Crackers Crandall: The Wayward Wizard of Typewriters

September 8, 2013, 8:37 pm

≫ Next: Henry Harper Benedict's 1903 History of the Typewriter

≪ Previous: One Million Words of Pulp Fiction a Year for 15 Years! Walter Brown Gibson, his Corona Typewriter and The Shadow

$

0

0

Looking at the lives of some of the more interesting people involved in the early development of the typewriter, few are as fascinating and as significant, yet as elusive, as that of

LUCIEN STEPHEN CRANDALL

Lucien Stephen Crandall

Born Portlerane, Broome, New York, May 4, 1844

Died Kennett Square, Chester, Pennsylvania, February 6, 1919*, aged 74.

*All previous estimates of the date of Crandall's death have been incorrect.

Wikipedia still lists him as dying in 1889. He lived 30 years beyond that.

WIFE NO.2 DIED FEBRUARY 2, 1909

BURIED WIFE NO. 3 JULY 13, 1910

MET WIFE NO. 4 JULY 14, 1910

MARRIED WIFE NO. 4 JULY 16, 1910

I meet her on a Thursday and my heart did glow

Da do ron-ron-ron, da do ron-ron

Somebody told me that her name was Flo

Da do ron-ron-ron, da do ron-ron

Yeah, my brain did slow

Yes, her name was Flo

And when I walked her home

Da do ron-ron-ron, da do ron-ron

I knew what she was doing when she caught my eye

Da do ron-ron-ron, da do ron-ron

She looked so quiet but my oh my

Da do ron-ron-ron, da do ron-ron

Yeah, she caught my eye

Yes, oh my, oh my

And when I walked her home

Da do ron-ron-ron, da do ron-ron

I picked her up at seven and she looked so fine

Da do ron-ron-ron, da do ron-ron

The very next day I made her mine

Da do ron-ron-ron, da do ron-ron

Yeah, she looked so fine,

Yes, I made her mine

And when I walked her home

Da do ron-ron-ron, da do ron-ron

- With apologies to The Crystals,  Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich and Phil Spector

Lucien Crandall has never ceased to intrigue me, maybe because I am a bit of a nutter who loves beautiful typewriters and women myself. Crandall invented the most beautiful typewriter ever made (the New Model Crandall, above) and held one of the most crucial patents in the history of the typewriter, one that was zealously protected and the subject of an enormous amount of speculation and litigation. He also claimed to have employed the first female typist, in 1874. I may have suddenly gone amaurotic, but I can find absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Crandall ever invented a typewriter for the blind. I suspect a misconception may have occurred, when Crandall was said to have invented a "blind writer" (the International, below). Nothing in the specifications for Crandall's earlier typewriters suggests that they were designed specifically for use by the blind.

That this last claim has been made so often about Crandall just goes to show just how little we really know about him. Almost everything that has been published about Crandall is either inaccurate or incomplete. So, in an effort to set the record straight, here are the true details:

PERSONAL LIFE

. Crandall was born the son of a Methodist minister of Puritan Stock (though descended from the first Seventh Day Adventist in America), but Lucien later gave land to and became a trustee for the Presbyterian Church at its foundation in Parish, Oswego, New York. His father was William Pierce Crandall (1808-71) and his mother Emily (née Bennett) (1812-98), both from Homer, New York. He was the second of four sons and the fourth of six children. 

Through his mother, Crandall was a descendant of Joseph Warren (above, 1741-75), who played a leading role in American Patriot organisations in Boston in early days of the American Revolution, eventually serving as president of the revolutionary Massachusetts Provincial Congress. Warren enlisted Paul Revere and William Dawes on April 18, 1775, to leave Boston and spread the alarm that the British garrison in Boston was setting out to raid the town of Concord and to arrest rebel leaders John Hancock and Samuel Adams. Warren took part in the next day's Battles of Lexington and Concord, which are commonly considered to be the opening engagements of the American Revolutionary War. Warren had been commissioned a Major General in the colony's militia shortly before the June 17, 1775, Battle of Bunker Hill. Rather than exercising his rank, Warren served in the battle as a private soldier, and was killed in combat when British troops stormed the redoubt atop Breed's Hill. His death, immortalised in John Trumbull's painting, The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775, galvanised the rebel forces, and he has been memorialised in many place names in the United States.

. In April 1900, Crandall helped found the Crandall Genealogical Association at Astor House, New York. The association said the first of the family to arrive in America was John Crandall, who sailed into Boston Harbour in 1634.  He was the first Seventh Day Adventist on the continent. Another illustrious Crandall, Joseph, founded Utica in 1701. Benjamin P. Crandall, first of the family in New York City, invented the baby carriage.

