Triumpf Adler -> Typewriters

Part of the Portfolio since 2021...

Not every exhibit here was killed by a crook. Some were simply standing on the tracks when the future came through. Triumph-Adler is the museum’s monument to obsolescence – the fate of being magnificent at exactly the wrong thing.

The pedigree is genuinely grand. Triumph began in 1896 as the German offshoot of the British Triumph bicycle works and started making typewriters in 1909; Adler had been building them since 1898, Germany’s first. Max Grundig united the two in the mid-1950s, and by the 1960s the TA group was the fifth-largest office-machinery maker in the world – the firm whose machines clattered out the correspondence of the entire Wirtschaftswunder.

Then the ownership carousel began, and it is almost too good. Grundig sold to America’s Litton Industries. And in 1985 – of all buyers – Volkswagen acquired the company and renamed it TA Triumph-Adler AG. Yes: a carmaker decided its future lay in typewriters, because the 1980s were a strange and confident decade.

The marriage lasted barely a year; in 1986 VW flipped it to Olivetti, a deal that handed Olivetti roughly half the European typewriter market – just in time for the typewriter to become a paperweight.

Because while all this corporate pass-the-parcel was going on, the personal computer was quietly ending the entire product category. German development and production were gutted under Olivetti; the historic Frankfurt Adlerwerke were shut in 1993, a year in which the company posted a loss of nearly DM70 million on sales that had fallen by 38 per cent. The machines that had built the office were now museum objects – ours, eventually.

What remained was a brand and a listing, so in 1994 a consortium did the only thing left: it turned the husk into a grab-bag Mittelstand holding company spanning office equipment, ‘games and leisure’, construction technology and even healthcare – a conglomerate with no logic except that it still had a stock-exchange quotation. This is a recognisable late stage of corporate decline: when the original business is dead, the corporate shell goes looking for a personality.

The end was tidy. Kyocera of Japan took 25 per cent in 2003 in exchange for letting TA rebadge its printers, took full control in 2010, converted the company into a GmbH and delisted it. Today ‘TA Triumph-Adler’ survives as a label on Kyocera office printers – a 130-year-old name reduced to a sticker on someone else’s machine.

(Not part of the Portfolio:)