M. Höhne wrote:

You still don't know that, because that is not what that means.

I agree.  I never meant my reply to explain a definition of terms or style. I understand the differences between the typewriter world and the printing world.  I appears to me somewhere in the beginning some terms were borrowed from the printing trade to somehow explain or relate the features of the new office machine of the day. The crux is it is printing on paper for both; one is NOT the other though related. What I meant by "categories" was the variations under either "Pica" or "Elite" offered by the manufacturers as options as opposed to actual size as say by a pica pole.

Pitch aside, I think there are variations in size.  My Remington 17 Elite is larger than the Royal KHM's Elite. Using a dial caliper with nice pointy jaws and 3D lighting I can reckon about a .007" difference in height between the two, measuring the distance between serifs on a upper case "H"  or from the top of the bowl to the bottom of the loop of a small case "g" as an example.  Am I barking up the wrong tree? 
The examples I mentioned that were in the Ames manual were suggested by the manufacturers for different needs, such as business correspondence vs. personal correspondence, field or box filling in forms and ledgers, and extra large type for shipping labels and dispatch envelopes. I took away it was based on the look and c.p.i.,(pitch) rather than actual measurement as a printer might use.  I didn't work much in the clerical biz to know what factors played in decisions for equipment investments of one type or another.  It definitely involved a large capitol outlay if the firm employed typing pools.  I agree with you, one is not the other but the terms did express a certain commonality that kept sales pitches simpler.

As much as I have used typewriters, I actually know very little about them.  That's why I come here; and slow and steady is the course.
 

[color=#303030 wrote:

M. Höhne][/color]A couple years ago on a different forum I got into a very detailed discussion of pica/elite with a guy who was reading type foundry catalogs with a magnifying glass, to the point where other members told us to shut up and go away. It happens.

That's a bit of me there. Too much detail for some, the whys and wherefores for me.
It's also the fun of discovery. While I can predict with some certainty whether pica or elite going on the carriage scale, you never really know the style until it's typed.  I have an Olympia SM9 with Senatorial that was surprising as most of the other machines, (from the 30's and 40's) seemed to have "Times New Roman"?

Do you think typewriter manufacturers outsource to type foundries, or made their type slugs in-house?  One thing the Ames book pointed out was that mixing from make to make or swapping elite slugs on a pica machine or vice versa didn't always work if at. There were references to the typeface having to match the platen's curvature; though there was Martin Tytell in New York who swapped typewriter alphabets for the war effort.  One last question; how do you box a quote?

I think most of the time, typewriter manufacturers bought their slugs from specialty type foundries.

Uwe wrote:

Michael might know better, but I was under the impression that the larger manufacturers produced their own primary slugs - for example, elite and pica - and relied on typeface manufacturers to supply ancillary typefaces. Smaller manufacturers - such as Empire - were exclusively fitted with outsourced slugs. 

In the case of Tytell swapping out slug sets, you have to keep in mind that during the heyday of typewriter manufacturing that you could simply order complete slug sets that were specifically made to fit the make/model of machine you were working on. I don't know anything about the man, but I'd be surprised if the swapping you mentioned had anything to do with taking from one machine and installing in another.

I know that one of the largest German typeface manufacturers was already maintaining an inventory of several million type slugs by the late '20s, which consisted of 60,000 different character combinations from over 360 typefaces and languages. Someone who wanted to change the typeface for a particular Remington standard, for example, merely had to place an order for the desired typeface from such a company and then get to work with their iron.
.

Mr Tytell was profiled in a 1997 article in The Atlantic about one of New York's last remaining typewriter repairman. He had an interesting career and experiences in typewriter repair.  Some of what it tells is inline with what you wrote. Some of his accomplishments included swapping alphabets to foreign characters or foreign machines to English. Typewriters were in short supply during the war effort and as they say "adapt and improvise".
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/typewriter-man/376988/
 

Uwe wrote:

 but you have to be careful not to touch the quote tags in the process.

This is a great site with cool stuff and a good knowledge base.  The only difficulties for me were posting/linking photos and quoting.  It is much more involved than the other sites I participate in.  But it's free of ads and fees, and it doesn't consume bandwidth on my computer so I won't mind the learning curve.