Typing on an Olympia Monica electric deluxe

Some electro-mechanical action.

Assessing the Traveller

The latest typewriter in the collection, an Olympia Traveller de Luxe S, is an interesting little machine. It is also covered in drops of a hard white substance. At first i thought it was paint but then i realised, as much of it is on the rollers and guard by the type point that this may be years of build up of tipp-ex! The typewriter looks like it has worked hard, even seemed like it had fag ash under the keys (i got rid of that, whatever it was, with a vacuum cleaner!) The typewriter works well despite the obvious signs of a hard working life, just like my beloved Olympia Olympiette. All the Traveller seems to need is a new ribbon... and a good clean.

Traveller 23

The latest typewriter has arrived in the collection, an Olympia Traveller de Luxe S. It seems to work pretty well though is fairly grubby, like my beloved Olympiette it looks like this Olympia has also been a hard working machine. Which is good. This is number 23 in the collection. We'll take a closer look at how well it works over the weekend.

More ribbons

Two more typewriters in the collection will be receiving new ribbons. The first being the Royal 200, which is the most recent addition to the collection (though another typewriter is on the way!) It is time to move onto lesson two in my touch typing book and i want to use a different typewriter for each lesson, i am thinking of using the Royal 200 though as the old ribbon was completely worn out that needed changing first!

Musicwriter

The Musicwriter was an interesting specialised typewriter used for creating sheet music. It was invented by Cecil Effinger, a noted composer and inventor, in the early 1950s and thousands were built by various manufacturers including Olympia between 1956 and 1990.

The idea of the Musicwriter is simple, the typebars have various elements of musical notation on them instead of letters. However, to write sheet music the Musicwriter required a very fine tunable way to place the paper in the correct place. A pointer was located above the ribbon to help the operator make their adjustments. A vernier was also available for fine tuning the horizontal position of the carriage. Pressing a key on the Musicwriter did not advance the carriage as on a normal typewriter (all keys were "dead keys"). However, even with these aids the Musicwriter required quite a lot of practice to get the music notation correct!

Early Musicwriter keyboard layout [1]

Example of Musicwriter output

[1] "A music writing machine that works", The Office (1957-08 Vol. 46 No. 2) p. 43