A sewing-machine maker that branched out.

Erika was a product of Seidel & Naumann, a Dresden engineering firm. German Wikipedia, citing the Neue Deutsche Biographie, says Bruno Naumann opened a small precision-mechanics workshop in Dresden on 5 August 1868 and by the following year was making sewing machines under licence from the American firm Wheeler & Wilson. A merchant named Seidel joined as a partner in 1869, and the business traded as Seidel & Naumann from 1870; Seidel left in 1876, but the name was kept.

In 1883 Naumann bought land on the Hamburger Straße in Dresden’s Friedrichstadt district and built a large factory there, and on 6 May 1886 the firm became a joint-stock company. The new site made room for other products. German Wikipedia records bicycles under the Germania name from around 1892, music automatons from 1887, speedometers for locomotives, licence-built Laurin & Klement motorcycles from 1901 and a car of its own design in 1905, which ran in the Herkomer competition that year. A plan to build its own motor vehicles was later dropped, although a 1908 article still mentioned Germania motorcycles and luggage tricycles made under the Laurin & Klement licence, German Wikipedia says. Typewriters arrived under the Ideal name, which could be fitted with tabulators and different keyboards to order, and went into series production in 1900.

Naumann also set up welfare schemes for his staff, German Wikipedia says, including a factory sickness fund, support funds for long illness and bereavement, and invalidity funds, and the workshops had cloakrooms, washrooms and dining rooms. The company name changed with its legal form: from Nähmaschinenfabrik und Eisengießerei vormals Seidel & Naumann to AG vormals Seidel & Naumann in 1900, and to Seidel & Naumann AG in 1940.

From 1872 the firm built high-arm sewing machines on the newer Singer pattern. Its foundry moved to a new plant at Heidenau, built in 1911 and 1912, and in 1914 it took over the Meissen sewing-machine maker Biesolt & Locke. The company later added adding and calculating machines, bookkeeping machines from 1925 and optical profile grinders from 1932, while bicycle production ended in 1938, German Wikipedia says.

A portable with a family name.

The Erika appeared in 1910: a light portable typewriter, Erika No. 1, named after Bruno Naumann’s granddaughter, Erika Naumann, German Wikipedia says. The first model had only three rows of keys, with three characters on each type. Seidel & Naumann applied to the Imperial Patent Office to protect the Erika name for typewriters on 28 January 1910, and the mark was registered on 3 August 1910. For export the machine also carried other names: Bijou in Britain and Gloria in France.

A later feature that German Wikipedia picks out is the Erika’s segment shift, which moves the type segment rather than the carriage when switching between lower and upper case, and so needs less force from the typist. The factory also made special versions in smaller numbers, including documentation typewriters and machines for writing braille. In East German times the works also ran its own vocational school for apprentices.

The Dresden works suffered heavy damage in the air raids of 1944 and 1945. In 1946 Seidel & Naumann was expropriated in the Soviet occupation zone, and the factory passed into state ownership as part of VEB Schreibmaschinenwerk Dresden, which in 1951 also absorbed the production equipment of the former Clemens Müller company. From 1979 it belonged to the VEB Kombinat Robotron, East Germany’s computing and office-equipment combine. German Wikipedia says typewriters were made at the Dresden works until 1990, mostly still under the traditional Erika name, and that from 1965 the Rechenelektronik Glashütte plant made some of the assemblies.

The old company itself had a quiet end in the West: in early 1963 its legal seat was moved to Düsseldorf and liquidation began, German Wikipedia records.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all typewriter names: Royal, Remington, Olympia, Erika, Groma, Torpedo and Optima. Typewriter brands in general sit at many different points in the history of office machines, from factories that carried a founder’s name to names that passed between owners, changed countries or outlived the machines that made them familiar, and a single nameplate can turn up on an office desk, a portable in a case or a collector’s shelf.

A typewriter brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single machine than by a nameplate, a decal and the factory behind it, because the company that owned the name may have been sold, divided, renamed or closed long after its last typewriter left the line. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owned it over time, where its machines were actually made and what became of the name.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what a company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its typewriters were made and how its nameplates changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

The end of a Dresden name.

The Erika did not survive German reunification for long. After privatisation in 1990 the business became robotron Erika GmbH, which stopped production in 1991 and filed for liquidation in 1992, German Wikipedia says. Trademark protection for Erika ran out in 2004, and in 2005, after 95 years, the mark was deleted from the register.

One branch of the name lasted longer. Braille typewriters built to the system of Oskar Picht had been registered as Erika-Picht since 1975, and German Wikipedia says they were still being produced in 2010 by multi-tech gGmbH in Dresden.

The factory building on the Hamburger Straße found new uses. It was bought in 1991, served Dresden’s city administration as its technical town hall from 1992 until the offices moved out by 2010, and after renovation housed refugees from 2015, according to German Wikipedia.

For a design guide, Erika shows how a single product name — a family first name on a portable case — can outlast the company that coined it and the state that nationalised it. Compare Groma, another East German typewriter maker, and Optima, the Erfurt works that also ended up in the Robotron combine. For this guide we use a deep green, a cream and a muted red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Erika Typewriters’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.