. Crandall first married a girl called Clara Minturn, from Lock, New York. Clara was also known as "Carrie".  She was born on January 8, 1851. They wed in Tully, New York, on June 8, 1866, when Carrie was 15 and Crandall 22. Carrie died in Cortland, New York, on July 7, 1867, aged 16. There were no children of the marriage.
. In June 1869 Crandall married singer Mary Edna Root, born in New York in July 1842. They apparently separated in the 1880s, but it is not known if they ever divorced. There were TWO daughters by this marriage, but only one survived childhood: Abbie Mae Crandall (born Syracuse, Onondaga, New York, December 23, 1872), who married William H.Bachman (1883-1968). The first daughter, Mary Crandall, died in childhood. Mary Root died in Syracuse on February 4, 1909, leaving Abbie her sole beneficiary, but declaring Lucien "her only other heir". Abbie died in Niagara Falls on March 16, 1957. She and Bachman had a daughter, Harriet Cornelia Bachman Jambro (1911-2001). At the time of her death, Mrs Jambro was living in Hamburg, New York, with a son, Thomas A. Jambro, probably one Lucien S. Crandall's last direct descendants.
. Crandall's third wife was Catherina Ann Shirreff, who was born in Great Boughton, Chester, England, in January 1867 and who immigrated to the United States in 1887. She was also known as "Ellis Crandall" and as "Kate". The couple were married in 1888 and there were TWO daughters by this marriage, Carena Ann Crandall (also known as "Carrie", born Pulaski, New York, February 1, 1890-) and Hazel M. Crandall (born Philadelphia, April 9, 1894-). Catherine Crandall died on July, 1910, while she and Lucien and their daughters, then aged 20 and 16, were living in Washington, Warren, New Jersey. 
. It seems Crandall's situation, with him (perhaps illegally, as a bigamist) having started a new family, created problems or embarrassments for some of the parties involved, and after the birth of Hazel, Crandall went to live in England, in Spark Hill, Birmingham, for three or four years in the late 1890s. 
. In 1900, Crandall was back in the United States and appears to have been living a double life, possibly because of the lack of a divorce. On the same day in the US census of 1900, June 9, Crandall was listed as living with his second wife, Mary Edna Root, and her Haines Brothers upright piano in Syracuse, and also with his third wife, Catherina Ann Shirreff, and their two daughters, in New York City.
. Crandall's fourth wife was Florence Mabel Tallman, born in Iowa in June 1883. See the "Mound of clay had not yet settled firmly" story below from the Syracuse Post-Standard of July 19, 1910. The couple moved to Chester, Pennsylvania, where Florence's sister and niece, Frances and Ruth Dunlop, lived, in London Grove.

MILITARY SERVICE

. Crandall enlisted with the 109thNew York Volunteer Infantry Regiment at its organisation at Binghamton, Broome, New York, on August 27, 1862. He was still 18.  He served as a private for the last two years and nine months of the American Civil War, surviving 12 major battles (all in the last 11 months of the conflict) without injury. The regiment was mustered into active service by the US Department of War a day after formation, with Benjamin Franklin Tracy (above, 1830-1915), later Secretary of the Navy, as commanding colonel. (Crandall would later assign adding machine and typebar patents to Tracy.).
The regiment's 10 companies were raised primarily from men of the 24th NY Senatorial District,  which comprised Broome, Tompkins and Tioga counties. The 109th was attached to the 8th Army Corps, Middle District, and took up railroad guard duties protecting the rail lines  from Baltimore to Washington.  In April 1864, the 109th was ordered to join the 9th Army Corps then assembling at Annapolis in preparation for action against General Robert E. Lee at Petersburg and became part of Hartranft's battle-tried 1st Brigade, Wilcox's 3rd Division, 9th Army Corps, Army of the Potomac.  On May 5, 1864, the 109th took part in the Battle of The Wilderness. The 109th mustered out on June 4, 1865, at the Delaney House, Washington. During the 11 months from May 1864 to April 1865, the 109th was in the field engaged in almost daily battles or on picket duty, and sustained 614 casualties, half the regiment's organisational number.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER

Crandall began working at the age of 12 (1856) "at the printer's case". After the Civil War, he returned to his first calling, setting up a book publishing and job printing company in Cortland in 1867. Then he elected on a career in journalism and was editor of the Cortland Democrat and later the Southern Onondaga in Tully. As well, in March 1872 he set up a temperance magazine, The Anti-Dram Shop, "Devoted to the interests of the Anti-Dram-Shop Party". When, in 1886, Crandall started legal action against James Densmore, he described himself as a "temperance lecturer".

