Back in August, Adam and I came across a mechanical calculator while picking up my freshly repaired IBM Selectric II from Berkeley Typewriter. I knew mechanical calculators existed, but I didn’t really know anything about them. Still, I filed it away in my “maybe some day” list, if I happened to come across one.
Fast forward to March 2024 and we’re sitting at the San Francisco airport waiting on a dreadfully delayed flight, and a fellow I know through the Philadelphia area Linux community reached out and mentioned he was helping with an estate sale, and came across some typewriters and asked if I’d be interested in any of them. I had less interest in the typewriters, but among the photos he shared was a mechanical calculator! I’m in. Bonus: I’m about to board a flight to Philadelphia! What timing!
It was a bit of a trek to get up to the estate, but I was greeted with what turned out to be an electromechanical calculator, meaning it has a small DC motor inside to move the mechanical components that were driven by a hand crank in other models. The trouble with this is that we’re looking at a motor that’s easily over 70 years old, and the power cable is cracked and unusable, so will need to be replaced for it to work as an electric device again. Thankfully, the mechanical components looked clean and intact, so I purchased it from the estate.
Once I got it home, the first step was to do a once-over cleaning-wise, starting with the case, which had been living in a barn and was too dirty for me to even be comfortable bringing it into the house. On a beautiful Sunday morning, the boys enthusiastically helped me with it.
From there, I could take a closer look at the machine, in all its glory!
It really is in nice shape, I’d argue even better than the one we saw at the typewriter shop. I still need to clean it up a bit more, but a once-over was good enough for now.
Sunday night I went into research mode to see what I could discover about it, especially when it came to getting it working. After doing enough web searching to know what to look for, I found a tip that told me to peek inside a slot on the bottom to find the model number and serial number. It took a flashlight and some wrangling, but I found it: Monroe Model LA5-200, serial number 437578.
The first things I learned were that the “A” stands for automatic, which means it has the motor in there. I also learned from John Wolff’s Web Museum: The Monroe Calculating Machine Company that the LA5-200 is “a later ten-column machine with … a few minor changes, but is otherwise identical to” the LA5-160, which is good for me, since the 160 is a lot more common.
Resource-wise, I’ve found:
Monroe Service Training Course Book 2: Models LA, LA-5, LA-6, LA-7, function, adjustment, nomenclature which has some excellent diagrams and things, which will be incredibly useful when I start working on it. These three images are from that guide, and were already helpful in my initial pass.
Additionally, there are a handful of LA5-160 YouTube videos showing some tear-downs and repairs, including this series from DJD Labs that I’m certain I will find useful!
Given how heavy it is, this will be staying at our townhouse in Philadelphia. So, it’ll be a project for when I’m here, which is good, because I already have plenty to keep me busy in California for the foreseeable future.
That’s a lot about the calculator, but I will admit that I didn’t leave the estate sale with just that one, I did bring home a typewriter too. It’s a 1967 Olympia SM9 (s/n: 3242067) and it was in great condition, aside from a very dirty case, that the boys helped me clean so I could bring it inside.
It’s a lovely typewriter, and it also came with a small pamphlet and cleaning kit!
I’ll also be keeping it here in Philadelphia. I’ll clean it up and get a new ribbon for it during our next visit. Amusingly, I now have two Olympias, and they’re both here. I’m thinking about ultimately giving it to Adam to use when he’s a little older, if his interest in mechanical typewriters holds.
The rest of our visit is pretty packed, including a couple work-related day trips, so I probably won’t get to work on these any more, but I did take some time the other day to finally set up a full Typewriter Hunter TypewriterDatabase account, which I’ve now populated with photos of my collection: 9 Typewriter Galleries ยป Hunter: Elizabeth Joseph