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One final irony is that while the first portables, the Blick Featherweight of 1909 and Standard Folding of 1908, weighed only 5 pounds and could be held in one hand, the Smith Corona Electric Portable weighed a whopping 24 pounds -- more than desk typewriters made from cast iron, like the Hammond and the Imperial A. The years of striving to reduce weight to a minimum had all been in vain. |
The claim of
this 1957 Ad campaign was dramatic; "Just touch the keys and you get
perfect letters - electrically!" But does "perfect letters" mean perfect character
impressions? Or it does it mean that the new futuristic electric
typewriter is so clever it can almost type your letters for you? The ambiguity
seems to be have been left in deliberately for the benefit of the scientifically
naive 1950s audience at which it was aimed. If the students, housewives, and
self-employed business people, who were Smith Corona's target, believed they
were buying some kind of intelligent computing machine, then so much the
better! The possibility of putting an electric motor into a portable
typewriter was high on the development agenda of every manufacturer
since the 1930s but the same factor had deterred them every time the subject
came up for discussion in the boardroom - cost. Electrifying the
typewriter would confer little real benefit but would make the machine heavier
and much
more expensive. Would domestic and small business users want to pay for
such luxury? In 1957, Smith Corona decided to bite the bullet and find
out. It produced the world's first electric portable in two versions: the
5TE with a 10-inch carriage and the more expensive 5LE with a 12-inch carriage,
shown here. Both cost significantly more than manual machines, although
they were cheaper than a manual desk machine - a fact that Smith Corona made use of
in its ads. In
the event, the buying public welcomed the electric portable, just as they had
welcomed the folding portable 40 years earlier and within a few years, every major
manufacturer had followed Smith-Corona's lead by introducing their own electric
portables. Although manual portables continued to be made in numbers for a
decade or more, it was the beginning of the end.