In 1874, Crandall went to work as a reporter for the New York Tribune. It was while at the Tribune that Crandall conceived of the idea of a type-setting and distributing machine.

While working on a model of this machine, Crandall came in contact with George Washington Newton Yost. (The notion that he worked for Yost and Densmore as a Sholes & Glidden salesman in 1873 is incorrect; Yost and Densmore employed no-one in 1873, and had nothing to sell anyway. Instead, in 1874, Crandall prepared advertising copy for Yost and Densmore, at that time telling Yost about his typesetting machine scheme.) It was through his plans for typesetting machine that Crandall's involvement with the typewriter began. (At about this same time, Crandall, based on his experiences in newspapers and in guarding railway lines during the Civil War, was working on an automatic telegraph key and register, for which he applied for a patent in November 1875.) Crandall never assigned any typewriter patents, even in portions, to Yost or Densmore, or to Remington. Crandall's famous "oscillating key" patent of 1875 was used by Remington, but documents show it was never relinquished by him to Remington.

This was apparently typewritten by Crandall

Crandall claimed that the advertising copy he wrote about the Sholes & Glidden for Yost and Densmore in 1874 - in the form of a description and catalogue - was "the first piece of typewritten literature ever given to the public".

TYPEWRITER INVENTING

Crandall did not work on the original Sholes & Glidden typewriter, nor did he work forRemington, nor was he ever in the employ of Yost and Densmore - though he did do some copywriting work for them in 1874 while he was working for the New York Tribune. Through Yost's introduction, Crandall became an independent consultant to Remington - and Yost and Densmorestill retained, at that stage, some say in improvements to and the construction of the typewriter.

This is one of the most significant and contentious patents

in the early history of the typewriter.

Crandall's first important involvement with the typewriter came in August 1875, when he applied for a patent for "improvement in type-writing machines". It was specifically designed to be fitted to the Sholes & Glidden, as it then was, and as being manufactured by Remington.
This was an initial but aborted attempt by Crandall to overcome the problem of the capital letters-only Sholes & Glidden. It involved typebars with six character slugs on each, a swinging platen (three positions) and oscillating keys. The three positions of the platen brought into play two slugs on each typebar and the oscillating keys determined which of the two slugs left an impression. The typebar itself did not oscillate. Crandall had set out to "simplify" the Sholes & Glidden "and render it less complicated and expensive by reducing the number of parts".

Typewriter Topics, 1911

Crandall's patent, issued in  November 1875, provided another consultant, Bryon Alden Brooks, with the "germ of a most valuable improvement which did much to popularise the typewriter".  Crandall's idea was "perfectly practical in an experimental way", but it was "too slow, as it involved too much care in the manipulation of the machine to be deemed successful". Thus Brooks, like Crandall working independently but on behalf of Remington (their patents were not assigned to Remington) adapted Crandall's design, reducing the number of typeslugs on each typebar to two and introducing a sliding platen (the shift device). This involved changing the curve on the platen. The improvements resulted in the Remington No 2 of 1878.

PRATT, HAMMOND IMBROGLIO

Although Remington proceeded with Brooks's far more practical design, and had to pay him royalties on his patent, it also had to pay Crandall royalties for coming up with the original idea. However, Crandall decided to continue developing his multi-typeslug scheme, and was determined to invent a typewriter of "simple and cheaper construction and with a greater range of type, combining upper and lower case letters, figures, and punctuation marks, and working them all with one set of keys merely.” The design incorporated a “typesleeve” and a laterally-oscillating key-lever.

The typesleeve overcame Crandall's difficulties in accessing John Jonathan Pratt's existing patent on a "mechanical typographer" which employed a flat "typeplate". 
Pratt had exhibited his "Pterotype" in London in 1867, but it was not patented in the US until August 11, 1868, after he had returned to America. The patent was thus theoretically still valid in the US until August 1882, unless renewed by Pratt. But the Pterotype did not go into full production, and Pratt had all but abandoned his project.

Pratt's original, 1867 typewheel

In the meantime, in February 1879, James Bartlett Hammond began to develop his typewriter. Hammond intended to use a similar, curved plate, or typeshuttle, but because of Pratt's existing patent, couldn't include it in his own patents. The US Patent Office thus notified Pratt that his patent was "in interference" with Hammond's plans. (Incidentally, Densmore received similar warnings from the Patent Office, as others, like Crandall and Hammond, moved to produce their own versions of the typewriter and found existing Sholes patents to be in interference with them. These Sholes patents had been applied for but not issued, because Densmore and Yost lacked the necessary funds.) 
Pratt "finally yielded preference [to Hammond] under a compromise which gave [Pratt] a royalty on [the Hammond] machine, and thus ended his efforts in the direction of typewriter invention". As well as the royalty, to persuade Pratt to yield Hammond gave Pratt an immediate cash payment plus a life annuity of $2500, which he had to pay each year until Pratt died in 1905.

