A working typewriter for giants appeared in Batman, #115, published in 1958. That story was also by Finger. In fact, he was known for introducing oversized props into his Batman tales, as well as helpfully supplying the illustrators with visual references.
Attempts to make Batman stories more serious in the early and then the late 1960s removed the giant office appliances, at least from the present. There was a nostalgic revival in late 1977: one story showed the Caped Crusader fighting on a giant IBM Selectric with a rotating ball while another introduced a giant photocopier. Since then, Batman has rarely had to deal with such machines in his regular adventures.
But the giant typewriters and cash registers hang on in flashback stories, and as a symbol of “the way things used to be in Gotham City.” Dick Grayson occasionally remarks about the crazy platforms he used to fight on.
All that is grounding for the question behind this weekly Robin: What inspired Bill Finger to write stories around those giant working props? What made him think readers would believe that a cash register company would have a giant working replica of its product sitting around?
Of course, people built non-working replicas for various attention-getting campaigns. Here’s a photo of a giant cash register from 1923, at the University of Southern California—but that was just a set for a fundraiser, with “coeds” operating the numbers.
In Batman Unmasked, Will Brooker suggested that a giant cash-register-shaped float in a war bonds parade might have inspired Gotham’s architecture, citing a photograph in George Roeder’s The Censored War.
But we can go earlier than that, and right into Finger’s backyard—to the 1939 New York World’s Fair! (More about that exposition’s influence back here.)
As shown in postcards of all sorts, the National Cash Register company constructed a building with a giant cash register on the roof. Its display changed to tally the number if visitors at the fair, and it twirled to give everyone a good view.
NCR had pulled the same stunt at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago and the 1936-37 Expo in Dallas. Alas, the NCR machine’s buttons didn't work, and its drawer didn't shoot out to knock over bad guys or reveal giant currency. Still, it was enough to establish the idea.
Furthermore, the ’39 World’s Fair also included a 14-ton typewriter by Underwood that reportedly worked. The company had built a similar machine for the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915, later moving that device to Atlantic City. (See more at Agility Nut’s Big Stuff.) But Finger surely saw the ’39 version.
This impressive color image of the NCR building comes from from Bill Cotter, who also posited the Batman connection.
The National Cash Register Company (NCR) Started in 1884 with Point of Sales registers. The company deals in all types of POS, but had financial problems. In 1991, AT&T purchased NCR for $7.4 billion. NCR has been the only AT&T acquisition that retained their original name. on Sept. 20 1995 AT&T would spin NCR back into it’s own company due to the antitrust issues put forward
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