Merritt Typewriter

A typewriter from 1890s

It seems has been sold from 1889 till around 1896.

It also appears could have been produced around 15000 pieces in total.

The Merritt belongs to the group of the index typewriter, and was considered the best of this group.
It was the lowest-priced of the group, and was less complicated.
But it's not a toy typewriter; it's a typewriter made for hard work.

There isn't a keyboard, but this plate with the letters and symbols, and an index pointing at them.

It's a so-called blind typewriter.

It doesn't mean is for blind people, it means that you cannot see what you write, until you lift the carriage.

The design seems unconventional, but in the 1890s, there was a huge array of typewriters of different sizes, designs, and prices.
And there was no standard yet, so if you saw this typewriter in 1890, you wouldn't realize it was unconventional; your only concern was whether you could afford it and whether it would perform the task for which it was designed.
Standardization came later, and of course, the more complex but faster typewriters, equipped with typing bars, prevailed.

The serial number is here.

On the other side in some machines there are 1234, but it's not clear why.

It seems a sloppy password.

There aren't the typing bars, the typefaces are on a sliding support.

Inside it there are all the typefaces, on a metal bar.

By moving the handle back and forth, each typeface come to the printing point.

When you depress the handle, the typeface is pushed up through this hole on the paper guide, so printing the character.

There isn’t the ribbon, but two rollers ink the typefaces, as they move back and forth on these.

The inking rollers can be removed when re-inking is needed.

Merrit considered a good selling point the fact that "It has no ribbon to wear out, smut fingers or paper."

The weak point of the Merritt was the speediness.

Optimistically, the speed was half that of a standard typewriter.

But there were a lot of good selling points that they insisted on, in the advertisements.

Main selling point was the price, 15$.

A big standard typewriter could cost around 100$, that is around 3500$ or Euro nowadays.

Many people could not afford this price, so they could buy an index typewriter for 15$, that is around 500$ nowadays.

With this entry-level machine, you could do most of the work you could with a more expensive machine. It was slower, but not everyone needed high speeds.

Then, when the workload grew and you had practice, you could buy a more elaborate typewriter.

They said that this typewriter has a perfect alignment of characters, and they were right.

At the beginning of the typewriter era, the alignment of the characters was a problem.

Since here the typefaces are all on a bar, there isn't any problem about this.

And of course with this system there isn't the problem of typing bars clogging.

In the advertisements they say that there are metal characters giving more legibility, neatness and clearness.

Now could be obvious, but at that time there were also typewriters, like this Hall, with rubber characters.

So Merrit probably was referring at other index typewriter like this.

It says also that it's easy to change to copying ink.

It refers to the most used copying system at that time, the copying press, that used a particular copying ink.

There is the video in this channel.

And it was portable.

Big standard machine wasn't.

Let's see how it works.

The space button is this.

It's connected to the same bail of the printing mechanism.

The logic behind the disposition of the letters in this keyboard, is that the most common letters are in the middle of the keyboard.

So they are easier to be reached.