The Torpedo 6 is a mechanical, type-bar typewriter with a 62cm platen. It is one of the models in a gradually developed and improved series of devices manufactured by the Torpedo-Werke AG company of Germany. The enterprise was established in 1896 by brothers Peter and Heinrich Weil as Peter Weil & Co., and initially only produced bicycles. After ten years of operations, the company acquired the rights to the design of the Hassia typewriter, developed by Hermann Wasem, from the company of Johann Völker and began manufacturing devices of this kind. In 1931, as a result of the Great Depression of the 1920s, the Weils’ company was acquired by the Remington corporation, which was in the business of producing pistols and typewriters. The “Torpedo” name, however, was retained, and continued to be used on products until 1967.
The Torpedo 6 model was manufactured from 1927 until January 29, 1944, when the typewriter factory in the Rödelheim district of Frankfurt am Main was destroyed by bombing. The year 1927 proved to be particularly significant for the production of typewriters, as it was the year that the Torpedo Standard model was launched, standing out with its relatively simple, modular design. It allowed several different device versions to be assembled depending on the purpose and the buyer’s needs. Interchangeable carriages of different lengths, or additional components and enhancements, were installed on a unified machine body of a standardised size, enclosed in an enamelled sheet metal casing, and equipped with a keyboard and the typebar mechanism. This meant that the Torpedo 6 model was sold in as many as eight variants. Four of them differed by carriage length, which measured 24cm (the so-called correspondence typewriter), 32cm, 45cm, or 62cm. The next four variants used not only different carriage lengths but also additional trays, rollers, or transmissions. Typewriters equipped with a wide carriage or decimal point tabulators were intended for bookkeeping and accounting as they allowed large journals and wide accounting sheets to be used (such documents usually have large or non-standard sizes, requiring solutions that allow them to be held in the typewriter mechanism), thus enabling the effective typing of columns of numbers. Customers buying the Torpedo 6 could use a combined shorthand typewriter – a split-platen typewriter allowing the typing of two sheets inserted in parallel – as a postal address machine and a bookkeeping typewriter. Having bought one of the variants, a customer could always purchase additional components from another. To change the typewriter’s application, the only thing that needed to be done was to remove the carriage and replace it with a new one.

Author: Filip Wróblewski