The Typewriter City

If you had walked into an American office in nineteen ten and asked where the typewriter on the desk was made, there was a good chance the answer was Syracuse.

The story starts with guns. Lyman Smith and his brothers ran a successful shotgun manufacturing business here, but in the eighteen eighties they were watching the new typewriter industry with interest. The Smith Premier Typewriter Company was founded in eighteen eighty-six and produced a double keyboard typewriter with a key for every character, an ambitious design for its time. The typewriters sold well enough that by eighteen ninety, Lyman Smith sold off the shotgun business to concentrate on keyboards.

In nineteen oh three, Smith reorganized under a new name: the L.C. Smith and Brothers Typewriter Company. The factory at seven-oh-one East Washington Street broke ground before the architect had finished drawing the plans, that is how confident they were. By nineteen eleven the factory had doubled in size. By nineteen twenty-six, L.C. Smith merged with the Corona Typewriter Company to form Smith Corona, one of the most recognized brand names in twentieth-century American office life.

At its peak, Smith Corona's Syracuse factory made typewriters that ended up in newspaper city rooms, law offices, government buildings, and the laps of novelists and reporters on every continent. During the Second World War, the factory shifted to producing military rifles, building more than two hundred thirty thousand of them before production ended in nineteen forty-four.

Smith Corona stayed in Syracuse until competition from overseas manufacturers and the rise of personal computing made the typewriter itself obsolete. The final chapter came in nineteen ninety-five when the company filed for bankruptcy. The factory is gone. But one of the world's most extensive archives of typewriter company records now lives at the Syracuse University library, the L.C. Smith and Brothers collection, available to researchers still trying to understand what it meant that for most of a century, the world typed on a machine built a few blocks from here.