A machine shop, a flatbed and a move to Hartford.

Royal began in a machine shop in Brooklyn, New York. English Wikipedia says Edward B. Hess and Lewis C. Myers founded the Royal Typewriter Company there in January 1904, and the company that carries the name today also gives 1904 as its founding year. A separate English Wikipedia article on the company’s factory gives 1906 instead. According to the company article, Hess and Myers showed a prototype to the financier Thomas Fortune Ryan the following year, and he took financial control of the business.

The first Royal on sale was the Royal Standard, in March 1906. English Wikipedia describes it as a “flatbed” machine, and credits the early design with a ball-bearing carriage rail, a new paper feed, a lighter typebar action and full visibility of the line being typed.

Brooklyn was soon too small. Royal bought land in Hartford, Connecticut, and began manufacturing there in 1908, the company article says; the factory article dates the oldest part of the building to 1907 and the move to 1909, crediting Charles Cook, who had acquired a controlling interest. Hartford was also home to the rival Underwood company.

The model line followed quickly. The Royal 5 of 1911 kept the flatbed layout, and the Royal 10 of 1914 moved Royal to the upright layout, with bevelled glass panes in its sides. A portable followed in 1926, the same year Royal introduced the Roytype name for its ribbons and carbon paper.

Radio, an airplane and a gold-plated portable.

Royal sold its typewriters with spectacle. To launch the portable, English Wikipedia says, Royal’s president George Edward Smith secured sponsorship of the radio broadcast of the Dempsey–Tunney boxing match on 23 September 1926. In August 1927 Smith bought a Ford-Stout trimotor airplane, known as the Royal Airtruck, which dropped crated typewriters to dealers by parachute to show how rugged the machines were.

The best-remembered Royals are the Quiet De Luxe portables, made from 1939 to 1959 with a break during the Second World War, English Wikipedia says. In the war Royal turned its factories over to military work, including machine guns, rifles and propellers, and did not return to full-time typewriter production until September 1945. Two post-war portables — the second Quiet De Luxe of 1948 and the second Companion of 1950 — are credited in English Wikipedia to the industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss. A Quiet De Luxe offered in a choice of six colours followed in 1955, and the Futura in 1958.

Writers kept the name visible. In 1947 Royal made a small run of gold-plated Quiet De Luxe machines, and English Wikipedia, citing The New York Times in 2013 and a collection of Fleming’s letters, says Ian Fleming used one. The same article names Ernest Hemingway as a Quiet De Luxe user and John Steinbeck as a Royal user.

The engineering was also defended in court: in 1947, English Wikipedia says, Royal won patent suits against Remington and L. C. Smith & Corona. Royal introduced an electric typewriter in February 1950, and from 1953 it also made typewriters at a factory in Leiden, in the Netherlands; the small Royalite portable of 1955 came from there, while the Royal Diana of 1953 was made in Mannheim, Germany.

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.

From Royal McBee to Royal Consumer Information Products.

Ownership changed many times after the war. In 1954 Royal merged with McBee, a maker of accounting machines and supplies, to form Royal McBee. Litton Industries’ stockholders approved its acquisition of Royal McBee in December 1964, the deal closed in March 1965, and Litton restored the Royal Typewriter name, English Wikipedia says. Through its Royal division Litton announced plans in October 1966 to acquire the English maker Imperial, and in January 1969 it bought the German maker Triumph-Adler.

Hartford manufacturing ended in 1972, when the production facility closed, according to the English Wikipedia article on the factory; much of the empty complex burned in 1992 and the remains were demolished. In March 1979 Volkswagen announced it would take a majority stake in Triumph-Adler, with Royal included, and in April 1986 Olivetti announced plans to buy Triumph-Adler and Royal from Volkswagen.

Royal became a private American company again in September 2004, English Wikipedia says, and today trades as Royal Consumer Information Products, Inc. The company says it is headquartered in Bridgewater, New Jersey, and describes itself as rooted in the Royal Typewriter Company. It says its range now includes cash registers, shredders, postal scales, calculators and laminators, and its website lists typewriters and retro products among its categories. From 1 November 2021 it became a licensee for HP-branded calculators in the Americas, and in March 2024 its operations were divided, with a separate Royal Consumer Information Products de Mexico serving Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and Latin America.

For a design guide, Royal shows how a typewriter name can outlast its factory by moving from machine to brand. Compare Underwood, its Hartford rival, and Triumph-Adler, the German maker that shared its owners under Litton, Volkswagen and Olivetti. For this guide we use a royal blue, a gilt and a platen cream with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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