LC Smith Corona Silent Typewriter

The Smith brothers (Lyman Cornelius Smith, Wilbert Smith, Monroe C. Smith, and Hurlbut Smith) founded the L.C. Smith & Bros. Typewriter Company in 1903 out of New York. In 1914, they merge with Corona Typewriter Company and began to manufacture more office and portable typewriters together.

The L C Smith Corona Silent (a.k.a. the Super Speed Silent) Typewriter was one of their top-of-line products in the 1930s. It was one of the first typing machines to include both uppercase and lowercase letters. The reason it was named Silent was due to the heavily felted body panels that softened the sound of the keys. Although it is pretty loud for today’s standards it was much quieter than its competition at the time. In addition, the typewriter has brass stops to control the intensity of the impact of the keys. The stops prevent the keys from punching through the paper and allow them to just kiss the paper with ink. The keyboard includes function keys like the tabulator bar which allows you to set multiple tabs at a time and the caps lock and shift lock keys. You could also manually set the margins with the margin bar on the sides of the carriage and with the carriage return lever you can set the line spacing at increments of one, two, and three. The Silent typewriter is an impact ribbon printer with the ability of 2-color printing, usually red and black.