The typeshuttle designed for Hammond by Pratt in 1882

To compound the arrangement, Pratt actually assigned to Hammond his [Pratt's] typeshuttle design of 1879, the patent being issued in late 1882. This was the design Hammond used.
In coming to an agreement to "yield preference" to Hammond, Pratt had temporarily stymied Crandall's work on his own typewriter, causing considerable bitterness  for an already embattled Crandall.

THE CRANDALL

This 4-inch high, 10-inch wide, 9-inch long prototype model of the Crandall, presented to the US Patent Office on December 20, 1881, is now held by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. It seems this small typewriter never went into production, but was expanded into what Crandall described as the "greatly improved" version, the New Model Crandall, in 1884. The laterally-oscillating key-lever  is the gold switch on the upper left of the model. It moved the typesleeve. You would move the switch one way to activate the numerals and punctuation, and the other way to activate the capital letters. Below is a close-up of the typesleeve:

It turned into this, the New Model Crandall, from the Martin Howard Collection:

Stymied but not thwarted by the Pratt-Hammond arrangement, Crandall pressed on with his own plans, adapting his existing multi-typeslug patent (for the Remington No. 2) from 1875 to create his distinctive typesleeve. For the Crandall typewriter, he first patented an early version in Britain in August 1879, six months after Hammond had made his initial move. Perhaps Crandall had had thoughts of overcoming his obstacles in the US by having his machine manufactured in Britain. Nonetheless, he applied for a US patent a week before Christmas 1879. The Pratt-Hammond imbroglio meant it was not granted for two years, eventually being issued in late December 1881.
The first Crandall typewriters were manufactured in Blodgett Mills, New York, but a fire burnt down the factory soon after production started and manufacturing was moved to Syracuse.
Now, I cannot say with any degree of certainty which of the two typewriters, the Hammond or the Crandall, went into production first. Almost every reference work offers a different year. But the consensus seems to be that full "quality" production was achieved for both in 1885. Claims of earlier years are made for both, but on the evidence before us, these seem to be highly unlikely. Edward James Manning started working on Hammonds at the Garvin Machine Company factory in 1886.

CRANDALL IN COURT

A jury awarded Crandall $10,000 and costs in a defamation case settlement against James Densmore in the Cortland County Court in February 1887. Densmore appealed and the verdict was set aside and a new trial ordered. Crandall went to the Court of Appeals, which finally heard the case in Saratoga in May 1891.
This was but the tip of the iceberg upon which that Titanic typewriter inventor, Lucien Crandall, would ultimately, almost five years later, flounder. In March 1887 Crandall sued Densmore for $100,000 in the New York Supreme Court, and the case was heard by Judge Horace Boardman Smith (above, 1826-1888). This time Crandall was awarded $30,000.
These suits concerned Densmore's violent written reaction to a bid by Crandall to have Remington manufacture Crandall's American Standard (later the Jewett) typewriter.

The idea that this case was connected to an unfounded theory about Crandall assigning half of his oscillating keys patent to Densmore and Yost is nonsense. This patent was issued, unassigned, exactly three weeks AFTER Yost and Densmore's Type-Writer Company had signed over to Remington all rights to make and sell the Sholes & Glidden. Remington, by then in total control of the development of the typewriter, did not make use of Crandall's patent until 1878, when it produced the Remington No 2.
In 1892, the Remington Standard Typewriter Manufacturing Company LOST a New York circuit court case when it sought an injunction over patent infringement against Frank W.Bailey, ON THE GROUNDS that Remington did not hold the patent (soon then to expire) but that Crandall DID. That should kill off any speculation about Crandall having disposed of any portion of his patent at any time to Remington or Yost and Densmore.
In 1899 the Union Writing Machine Company unsuccessfully challenged the Domestic Sewing Machine Company, makers of the Williams typewriter, in the New Jersey Circuit Court over an alleged infringement of Bryon Brooks's shift patent. Again, Crandall's 1875 patent was declared to be "a document of prime importance". Its ownership by Crandall was not questioned. 
But I digress ...

In 1886, Crandall had retired from the management of the Crandall Typewriter Company in Syracuse and assigned his patents for the Crandall over to that company - which six years later would go under the umbrella of the Union trust. 

