M.A.P Typewriter (1921)

M.A.P Typewriter
 
First year of production:  1921
 
Company:  M.A.P (Manufacture d'Armes de Paris)
 
2021 will be the centenary year of the French-Belgian typewriter, the MAP (Manufacture d'Armes de Paris). This machine, starting out in June 1921 with Model 3 serial number 500, was manufactured by a subsidiary of MAP, the Société des Machines à écrire MAP in St Denis (Seine), in a World War I machine gun factory converted to make office equipment.
 
The typewriter was designed, and its production overseen, by American Halcolm Gordon Ellis.
 
In 1919 Ellis returned from many years of working on combined adding machine-typewriters to an out-and-out typewriter and designed what would become the MAP. His Paris sales representative and MAP’s managing director, Dutch-born Nathan 'Nico' Sanders encouraged Ellis to move to France to provide production expertise.
 
The MAP continued to be made until 1954.
 
To ensure its initial success, Sanders put together a hugely impressive board of directors, who included: Louis Renault, the industrialist and pioneer of the automobile industry; Émile Pathé of the Société Pathé Frères, the largest film equipment and production company in the world, as well as a major producer of phonograph records; Ernest Chenard, a railway engineer and bicycles manufacturer who founded automobile business Chenard, Walcker et Compagnie with mining engineer Henri Walcker; Gustave Adolphe Clément-Bayard, an entrepreneur who raced and manufactured bicycles, pneumatic tyres, motorcycles, automobiles, aeroplanes and airships; Louis Delâge, a pioneer automotive engineer and manufacturer; and Léon Ernest Gaumont, an inventor, engineer and industrialist who was a pioneer of the motion picture industry.