TechnologyInnovationTime leap

From the mind into the machine

11. October 2024

In 1927, Rheinmetall presented an electrically powered calculator for the first time at the Leipzig Spring Fair. What began as compensation for the severely restricted armaments production after the Great War developed into an internationally demanded product portfolio during the Weimar Republic. An excursion into the early mechanisation of office work.

Typewriters instead of ammunition

The year 1918 is dominated by stagnation and mass layoffs. The restrictions associated with the Treaty of Versailles required entrepreneurial innovation from the Rheinmetall armaments group. While the group in the Rhineland switched its production to engines, railway carriages, agricultural machinery, and steam ploughs, the factory in Sömmerda in Thuringia specialised in mechanical precision devices such as typewriters and calculating machines in 1919.

2.727

units of the first “Model 8” typewriter were produced by Rheinmetall by 1925. Rheinmetall trading company mbH, founded in Berlin in 1920, is responsible for their marketing. Often, the designs from Sömmerda were global novelties from a technical point of view. For example, the “Rheinmetall Duo”, produced from 1926, allowed the use of different fonts, even foreign characters, thanks to its double shift.

In addition to the “square in a circle” trademark, which had been registered as early as 1895, the company had the word mark “Rheinmetall” protected by the Reich’s Patent Office in 1919. From then on, the striking lettering prominently decorated the typewriters and calculating machines of the Rhineland metalware and machine factory as a brand.

Predecessor of the pocket -calculator

The engineers in Sömmerda soon began tinkering with a wide variety of calculating machines. Initially mechanically operated with a stepped roller and crank, as of 1927 they had an electric drive. While the early models could only perform addition, subtraction, and automatic division, the “super machines” from 1930 also made office work easier with automatic multiplication. Whether it was a matter of “percentage, interest and compound interest calculations; redemption tasks; square root extraction; cubing; currency and average calculations (…) or chord calculations”, as stated in an advertising brochure from 1930.

The highlight before 1945 was a billing machine that Rheinmetall launched in 1932: an “extraordinary, internationally acknowledged, and unrivalled construction” combining a typewriter and calculating machine.

Exemplum of German history

During the Nazi era, a massive rearmament programme was implemented. While Rheinmetall AG, which had since merged with Borsig, stopped civilian production at its main plant in Düsseldorf, office machine production in Sömmerda remained an important branch of manufacturing well into the years of war. After the end of World War II, the Thuringian factory was initially under Soviet military administration until it was transferred to East Germany in 1952. It developed into the largest office machine and computer manufacturer in the country, known as VEB Büromaschinenwerk Robotron Sömmerda. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, Rheinmetall refused to buy back its former factory, which had since gone bankrupt.

Rheinmetall trading company mbH, founded in Berlin in 1920, is responsible for marketing the typewriters and calculating machines produced in Sömmerda. The “Rheinmetall House”, as the former hotel building on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Karlsstrasse is soon called, marks the group’s first presence in the German capital with its own branch.

“An enormous amount of intellec-tual and technical work has been done to introduce electricity into office machines as a reliable assistant to support human activity.”

E. Geiling, office machine engineer at the Sömmerda factory of Rheinmetall-Borsig AG, 1937

Precision engineering experts


In 1929, Rheinmetall launched an advanced version of its first typewriter, the ‘Modell 9’.
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