An electrical giant’s typewriter.

Olympia began inside the electrical company AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft) in Berlin. German Wikipedia says AEG asked the engineer Friedrich von Hefner-Alteneck to develop a typewriter, and he produced the Mignon, an inexpensive index typewriter in which the user picked each letter with a pointer, aimed at tradespeople and private households as well as offices. On 15 August 1903 sales of the machine were handed to the Union Schreibmaschinen-Gesellschaft m.b.H., the company English Wikipedia treats as the start of Olympia Werke.

In 1923 typewriter production was concentrated at Erfurt, in the buildings of a former armaments works, German Wikipedia says. From 1930 the business traded as Europa Schreibmaschinen AG and its products took the internationally protected trademark “Olympia”; the last Mignon, of 1933, was sold as the Olympia-Plurotyp. On 31 December 1936 the company was renamed Olympia Büromaschinenwerke AG.

During the Second World War the Erfurt works made armaments, German and English Wikipedia say, including Enigma cipher machines, which for secrecy carried a manufacturing code rather than the company name. US artillery badly damaged the plant between 11 and 13 April 1945. After Erfurt was handed to the Soviet occupation authorities on 3 June 1945, what remained became a state-owned enterprise that went on making typewriters as VEB Optima.

From Bielefeld to the North Sea coast.

The western Olympia was rebuilt by people who left Erfurt. German Wikipedia says that at the end of June 1945 staff around the board chairman Joachim Wussow went west with design documents, on the instructions of AEG’s management. After about a month in Burgkunstadt in Upper Franconia they moved in August 1945 to Bielefeld, founding the Bielefelder Schreibmaschinen Werke in rented rooms at the headquarters of Dr. August Oetker KG.

Looking for a better site, the board found a former navy equipment depot at Roffhausen, near Wilhelmshaven. The military government granted a production permit on 1 October 1946, and typebar typewriters went into production. At the end of 1947 the company was renamed Orbis Schreibmaschinen-Werke, and its SM series of machines began in 1948, German Wikipedia says.

Two companies now had a claim to the old name. German Wikipedia records that in 1949 the right to the Olympia company and brand name was decided in favour of the Roffhausen firm; the Erfurt works became Optima Büromaschinenwerk Erfurt and sold its machines as Optima. Roffhausen traded as Olympia Werke West GmbH from 1950 and as Olympia Werke AG from June 1954.

The company spread across north-west Germany. A plant at Leer in East Frisia, opened in 1957, specialised in portable and small typewriters. Olympia took a stake in the calculating-machine maker Brunsviga of Braunschweig in 1957 and bought it outright two years later, and in 1959 Roffhausen began building SGE electric typewriters. By 1962 AEG held the whole share capital. In 1969 Olympia took over the typewriter maker Alpina Büromaschinen in Kaufbeuren, and German Wikipedia lists production abroad in Belfast, Mexico City, Santiago de Chile and Toronto.

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.

A brand name without a factory.

Electronics changed the business. From 1964 Olympia built RAE electronic calculators with Nixie-tube displays, and in the early 1970s it turned to a cooperation with Matsushita on calculators, German Wikipedia says. Copiers and other equipment were bought in from suppliers such as Agfa. Computing came and went: in 1960 the company’s electrical laboratory showed a small punched-tape computer that never went into production because AEG concentrated its computer work at Telefunken. When the Hanover fair opened its new CeBIT hall (Centrum der Büro- und Informationstechnik) in 1970, Olympia presented the Multiplex 80, a computer-controlled data-capture system, which had already been installed at Deutsche Bank in Hamburg in 1969. AEG, by then owned by Daimler-Benz, continued as the parent of what had become AEG Olympia AG.

In December 1991 the parent companies decided to withdraw from office communications and close the Roffhausen site. Employees campaigned under the slogan “Olympia – das Herz der Region muss weiterleben” (“Olympia – the heart of the region must live on”), but the works closed at the end of 1992. The site became the Technologie-Centrum Nordwest, a business park for spun-off units and new firms, where volunteers run a small Olympia museum that can be visited by appointment.

The name outlived the factory. German Wikipedia says the sales company, with the Olympia brand, its international sales network and the Mexico City plant, was taken over on 1 July 1994 by the Hong Kong-based Elite Group and continued as Olympia International Holdings Ltd. In Germany the brand rights sit with Olympia Business Systems Vertriebs GmbH, which merged early in 2019 with the Wiesbaden office-supplies wholesaler GENIE to form GO Europe GmbH, based in Hattingen. Both still carry the Olympia name. The machines also have a literary afterlife: Paul Auster’s short book The Story of My Typewriter, illustrated by the painter Sam Messer, is about his old Olympia.

For a design guide, Olympia shows how a typewriter name can survive a split country, a closed factory and changes of owner. Compare Optima, the Erfurt works that lost the Olympia name, and Triumph-Adler, another West German office-machine maker. For this guide we use a navy, a steel grey and a paper white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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