Four brothers, a gun factory and a double keyboard.

Smith-Corona grew out of two typewriter businesses in upstate New York. English Wikipedia dates its origins to 1886, when Lyman C. Smith and his brothers Wilbert, Monroe and Hurlbut established the Smith Premier Typewriter Company in Syracuse. The Smith Premier machine, invented by an employee, Alexander T. Brown, was being made in Lyman Smith’s gun factory on South Clinton Street by 1889, the same article says. It used a double keyboard, with separate keys for capitals and small letters, and its advertisements promised “a key for every character!” according to the History Center in Tompkins County.

In 1893 Smith Premier joined the Union Typewriter Company, a Syracuse-based trust that also took in Remington, Caligraph, Densmore and Yost, English Wikipedia says, citing Bruce Bliven’s 1954 history The Wonderful Writing Machine. When the trust blocked the brothers from using a new front-strike design that let typists see the page as they typed, they left, and in 1903 founded L. C. Smith & Bros. Typewriter Company. The new firm launched with the Model No. 2; the Model No. 1 followed a year later. Both were invented by Carl Gabrielson.

The other half of the name came from portables. The Rose Typewriter Company of New York City had marketed a portable machine in 1906; in 1909 it was bought out, renamed the Standard Typewriter Company and moved to Groton, New York, the Syracuse Journal reported in 1939. After the success of its Corona model it became the Corona Typewriter Company in 1914.

Office machines, portables and a rifle contract.

The two firms came together in 1926, when L. C. Smith & Bros., which made office typewriters, united with Corona, which made portables, English Wikipedia says, citing the company’s own history. The combined name was usually written Smith-Corona, with a hyphen; the present company styles it Smith Corona.

During the Second World War the Syracuse plant turned to weapons. From October 1942 Smith-Corona built M1903A3 Springfield rifles, with help from Remington Arms and High Standard, and production stopped on 19 February 1944, according to Bruce Canfield, writing in American Rifleman in April 2010. Rifles from the contract carry the Smith-Corona name on the receiver ring.

After the war the company went back to typewriters for offices and homes. Captions in English Wikipedia date the Speedline portables to 1939–1948 and the Super 5 series to 1949–1960. The company introduced electric typewriters in 1955 and electric portables in 1957, according to its own history; English Wikipedia describes the portable electric as a tool for generations of American high-school and college students.

Diversification followed. Smith-Corona bought the Kleinschmidt Corporation in 1956 and Marchant Calculators in 1958, becoming Smith-Corona Marchant, or SCM — the New York Times reported the planned merger on 7 April 1958 — and in the same year bought British Typewriters Ltd of West Bromwich, in England, which made small portables. In 1960 it moved its typewriter operations from Syracuse to Cortland, New York, and its headquarters to Park Avenue in Manhattan.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all typewriter names: Olivetti, Smith-Corona, Underwood, Hermes, Imperial, Facit and Triumph-Adler. Typewriter brands in general sit at many different points in their histories, from names that moved on to computers and office equipment to marques that closed their factories long ago and now live on mainly through collectors, archives and old advertising.

A typewriter brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single machine than by a nameplate, a decal, a case and the advertising around it, because the company behind the name may have merged, changed hands, moved production or stopped making typewriters altogether. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns the name now, where its machines were made, and when typewriter production ended.

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

From SCM to thermal labels.

In 1962 the company renamed itself SCM Corporation and, English Wikipedia says, adopted a tribar SCM logo. Through the 1960s it spread into photocopiers, the Proctor Silex appliance business, paper and, in 1967, Glidden paints. In 1973 it opened a typewriter plant in Singapore and introduced a cartridge ribbon that spared typists from threading spools by hand.

Cheaper imported machines and then the personal computer wore the typewriter business down. The West Bromwich plant closed in 1981, and in 1986 SCM was taken over by the British group Hanson, which sold off several divisions. In May 1995 the New York Times reported that Smith Corona was cutting jobs as it moved its remaining typewriter manufacturing from Cortland to Mexico, and in July 1995 the paper reported its filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. A second bankruptcy followed in 2000, when the business was sold to a private company, the New York Times reported on 24 May 2000.

English Wikipedia, drawing on the company’s own history, says the new owners moved typewriter and supplies manufacturing to Cleveland, Ohio, and that within five years the company had stopped making typewriters. As the supplies trade shrank, it applied its ribbon and thermal know-how to labels, entering the industrial ribbon and label market in late 2010. Today Smith Corona makes thermal-transfer labels, direct-thermal labels and thermal ribbons, used mainly for barcode and shipping labels, at its Cleveland facility. It no longer makes typewriters.

For a design guide, Smith-Corona shows how a typewriter name can survive by moving to the consumables that once fed the machine. Compare Underwood, another American typewriter maker of the same era, and Olivetti, one of its named competitors in the electronic-typewriter years. For this guide we use a navy, a cream and a brass with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Smith-Corona’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.