The Yankee Index Typewriter

For any of us familiar with label makers (I still have mine from the ’80s), this typewriter will also look familiar. In the late 1800s, when typewriters were an emerging technology, an inventor named Robert Hawley Ingersoll developed this index model. The Yankee Typewriter (aka The Dollar) couldn’t compete with more conventional keyboard-style typewriters, but it’s an historical marvel.

Ingersoll first patented and released the Dollar, an incredibly simple machine, in 1891 but it failed to sell. Seven years later he introduced The Yankee. On Robert Messenger’s excellent Oz Typewriter site, Messenger wrote that they were almost identical, except that “the Yankee had a slightly flatter, round dial with an indicator, making it slightly easier to use than the Dollar. ” Otherwise, it had the “same wooden base, same metal wheel with rubber type, some hole for alignment in the wheel support, same clamp for holding the paper in place, same ink roller and primitive escapement.”

 

The reaction to The Yankee was more positive:

“…most instructive and amusing for the young folks and practical for business work.” — The World (New York, New York) Dec. 11, 1897.

The claim in this ad, that The Yankee produces the “same quality of work as a “Remington,” is dubious but, hey, a lot of advertising is hyperbole.

What made more sense was when The Yankee was marketed as a “child’s toy.”  “The Child’s Yankee Typewriter; Writes just like a big machine.” — The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky) Dec. 19, 1897.