The town of Groton had raised the capital through stock to build a new Crandall factory. Luther Adelbert Barber (1844-1929) was the new company president (of what was now known as the Crandall Machine Company), succeeding Crandall himself, and Dexter Hubbard Marsh (1840-95) took over as secretary and treasurer. The other major backers were Frank Conger (above, 1849-1902; elder brother of Benn Conger, Corona founder) and Everett Smiley (1828-97).

This company produced the Crandall Universal No 3 in 1893 and the Crandall Visible 4 in 1895. It ceased operation in 1899. 

Right to the end, its factory superintendent was Edwin Earle Barney (1867-), later to take charge at Remington. In 1894, Barney re-designed the Crandall (the so-called "Improved Crandall"). Although, for eight years, Crandall had had nothing to do with this company, historians have credited him with this machine, instead of Barney.

Barney's 1894 re-design of the Crandall

Lucien Crandall was embarking on new ventures, to make typewriters under his new designs. These were the American Standard and its "counterpart", the Victoria typewriter. The latter was destined for British sales, and Crandall had plans to have it made it on those shores. Crandall applied for a patent for the improved alignment of the American Standard in January 1886.

In the meantime, he established a manufacturing company and factory in Parish, New York. This building was erected in 1886 as the Knaus and Arwine Chair Factory and included a tannery. For three years, a Crandall-designed typewriter, the International, was manufactured there. 

Before all this, however, Crandall had approached Remington with a proposal to sell his patents to the Ilion company. Hearing of this, and seeing it as a challenge to his own dwindling income from the Type-Writer Company and what he might be able to leave behind for his family, a dying James Densmore wrote to Remington calling Crandall a "liar, scoundrel, a dishonest and immortal man." The letter ruined Crandall's chances of a deal with Remington.

Crandall sued Densmore "for defamation of character, laying his damages at $100,000, claiming that sum to be the loss sustained by him in his failure to negotiate with the Remingtons, as the sale of the Remington type-writer has reached an enormous number, and a small royalty, such as Crandall claims he could have got, would approach very closely to these figures at the present time." Densmore's defence was, as he saw it, simply the truth.  
Densmore (September 16, 1889) and Judge Boardman Smith (Boxing Day 1888) had died but the Crandall-Densmore case dragged on until 1891. As per the instructions in his step-father's will, Densmore's stepson and executor, Ernest Ryan Barron (1844-) continued to pursue an overturning of the original finding in Crandall's favour. By 1890 Crandall had had Densmore indicted by the Grand Jury of Herkimer County on a charge of criminal libel. In turn, Crandall was indicted and tried in Cortland County on a charge of perjury, but found not guilty. In late 1886 Crandall had Densmore's wife Adella and her niece Ella Womersley arrested in Brooklyn for perjury (they were released on $5000 bail), and then faced $25,000 damages charges from each of these two women for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution. In October 1887 Crandall's case against Mrs Densmore and Womersley was dismissed by a Grand Jury. By the end of 1887, a warrant for the arrest of Crandall was issued by the Supreme Court of Brooklyn, as a counter-suing Womersley sought to recover $10,000 for malicious prosecution.
Finally, on October 8, 1891, five years after all this nastiness had started, a "judgement absolute" was rendered against Crandall, with costs going to Barron on behalf of the Densmore estate.

To rub salt into Crandall's wounds, Remington Standard was successful in bringing a trade mark infringement injunction against Crandall's American Standard, which instead became the Jewett and emerged from Des Moines in 1892. Little wonder Crandall wanted to get out of the country for a while.

HIS LAST TYPEWRITER

Apart from the New Model Crandall, American Standard (Jewett) and the Victoria, Crandall claimed other typewriters were made under licence to him, such as the Densmore, the National and the Fitch.

Made by George W. Harwood of Syracuse. See Sweet's obituary below.

His last typewriter, the International, was definitely all his own creation. Crandall considered it his "most original and best work". Crandall was issued with the first of a series of seven patents in 1893, all assigned to William Avery Sweet (1830-1904) of Syracuse (the last of them, in 1895, during Crandall's absence in England). This time Crandall was not going it alone. Sweet was general manager for many years of the Sanderson Brothers Steel Company plant, which was associated with the Syracuse Roller Mill, the Barnes Bicycle Works and the Sterling Iron Company. Sweet’s father Horace Sweet had been a pioneer in introducing farm machinery. William Sweet later became president of his own steel company, and seemingly made typewriters there.

