On yesterday evening’s edition of “Stump My Nephew,” we discussed the Singer Manufacturing Company’s brief but notable venture into handgun manufacturing with its production of 500 M1911A1 pistols for the U.S. government just before the country’s entry into World War II. Singer’s expertise in producing sewing machines translated well to the manufacture of war matériel (albeit not more 1911s after that test batch), and as anyone who’s passed a high school modern history class in this country should be able to tell you, much of America’s industrial economy underwent a similar shift.
While Singer of sewing machine fame is notable as the company that made the fewest M1911A1s for the U.S. military (though North American Arms made even fewer pre-A1s), the opposite distinction goes to another household appliance manufacturer. On March 16th, 1942, typewriter company Remington Rand (not the Remington, but tracing its name to the same source through a series of mergers and acquisitions) received its first order for M1911A1 pistols to support the war effort. “Support” might be too gentle a term, though, as Remington Rand ended up turning out around 900,000 examples—more than all the other manufacturers combined. Interestingly, some of the equipment Remington Rand used to become the most prolific producer of U.S. military M1911s came from…Singer, after they shifted to other war production projects.
After the war, Remington Rand went back to making office equipment, acquiring the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in 1950. For those of you who don’t know, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly were the inventors of ENIAC, arguably the first “true” computer (I won’t get bogged down in computer science definitions in this blog post about gunmakers). Remington Rand went on to release the room-sized UNIVAC I computer in 1951, initiating a product line that would continue after the company’s 1955 merger with the Sperry Corporation, itself notable for making cutting-edge avionics and mechanical fire control systems during the war. In addition to its numerous other high-tech product lines, Sperry Rand continued to build and sell typewriters under the Sperry Remington name; it’s likely that many an American GI who’d carried a Remington Rand pistol in World War II returned home, took an office job, and was assigned to a typewriter made in the same factory.
Like so many other successful and storied American companies, Sperry Rand was killed in a hostile takeover in the Reagan years. The Burroughs Corporation sold off pieces of the carcass to other companies and merged with whatever remained to form Unisys in 1986.
