Pictured above is an Underwood No. 5 typewriter, with a serial number that indicates it was manufactured in 1923. It was part of the house's furnishings in 1972 when the National Park Service took over administration of the site.Based on a late 19th century design invented by German immigrant Franz X. Wagner and manufactured by John T. Underwood’s company, the No. 5 was released in about 1900. Underwood's company started out producing ink, carbon paper and typewriter ribbons, but was in the typewriter business by 1890. The No. 5 model quickly became the standard for typewriters, inspiring many copycat designs and seeing widespread use in the United States and Europe. It sold about five million units during its production run, which extended into the 1930s. Among its desirable qualities were its speed, and the fact that the typist could see what they were typing as they went along; earlier typewriter designs did not allow the user to see what was being put on the paper in real time. The Underwood No. 5 was such an important development in the history of typewriters that an example is in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American History.
The typewriter may have belonged to either Alice Longfellow, the poet’s eldest daughter, or Harry Dana, one of Henry Longfellow’s grandsons. Alice, who died in 1928, and Harry, who lived in the house from 1917 until his death in 1950, used typewriters for correspondence, financial records and other purposes, and much of their typewritten papers are now part of the park's archival collections.
What Henry Longfellow thought of typewriters was unknown, but he could have acquired one since models earlier than this Underwood were being manufactured by 1873, nine years before Longfellow's own death. No mention of a typewriter occurs in Longfellow's journals, and one is not visible in any historic images of his study. According to his brother Samuel, Henry preferred to do his writing by hand using a quill. Longfellow's seeming dismissal of the new writing machines didn’t stop advertisers from using his work though, as evidenced by the fact that the December, 1925 edition of Office Appliances - The News and Technical Trade Journal of Office Equipment devoted an entire page to Longfellow’s “Christmas Bells” poem; that edition of the journal also featured an Underwood advertisement on its back cover.