Having become interested in religion, Oliver moved to Monticello, Iowa, after the death of his mother, to serve as a Methodist minister.

In 1888, Oliver began to develop his first typewriter,[5] made from strips of tin cans, as a means of producing more legible sermons.

[5] Oliver resigned his ministry and moved to Epworth, Iowa, where he found investors willing to provide $15,000 ($549,000 in 2025) of capital, and leased a building in which to manufacture his machines.

[citation needed] While visiting Chicago to promote the machine, Oliver encountered businessman Delavan Smith, who became interested in the typewriter and bought the stock held by the Iowa investors.

[9] The Oliver Typewriter Company had begun operating in 1895, with its Chicago headquarters on the ninth floor of a building on the corner of Dearborn and Randolph Street.

[10] Manufacturing was divided into six departments: type bar, carriage, assembly, tabulators and adjustment, inspection, and an aligning room.

[11] The company's headquarters moved to the Oliver Building, now a Chicago landmark on the National Register of Historic Places, when it was completed in 1907.

In response to increased competition in the late 1910s, however, the company eliminated its network of local salesman and used the resulting savings in commissions to reduce the typewriter's $100 ($1,800 in 2025) price by half.

A minor recession in 1921–22 caused a large number of customers to default on their payments, resulting in the repossession of their typewriters.

The company, however, had to retool its machines and return to the original Oliver design when the British government placed large orders for the three-rowed No.

[19] The "front strike" method, a competing "visible print" design, was patented around the same time (1889–91), but an effective machine that did not interfere with the typist's line of sight was not available until 1897 when, roughly three years after the introduction of the Oliver No.

[2] The Oliver's typebars are bent in a bow (forming an inverted "U" shape) and rest in "towers" on the sides of the typewriter.

This design limited the machine to a three-row QWERTY keyboard as the typebars were stacked such that they grew progressively larger as more were added.

[21][22] Models produced by licensees were marketed under various names including "Courier" (Austria), "Fiver" (Germany),[18] "Stolzenberg" (continental Europe) and "Revilo" (Argentina).