One of "the greatest industrial designs before Apple" turned out to be a typewriter

Its ambition wasn't just to build a productivity tool. It wanted to shape an ideology.

In 1933, in Ivrea, a small Italian town at the foot of the Alps, 32-year-old Adriano Olivetti took over a typewriter factory from his father, Camillo Olivetti. He probably never imagined that 30 years later this family business of 900 employees would grow into a multinational group with 80,000 employees, 10 factories at home and 11 abroad.

Olivetti's story is full of "as the story goes." As the story goes, IBM's famous maxim "Good design is good business" was inspired by Olivetti typewriters. As the story goes, Steve Jobs was inspired by Italian design at the 1981 International Design Conference and went on to recruit top Italian designers such as Ettore Sottsass — the man who designed Olivetti's classic Valentine typewriter.

But this is not a business you can explain with numbers and hearsay alone. At the recent retrospective Olivetti: Beyond Form and Function at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), curator Juliette Desorgues put it this way: "It's not just a business institution anymore. Olivetti is a cross-disciplinary philosophy, and like the Bauhaus, its influence has seeped into everything."

Isn't that a bit much to say about a typewriter company? What exactly did it do?

1

Let's start with product strategy.

The wave of design that fuses function and aesthetics, now led by Apple, already appeared once before, right after World War II — and Olivetti led it then. Its main customers were businesses rather than consumers, yet it cared a great deal about how its machines looked. "Elegant restraint" was the aesthetic principle founder Camillo laid down from the start: "The form of a machine has its own particular value. A typewriter shouldn't be one of those tasteless showpieces you find in a parlor. It should look calm, and it should work with elegance."

Born in 1950, the Lettera 22 is considered one of the 20th century's most iconic portable typewriters. Marcello Nizzoli designed it: light gray, minimal. Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, once said: "Before Olivetti, typewriters all looked outdated. But in this design, Nizzoli borrowed the auto industry's press-forming steel technique to change the typewriter's traditional shape; suddenly it had the smooth, crisp lines of a car body."

The Lettera 22's follow-on model, the Lettera 32, was also designed by Marcello Nizzoli and was a favorite among writers. American novelist Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the novel behind the Oscar-winning film No Country for Old Men, owned a pale blue one; it sold at auction in 2009 for a staggering US$254,500. McCarthy said: "All my books were written on that typewriter. It's been with me for 46 years, and apart from the occasional dusting, it's never needed any special maintenance or cleaning."

Olivetti's product invention wasn't limited to typewriters. It also built the world's first desktop computer. Computers already existed — mainframes like the IBM System/360 Model 30 and the IBM 1440 data processing system were on the market — but they were the size of refrigerators and needed a whole room to hold them.

Olivetti engineer Pier Giorgio Perotto led a four-person team that spent two years building a memory module roughly the size of a desktop motherboard today, switched storage to a card-based system, and wrote a simple programming language to help users learn how to enter data. The machine also looked good: it was designed by Mario Bellini, who later became a well-known architect. General Electric (GE) had bought Olivetti's electronics division in the spring of 1964, and to keep GE from claiming the work, the team changed "computer" in the project name to "calculator" — and got away with it.

This desktop machine, called the "Programma 101," appeared at the 1964 New York World's Fair. It weighed just 35 kilograms and cost only US$3,200 (a mainframe then ran about US$100,000), and it became a hit, selling 4,000 units. NASA even bought 10 of them to run calculations for the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing.

An excerpt from Programma 101 – Memory of the Future, a documentary about how the machine was built

2

These stories show that design is not simply a matter of changing a shape; it takes software and hardware working together. But Olivetti's attention to design went further still, into the running of the company itself. Adriano Olivetti's favorite line: "Design is a question of substance, not just form."

Can you imagine a technology company building its own graphic design department in-house, rather than outsourcing all of it to save money? Olivetti did exactly that in 1937. The Italian graphic designer Giovanni Pintori led the department, and the posters, ads, and in-house magazines it produced were bold in color and abstract to the point of being avant-garde. Some used inventive motifs — a bird, an egg — to suggest lightness and portability. Much of the copy was written by novelists or poets.

An Olivetti typewriter ad on the theme "Writing Is a Gift."

Collect the work of every well-known figure the department worked with and you'd have a star-studded roster: Bauhaus designer Herbert Bayer, Swedish designer Walter Ballmer, American photographer Henry Wolf, American designer Milton Glaser, and more.

Olivetti also liked to invite leading architects to design its shops, showrooms, and factories. Among them were Carlo Scarpa, Gae Aulenti, BBPR, Louis Kahn, and Le Corbusier. The thinking matched the products: function and beauty together, close enough for customers to study a machine's details, open enough to show art on the walls.

