Friden Flexowriter

The Friden Flexowriter was a teleprinter, a heavy-duty electric typewriter capable of being driven not only by a human typing, but also automatically by several methods, including direct attachment to a computer and by use of paper tape.

Elements of the design date to the 1920s, and variants of the machine were produced until the early 1970s; the machines found a variety of uses during the evolution of office equipment in the 20th century, including being among the first electric typewriters, computer input and output devices, forerunners of modern word processing, and also having roles in the machine tool and printing industries.

The Flexowriter can trace its roots to some of the earliest electric typewriters. In 1925, the Remington Typewriter Company wanted to expand their offerings to include electric typewriters. Having little expertise or manufacturing ability with electrical appliances, they partnered with Northeast Electric Company of Rochester and made a production run of 2500 electric typewriters. When the time came to make more units, Remington was suffering a management vacuum and could not complete contract negotiations, so Northeast began work on their own electric typewriter. In 1929, they started selling the Electromatic.

In 1931, Northeast was bought by Delco. Delco had no interest in a typewriter product line, so they spun the product off as a separate company called Electromatic. Around this time, Electromatic built a prototype automatic typewriter. This device used a wide roll of paper, similar to a player piano roll. For each key on the typewriter, there was a column on the roll of paper. If the key was to be pressed, then a hole was punched in the column for that key.

The Electromatic typewriter patents document the use of pivoted spiral cams operating against a hard rubber drive roller to drive the print mechanism. This was the foundation of essentially all later electric typewriters. The typewriter could be equipped with a "remote control" mechanism allowing one typewriter to control another or to record and play back typed data through a parallel data connection with one wire per typewriter key. The electromatic tape perforator, used a wide tape, with punch position per key on the keyboard.

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