Crandall's last full typewriter patent, issued in October 1895, was for some sort of weird combination of Crandall-Hammond-thrust action typewriter, one which would revert to his original interest in multi-slug typebars. He wrote, "My object is to produce a type-writing machine in which the printing is made upon the top of the impression-platen by means of horizontally-reciprocating typebars, an inking roller and an impression-hammer, each typebar being provided with six (or more or less) characters, signs or symbols, part upper case and part lower case, said typebars being arranged upon lines radial to the printing-point and converging thereat, each one being projected by the operation of a key-lever variable distances for the three small letters adjacent to its outer end, and then by operating a shift-key is adapted to be projected farther for the printing of the three capitals thereon, respectively, means being provided to properly stop each typebar at the printing-point, comprising a system of stops actuated by the key-levers, in which an interval exists between the moment when the typebar reaches the desired point of projection and when the hammer strikes the impression blow thereon ..." It has been claimed that the similar-looking British Gardner typewriter was an adaptation of Crandall's design, but that machine apparently emerged in 1890. It was called the Victoria in Germany.
So, like Crandall's very first typewriter, it seems his last was never made, despite it being one-fourth assigned to Jacob Wolf Riglander (1841-1929), an extremely wealthy New York merchant with many import-export business contacts in Europe.

---

Henry Harper Benedict's 1903 History of the Typewriter

September 9, 2013, 11:13 pm

≫ Next: Wyckoff, McKean Jones 1900 History of the Typewriter

≪ Previous: Crackers Crandall: The Wayward Wizard of Typewriters

$

0

0

This paper was delivered 110 years ago on Thursday of this week. 1903 marked the 30th anniversary of the deal signed by James Densmore and E.Remington & Sons to manufacture the Sholes & Glidden typewriter.

In 1903, the Herkimer County Historical Society asked Remington Typewriter Company president Henry Harper Benedict to deliver a paper on the evolution of the typewriter. The society's interest stemmed from the Remington Typewriter Company's factory at Ilion falling within the boundaries of Herkimer county, in the state of New York.
The society, however, asked Benedict not to concentrate solely on the Sholes & Glidden and the Remington, but to look at other early machines as well. Benedict didn't entirely follow those instructions, and fell short of being completely objective, but nonetheless came up with a most interesting paper. Some pertinent points about this document:

Benedict

 . Henry Harper Benedict was the man who in February 1873 gave the word which convinced Philo Remington to commit E.Remington & Sons of Ilion, New York, to make the Sholes & Glidden.
Benedict was born at German Flats, Herkimer County, New York, on October 9, 1844, and educated at local public schools, the Little Falls Academy, Fairfield Seminary, Marshall Institute at Easton, and finally Hamilton College, Clinton. He entered Hamilton in 1865 and graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in 1869. In 1923 he was also made a master of arts and a doctor of law. 
Immediately after graduating from Hamilton College, in 1869 Benedict joined E. Remington & Sons as a bookkeeper and rose through the ranks to become Philo Remington’s private secretary and treasurer of the Remington company’s sewing machine division.

In 1882 Benedict joined Clarence Walker Seamans and William Ozmun Wyckoff to form Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict to make and market Remington typewriters. Benedict became president of Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict from 1895 and was also president of the Remington Typewriter Company from 1902 until retiring at age 68, in 1913, a multi-millionaire and Remington's largest shareholder. Benedict died, aged 90, on June 12, 1935.
. Benedict says he researched and wrote a history of the typewriter in the early 1880s. This appeared under the heading of  "The Evolution of the Type-Writer" in Belford's Monthly in April 1892 (this is apparently available online, but I cannot access it). For this later paper, Benedict relied heavily for an "update" on two of his employees, Oscar Woodward and Robert McKean Jones.
Woodward had been the principal examiner of typewriters for the United States Patent Office in Washington before joining Remington and the Union Trust in New York. Woodward (born Pennsylvania, 1857; raised Ottunwa, Wapello, Idaho) was put in overall charge of development of the Remington Visible. Under the Union umbrella, Woodward worked for Wyckoff, Seamans and Benedict from 1903 and also on the Densmore and Yost typewriters (particularly on the Yost frontstrike machine in 1907). Benedict called Woodward 'thebest authority in the world on typewriter patents'.
McKean Jones, a linguist and typographer with Remington, in the 1920s became the manager of Remington's development department. He was born in Wirral, Cheshire, England, in July 1855. McKean Jones is best known for his Japanese (katakana) and Chinese ("chu-yin tzu-mu") phonetic alphabet typewriters (adaptations of existing Remington typewriters). Benedict says he was, in 1903, 'themost prolific writer on typewriter topics' and 'perhaps thebest authority [on typewriters] in the world'.  With Wyckoff, McKean wrote a history of the typewriter in (Johnson's) The Universal Cyclopedia of 1900. I will post this tomorrow. Jones died in his winter home in Stony Point, New York, on June 19, 1933. 

