C. Smith and his brothers went into the typewriter business. In 1926 it merged with the Corona Typewriter Company, maker of a famous folding portable.
A typewriter looked like one machine. It was two.
The top half was a keyboard. The bottom half was a small printing press, striking metal type through an inked ribbon onto paper.
Both jobs happened in the same instant. There was no draft and no file. The page was the only copy, and it came out finished or it came out wrong.
People were not paying for typing. They were paying for a finished page, made at home, that looked like it came from an office.
The machine was bought once and kept for years. The ribbon was bought again and again.
In 1973 the company introduced a snap-in cartridge ribbon for its own machines. It ended the era of ink-stained fingers and kept the refills coming back to the same name.
The Only Printer in the House
The advantage was simple. Almost no household owned a printer.
If a family needed a clean page, a resume, a letter to the insurance company, a book report, the typewriter was the only way to make one without leaving home.
By the 1960s the main factory sat in Cortland, New York, a small city south of Syracuse.
In the early 1980s the company rebuilt its line around electronic typewriters, with about a fifth of the parts of the old electrics.
By 1985 Cortland was turning out roughly 15 percent more typewriters than it had in 1979, with about a quarter of the workers.
That year Americans were expected to buy about 2.2 million low-end typewriters. The company and its Japanese rival, Brother, each held about 40 percent of the American market.
It was also the first profitable year in five.
The Computer Pulled the Halves Apart
The personal computer did not type better. It separated the jobs.
Words now lived on a screen first. They could be moved, cut and rewritten a dozen times before anything touched paper.
Printing became the last step, handled by a separate box, often from a different company.
The company's answer was the personal word processor. It was a typewriter with a small screen and a memory, both halves still sharing one case. By 1989 it led that market.
The industry had forecast sales of about 1.2 million machines a year. The market peaked at about 250,000.
A machine that did both jobs at once had been the whole point. Now it was the compromise.
Putting each letter on paper at the moment it was typed was no longer a step anyone needed.
The Last Line Out of Cortland
In 1992 the company announced it would move manufacturing to Mexico to cut costs by about a tenth. Within a few years the last American production had left New York.
The company filed for bankruptcy in July 1995. Newspapers called it the last major American typewriter maker.
A second filing followed in May 2000. A private company bought what remained and moved it to Cleveland, Ohio.
What the Ribbon Carried Forward
The company is still in Cleveland. It no longer makes typewriters.
It makes thermal labels and the ribbons that print them, the kind stuck to boxes in warehouses and on doorsteps.
It has described itself as the largest thermal label maker in the country.
Every shipping label is a page printed by a machine with no keyboard.
The writing happens somewhere else, on a screen, long before the printer is asked to do anything.
The two halves never came back together.
The keyboard left with the computer.
The ribbon kept the name.
