The earliest Babies/Featherweights did not offer a margin release key, a shift lock key, nor even a carriage return lever. While inovative design played a major role in the dramatic reduction in their size and weight compared to other portables, that reduction was also partially accomplished by providing fewer features than larger typewriters.
These ultra-portables quickly found popularity with journalists and others who used typewriters ‘in the field’ and with others who just wanted a ‘lap-tap’. In spite of the Featherweight decal that appears on the right top of the metal shell, there does not appear to be any mechanical difference between the ‘plain’ Baby and the Baby Featherweight.
The Baby and Baby Featherweight each weighed in at just over 8 pounds/3.8kg with their metal lid-about half the weight of the Hermes 2000-and together were the first widely-distributed ‘ultra-portable’ typewriter. Paillard’s first portable typewriter-the Hermes 2000-launched in 1933, and was followed by the Hermes Baby and the Hermes Baby Featherweight in 1935. The 1930s - Paillard’s First Portable and Ultra-Portable Typewriter Models They produced standard-size manual typewriter models beginning in 1923, expanded into cameras and projectors (branded Bolex Paillard) in the 1940s, and entered the electric typewriter market in 1959.
(Some erroneously state that these typewriters were products of Hermès of Paris they were not.) Paillard had started out as a family business in 1814, making watch and music box mechanisms. Hermes typewriters were designed and manufactured by the firm E.
0 kommentar(er)
