Columbia 2 Typewriter Dial Detail
edigu › Typewriters – Taken from fineestateliquidation.com
The Columbia typewriter is one of the most exquisitely built typewriters of all time, with the influence of the watchmaker’s craft immediately evident as one looks at the elegant celluloid index disk. The Columbia despite its small size, gives proportional spacing, being the first marketable typewriter to do so. This was achieved by a very clever mechanism, that perhaps only a watchmaker could have created, that moved the carriage varying amounts of distance depending on the widths of the characters chosen. So typing the letter ‘X” would move the carriage further along than when typing an ‘I’. The Columbia was also first in giving visible typing, allowing one to see what they had just typed. To do so one would look down through the open rectangular window just above the Columbia’s nameplate.