Plenty of companies like to talk about their corporate culture. The other odd thing about Olivetti is that it did more than talk: intellectuals ran core departments. Recruitment was handled by Ottiero Ottieri, a psychologist and novelist; the company library was run by the poet Giovanni Giudici.

Every Christmas, employees received special editions of literary classics, reproductions of famous artworks, or paintings by up-and-coming artists. Olivetti also paid to restore art — it sponsored the restoration of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, which took 17 years and cost 3 million euros.

3

Adriano's ambition wasn't limited to changing a company, either. The postwar years were full of argument about modernism and human nature, and Adriano dreamed of an industrial city with more "human" in it — "urban development on a human scale" — one that would "establish a balance between private life and public life, between work and family, between centers of consumption and centers of production."

In The City of Man (Città dell'Uomo), published in January 1961, a few weeks before his death, he wrote: "Streets, factories, and houses are the most solid, visible elements in the progress of civilization, but the way Italian cities have expanded has given no long thought to how people live — selfish, materialistic, speculative, with no plan at all."

Adriano was no cynic. His hometown, Ivrea, became the testing ground for "the city of man." By the late 1950s, Olivetti's growth had made Ivrea a hub of Italian manufacturing, drawing 14,000 architects, designers, and workers from elsewhere. Over 30 years the town's population doubled, to 30,000.

He did not turn it into a concrete jungle. Instead he hired top architects to design bright, forward-looking buildings for employees and their families. The community had wide stretches of green, and even the tallest housing was only three or four stories. The new factory's facade was wrapped entirely in glass, so workers could see the mountains and valleys, and people outside could see what was going on inside.

Inside the factory there were canteens, plazas, debating rooms, film projectors. The library held more than 10,000 books and over 2,500 foreign newspapers and magazines, open to employees and townspeople alike. The company also set up free or cheap clinics, kindergartens, nurseries, and summer camps for children.

Olivetti paid particular attention to the welfare of children and women. Italian law did not require five months of maternity leave until 1950, but the company had already given its female employees nine and a half months of leave (at 80% of salary), along with breastfeeding and prenatal nutrition training and free pediatric care (for children under 14). Women still met discrimination at work in those years, yet 40% of Olivetti's employees were women.

The town was so agreeable that some publications called it an "Invented Eden". According to the Guardian's "The Story of Cities" series, the United Nations even considered listing it as a World Heritage Site. The nomination text described Ivrea between the 1930s and the 1960s this way: "A wholly new way of working and living laid the social and productive foundations of this unique industrial city. Here, economic efficiency and social space coexisted in harmony, creating another possibility."

4

Olivetti eventually declined.

The main reason was not that the strategies above were wrong, but that the company failed to reinvent itself. In the 1990s, the typewriter business shrank as PCs took over, and Olivetti's own PCs were squeezed from two sides at once: competition from American technology firms and cheap machines from Taiwanese companies such as Asus.

In 1998, Olivetti sold its PC business to Wang Laboratories, and in 1999, carrying US$16 billion in debt, it launched a hostile takeover of Telecom Italia, Italy's largest telecom group. The takeover worked, but the ownership structure that resulted was tangled, and after a 2003 restructuring Olivetti became a single division of Telecom Italia, running only the office-equipment business: PCs, laptops, printers, fax machines, calculators.

The glory is gone, but the good news is that "typewriters" have become a hot topic again in the past couple of years. Hanx Writer, a typewriter app designed by Tom Hanks, climbed to the top of the iTunes App Store; last year's Miami Book Fair brought several new books about typewriters, among them Richard Polt's The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist's Companion for the 21st Century, Tony Allan's picture book The Typewriter: The History, the Machines, the Writers, and Ruth and Marvin Sackner's The Art of Typewriting; two new typewriter websites even appeared, The Classic Typewriter and The Typewriter Revolution. People miss Olivetti's beautiful, useful machines again.

Asked why typewriters are coming back, Richard said: "Digital life is invading our privacy, eroding our ability to focus on any one thing, and building a lot of shallow connections between people." "We need to escape the digital stream."

Richard may be overstating it. But whether you look at Olivetti at its height or at today's second thoughts about digital life, what people want has not changed.

In the words of Adriano's grandson, Beniamino de Liguori, all we want is to find a way to "let people and machines coexist in harmony. After all, 'serving people' is technology's ultimate purpose."

Cover and inline images from Archivio Storico Olivetti, qz.com, guardian, fastcodesign, MoMA, royal.pingdom, typewriterreview