Two brothers and a bicycle works in Frankfurt.

Torpedo was the brand name of the Torpedo-Werke AG of Frankfurt am Main, a company that German Wikipedia describes as a maker of bicycles and office machines. Its roots were in two-wheelers. German Wikipedia says the firm was founded in 1896 by the brothers Peter and Heinrich Weil as Peter Weil & Co, starting in a hall in Rödelheim. The bicycles, assembled there from parts, were sold as Weil-Räder and Torpedo-Räder, so the Torpedo name was in use before the company made a single typewriter.

The small exhibition “Historische Bürotechnik” of the Arnold Betzwieser collection, whose page on the early Torpedo machines draws on Leonhard Dingwerth’s 2008 history of German typewriter factories among other sources, traces the company’s names. It says Peter Weil & Co. was soon renamed Weilwerke GmbH, later became a joint-stock company, and finally took the name Torpedo-Werke AG. German Wikipedia dates the conversion into an Aktiengesellschaft to 30 November 1921.

Bicycles stayed in the range for decades. German Wikipedia says that from 1938 they were built in a new works on the Hanauer Landstraße, while office-machine production stayed in Rödelheim, and that the firm briefly made a motorcycle from 1929 to about 1931. Two later uses of the name are separate stories: German Wikipedia notes that the Torpedo freewheel hub was made by Fichtel & Sachs, not by the Torpedo-Werke, and that bicycles sold as Torpedo by the department-store chain Karstadt from the mid-1980s came from suppliers with no connection to the original works.

A Neu-Isenburg design renamed Torpedo.

The typewriters began with a takeover of someone else’s design. German Wikipedia says production started in 1906 with a model taken over from Johann Völker & Co. of Neu-Isenburg, which was then developed further and sold under the name Torpedo. The Betzwieser exhibition gives a slightly different account: it says the predecessor was the Hassia, built from 1904 by Jean Voelker & Co. in Neu-Isenburg, and that its manufacture was continued from 1907 by Peter Weil & Co. as the Torpedo. It names Hermann Wasem as the Hassia’s designer, who reworked it into the Torpedo 2, and credits Karl Winterling, previously at Adler, with the Torpedo 4 of 1910, a front-strike typebar machine replaced by the Torpedo 5 in 1911.

Office machines became the company’s main business. Frankfurt baut auf, a documentation of Frankfurt’s postwar reconstruction archived in 2012, says the Torpedo-Werke had become known in 1927 for introducing segment shift, and German Wikipedia names the machine as the Torpedo Standard, which could be supplied with carriages of different lengths. German Wikipedia adds that Torpedo also made booking machines, from 1932 with a mechanical calculating unit.

Control of the company passed to the United States. German Wikipedia and Frankfurt baut auf both say that the majority of the shares had been held since 1931 by Remington Rand Inc. of New York; the Betzwieser exhibition dates Remington Rand’s majority stake to 1932, as part of a restructuring after the slump that began in 1929. Frankfurt baut auf says director F. H. Harms took over the management in 1934. Remington Rand itself, English Wikipedia says, had been formed through a merger in 1927.

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.

Bombed, rebuilt, and closed in 1967.

The Second World War destroyed both Frankfurt works. Frankfurt baut auf says the bicycle factory on the Hanauer Landstraße was wrecked in the heavy air raids of October 1943 and that bombs hit the Rödelheim main works on 29 January 1944. The Betzwieser exhibition adds that a branch works had been set up at Zeist in the Netherlands in 1942. Production moved temporarily to an alternative plant at Groß-Karben, where, according to Frankfurt baut auf, small typewriters were being made again in 1945, while the Rödelheim works resumed production in the course of 1946.

The 1950s brought a broad range. Frankfurt baut auf says a newly acquired plant at Alzenau in Lower Franconia began making two-wheelers in 1952, including mopeds from September 1953, that small-typewriter production moved back to Rödelheim at the end of 1952, and that the company let its two-wheeler production run out in 1956 to concentrate on office machines. German Wikipedia names engine suppliers for the motorcycles as Fichtel & Sachs and Ilo. In 1953, the same documentation says, the firm also added single-card and two-card automatic feeders for its booking machines.

The end came with the move to electric machines. German Wikipedia says that only a small share of the profits from mechanical typewriters went, and late, into developing electric ones, and that Torpedo’s first electric typewriters proved immature and expensive. The Betzwieser exhibition says the company could no longer compete abroad in office machines, made heavy losses from 1961, and ended production in 1967; German Wikipedia also gives 1967.

For a design guide, Torpedo Typewriters shows a name that moved from bicycles to office machines inside one Frankfurt company, and then spent its last decades under American majority ownership. It belongs beside its parent’s typewriter line Remington and the German office-machine maker Triumph-Adler. For this guide we use steel blue, signal red and cream with an industrial sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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