Wyckoff

. Benedict's 1903 paper includes writing machines developed in the United States (including, surprisingly, the one from Abner Peeler), Britain and France, but excludes Italy (notably Pellegrino Turri di Castelnuovo, 1808, but also Pietro Conti and Giuseppe Ravizza), Germany and Austria (Peter Mitterhofer), Russia (Mikhail Ivanovich Alisov) and Brazil (Azevedo). Clearly, inventions made in these countries were unknown to Benedict, McKean Jones and Woodward at the time this paper was delivered. They were also unknown to Friedrich Müller when Müller published his Schreibmaschinre und Schriften-Vervielfältigung in Berlin in 1900 (as far as I know, the first general typewriter history book written*). They were still unknown to George Carl Mares when he published his The History of the Typewriter: Being an Illustrated Account of the Origin, Rise and Development of the Writing Machine in London in 1909. And they were still unknown to Charles Vonley Oden when he published Evolution of the Typewriter in New York 1917 (available online).
*An F.S.Webster Company catalogue of typewriters of the day, called Typewriters of All Kinds and Our Galaxy of Stars, written by Frank E.Kneeland, was published in Boston in 1898. It is no longer available online. Also E.N.Miner of the Typewriter Headquarters, New York, published a small booklet at about this same time.
The Italian inventions were revealed in Venetian Conte Emilio Budan's Le Macchine da Scrivere dal 1714 al 1900: Loro Storia e Descrizione Illustrata (Milan, 1902) and his 1911 essay I Precursori Delle Moderne Macchine da Scrivere (1713-1880). But English-speaking typewriter historians did not become aware of them until the early 1920s. They were first mentioned in the English language in Typewriter Topics' A Condensed History of the Writing Machine: The Romance of Earlier Effort and the Realities of Present Day Accomplishment (New York, 1923).
. Nevertheless, the Benedict paper did make mention of some inventions which had, until the turn of the century, been lost in the clouds of time (and the flames of the Patent Office). Most notable among these was William Austin Burt's 1829 typographer.  Re-discovering and giving long-overdue prominence to the Burt invention was undoubtedly the work of Woodward, and that incredible story is told by Benedict in this document. Because of this, Burt's invention was included in Mares and Oden. McKean Jones and Wyckoff had also mentioned Burt in their 1900 Johnson's Universal Cyclopedia entry.
. Although it is not, oddly enough, acknowledged by either Typewriter Topics in its A Condensed History, or, more pointedly, by the Herkimer County Historical Society itself in its The Story of the Typewriter 1873-1923 (both 1923 publications marking the 50th anniversary of the first Sholes & Gliddens), Benedict's paper unquestionably contributed a great deal to the research for both of these books. It would no doubt have also been of great value to later historians, such as Martin and Adler.

Wyckoff, McKean Jones 1900 History of the Typewriter

September 10, 2013, 2:46 pm

≫ Next: West Virginia, HERE I COME! Sixth Annual Chestnut Ridge Typewriter Museum Gathering

≪ Previous: Henry Harper Benedict's 1903 History of the Typewriter

$

0

0

As promised in yesterday's post about Henry Harper Benedict's history of the typewriter, here is the typewriter entry by William Ozmun Wyckoff and Robert McKean Jones from the 1900 edition of Johnson's The Universal Cyclopedia:

Charles Wheatstone

Alfred Ely Beach

Christopher Latham Sholes

Lucien Stephen Crandall

James Bartlett Hammond

Thomas Hall

Charles Spiro

Alexander Timothy Brown

Walter Jay Barron

George Canfield Blickensderfer

Lee Spear Burridge

Rasmus Malling-Hansen

West Virginia, HERE I COME! Sixth Annual Chestnut Ridge Typewriter Museum Gathering

September 10, 2013, 11:27 pm

≫ Next: Typewriter Mystery Men: The Barron Brothers, Brooks, Davidson, Hall and Spiro - Pioneers We Don't Know an Awful Lot About

≪ Previous: Wyckoff, McKean Jones 1900 History of the Typewriter

$

0

0

Starting to think about packing the bags already - and trying to remember what I promised to take for Richard Polt.
One month to go!
Flights booked, hotels booked, itinerary confirmed - all is (just about) in readiness. It's (almost) all systems go!
I can hardly wait ...
Only the second Australian (and first New Zealander) to attend a typewriter collectors' gathering in the U S of A (after Bob Moran, in Philadelphia in June 2000).

The road map I'm bringing for Richard Polt.

May be a bit out of date by now?

