Oliver Typewriter Company

Thomas Oliver was born in Woodstock, Ontario, Canada, on August 1, 1852. Having become interested in religion, Oliver moved to Monticello, Iowa, after the death of his mother, to serve as a Methodist minister. In 1888, Oliver began to develop his first typewriter, made from strips of tin cans, as a means of producing more legible sermons. He was awarded his first typewriter patent, US Patent No. 450,107, on April 7, 1891. After four years of development, a "crude working model" composed of 500 parts had been produced. Oliver resigned his ministry and moved to Epworth, Iowa, where he found investors willing to provide $15,000 of capital, and leased a building in which to manufacture his machines. Oliver died suddenly of heart disease on February 9, 1909, aged 56.

Design

The general design of Oliver typewriters remained mostly unchanged throughout the company's history. The Oliver’s are "down strike" typewriters, meaning the typebars strike the platen (also known as the roller) from above, rather than from below ("up strike") or from the front ("front strike"). Unlike the "up strike" method, which prints text out of sight on the underside of the platen, the "down strike" is a "visible print" design, meaning the full page is visible to the typist as the text is being entered.

The relatively greater striking power of the "down strike" design led Oliver’s to be preferred for specialty uses such as stencil cutting or "manifolding" (copying using carbon paper). The "front strike" method, a competing "visible print" design, was patented around the same time (1889–91), but an effective machine that did not interfere with the typist's line of sight was not available until 1897 when, roughly three years after the introduction of the Oliver No. 1, the Underwood No. 1 appeared on the market.

The Oliver's typebars are bent in a bow (forming an inverted "U" shape) and rest in "towers" on the sides of the typewriter. This design limited the machine to a three-row QWERTY keyboard as the typebars were stacked such that they grew progressively larger as more were added.

The size and usability implications of adding additional keys and thus, more typebars, precluded the addition of a fourth keyboard row dedicated to numbers. Although a four-row prototype was designed in 1922, it was shelved due to the company's financial troubles at that time.

Color

Oliver typewriters were finished with olive green paint or nickel-plating and white or black keyboards, depending on customer preference. Beginning with model No. 3, machines were painted green except some variants to be exported to warm or damp regions, which were chrome-plated. The color was changed from green to black on the introduction of model No. 11.

Oliver Typewriter Model #9 similar to the one in the museum.