Silver Reed: Difference between revisions

Silver Seiko Ltd. is a Japanese company founded in 1952^[1] to manufacture and market knitting machines, initially under the Marukoshi Knitting Machines Ltd company name^[3] — and subsequently more widely known under the Silver Seiko company name and Silver Reed brand. The company is unrelated to the Seiko Group.

Silver Seiko began manufacturing typewriters under the Silver Reed brand, in 1966,^[1] working with the leading industrial design firm, GK-Design Group.^[4]

The company eventually developed subsidiaries in Hong Kong and the United States (Silver Seiko America Inc., 1977) and in 1986 brought to market a $350 hand-held copier, marketed as "Porta Copy," that could scan and print a 3 1/4" wide, continuous thermal paper scan.^[5]

As the market for the company's core products, knitting machines and typewriters, shrank, sales peaked at approximately 35.7 billion yen in the fiscal year ending March 1985, and declined year by year, the company's business performance worsening year by year, and Silver Seiko declared bankruptcy in 2011 — with approximately 300 employees and 58 independent contractors (as of March 31, 2010).^[6]

The company and marketed their typewriters under their own Silver Reed label^[7] and frequently re-branded their products for other typewriter companies — prominently for Litton Industries' Royal brand — and under the Underwood brand.

Silver Seiko America was founded in 1977, and headquartered in Torrence, California,^[1] had a sales volume of $10 million during its first year, expected to reach $40 million in sales by 1979 and predicted typewriter sales of $100 million by 1981.^[1]

Silver Seiko typewriters were initially manual models and subsequently electric and electronic. In the late 1970s, Silver Seiko developed a direct competitor to the IBM Selectric, an office typewriter that had at the time captured nearly 75%^[7] of an $850M market ($3.5B, 2023).^[7] The Silver Seiko electronic typewriter used the same 'golf ball' head as the Selectric, but used microprocessors, rather than the difficult-to-service tilt and rotate tapes.^[1]

In the 1960s and 1970s, Silver Seiko, along with Japanese companies Brother Industries and Nakajima, were frequent targets of antidumping campaigns in the United States for their low-priced typewriters.^[8]

• October 1952: Marukoshi Knitting Machinery Co., Ltd. founded in Kamitakaido, Suginami-ku, Tokyo
• May 1955: Company name changed to Silver Knitting Machine Manufacturing Co., Ltd.
• January 1964: Silver Knitting Machine Co., Ltd. merged with Silver Knitting Machine Manufacturing Co., Ltd. and Silver Knitting Machine Sales Co., Ltd. and Headquarters relocated to Kodaira City, Tokyo.
• March 1964: Listed on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
• June 1967: Company name to Silver Seiko Ltd.
• April 1984: Company merged with Silver Office Machine Sales Co., Ltd.
• September 1984: Listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
• October 1992: Kodaira factory closed
• June 1993: Head office moved to Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo
• May 27, 2010: Company announces name change to "Nupapa"
• October 1, 2010: The company name change was withdrawn in the IR announced on June 9th
• December 28, 2010: Silver Seiko fails to meet its debts for the second time. Under Japan's commercial code, a company is considered bankrupt when it fails to meet debt or promissory-note payments twice within six months.^[9] In response, the Tokyo Stock Exchange designated Silver Seiko shares as stocks for delisting on the same day, delisting them on January 29 2011
• September 27, 2011: Applied to the Tokyo District Court for application of the Civil Rehabilitation Act, with total debts of approximately 1,2M yen ($8M, 2023).
• December 27, 2011: Decision to abolish rehabilitation proceedings and commence bankruptcy.

The Silverette was a light, ultra-portable typewriter weighing just over 10 lbs — and manufactured over three generations.

Features on the second-generation model included a standard 88 key keyboard, all-metal bodywork (including ribbon cover), tilt-away carriage-shift (vs. basket shift or carriage shift), calibrated paper bail, 1, 1 1/2, 2 line spacing, paper support, 10" carriage (to accommodate business-size envelopes), two-color ribbon settings along with a stencil cutter and automatic ribbon reverse, touchset margins, touch sensitivity regulator, back space key, margin release key, shift key at each side, shift lock key, jamb-release key,^[4] Pica (10 cpi) or Elite (12 cpi) typefaces, a five-year manufacturers warranty (Royal) and an ABS plastic snap-on cover with built-in carrying handle.

Silver Seiko would market basic Silverette variants under numerous rebadged variants, often with subtle feature inclusions and deletions: a #1 key, tab or "speed spacer" functionality, two-color or single color ribbon capability.

Variants included the Royal Mercury, Royal Signet, Royal Jet, Royal Mariner, Royal Companion, Royal Educator, Royal Mustang, Royal Signet, Royal Tab-O-matic^[4] and Underwood 255 — as well as the Silver Reed 100, SR-200, 280 Deluxe, 780, and Speedwriter 7200. — and as private label models, e.g. the Eaton 400 (for the Eaton's department stores, Wilding TW100,Viscount and Welco S100.

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