Trying now to keep the excitement in check! At least for another three weeks, anyway ...
In one month I get to meet:

Richard Polt

Herman Price

Will Davis

Martin Howard

Peter Weil

Alan Seaver
Paul Robert
(I hope he can make it)
Martin Rice

and so many others ... Fritz Niemann from Germany, Dave Davis, Mike Brown, Jack Knarr (I hope one-finger-typist, fellow journo Jack will make it), Don Feldman ... all on the "Must Meet Before I Die" bucket list - my mind is just swimming with names ... and with anticipation.
Eight years ago I was typing all these names in a Who's Who of the Typewriter Collecting World.
They were just names in big, bright lights for me back then. I'm not ashamed to say I hero-worshipped them (though it might embarrass them to see me write that!).
Now I get to meet these guys!
Wow!
Starting to think about making some T-shirts for the occasion, and putting together a few ideas for designs ...

I fly into Cincinnati on Thursday, October 10, and drive to Morganstown with Richard Polt (and maybe filmmaker Doug Nichol) on Friday the 11th.  I imagine the typewriter gabfest on the drive to West Virginia will be one great way to warm-up for the weekend of October 11-13. Oh boy! Talk about typewriter heaven!

Almost heaven, West Virginia

Chestnut Ridge Museum

Monongahela River -

Life is old there

Older than the wedge

Younger than the Coliseum

Growin' like a hedge

Country Roads, take me home

To the place I belong

West Virginia, vintage typers

Take me home, country roads

Typewriter Mystery Men: The Barron Brothers, Brooks, Davidson, Hall and Spiro - Pioneers We Don't Know an Awful Lot About

September 11, 2013, 7:35 pm

≫ Next: Goodies and Such Good People: The Wonderful Wide World of Typewriters

≪ Previous: West Virginia, HERE I COME! Sixth Annual Chestnut Ridge Typewriter Museum Gathering

$

0

0

Toward the end of his otherwise marvellous 1954 book The Typewriter and The Men Who Made It, the late Richard Nelson Current annoyingly leaves, in the mind of the reader, a few more questions than he provides answers.
What exactly was the nature of the relationship between James Densmore and his two stepsons, Walter Jay Barron and Ernest Ryan Barron? Current thoroughly examines the turbulent 46-year (January 1853-September 1889) history of dealings between Christopher Latham Sholes and Densmore, as well as the often testy and mealymouthed exchanges between the Densmore brothers, James, Amos and Emmett. But the Barron brothers remain relatively mysterious figures.
Why was Walter cut from Densmore's will? Why was Ernest the so-called "loyal" one, the brother who, after Densmore's death in 1889, had badgered Christopher Latham Sholes for patent signatures on Sholes' own deathbed - for no other apparent reason than the benefit of Densmore's estate? And at what point did Densmore and Walter Barron fall out, after working so closely together on the early development of the Sholes & Glidden? Why did Walter side with James' more avaricious brother, Amos Densmore? What exactly was the role of either Barron brother in the early history of the typewriter?
Current also refers to James Densmore, in his dying days, being pursued - and sued - by George Washington Newton Yost, Lucien Stephen Crandall and Alexander Davidson, each of them vehemently disputing with Densmore the ownership of certain typewriter patents. Where exactly - and how - did Davidson fit into all this? 
For some answers to these questions, and some insights into the lives and accomplishments of the Barron brothers, Yost, Amos Densmore and Davidson, as well as Thomas Hall, Charles Spiro and Byron Alden Brooks, we can refer to the 1893 Volume III of The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, and the entries for these men. Note:
. Walter Barron claims most of the credit for the Caligraph and the Densmore, a lot of it for the Franklin and some of it for the Yost. But there is no mention in his biography of James Densmore or of his brother, and he does not name his parents! (His widowed mother, Adella, married James Densmore.) 
. Ernest Barron claims much of the credit for the Caligraph as well, and some of it for the Densmore and Yost. He does not mention his brother.
. Alexander Davidson claims much of the credit for the Yost.
. George Yost gives credit for the Caligraph to Franz Xaver Wagner, but claims to have given "life, health and development [to the typewriter]" and made the typewriter a financial success which "created a new industry" that "revolutionised office methods" and gave employment to thousands of men and woman.
. By comparison with this lot, Thomas Hall, Charles Spiro and Byron Alden Brooks seem much more modest men.
. Apart from his typewriter inventions (the Peoples [later the Champion], Crown, Philadelphia [which, according to Mares, looked like the Gardner] and Brooks), Byron Brooks is said to have had a hand in the development of the Linotype machine.

BYRON BROOKS' TYPEWRITERS:

Crown 

 People's

Champion

 Philadelphia (from Müller)

Brooks

Goodies and Such Good People: The Wonderful Wide World of Typewriters

September 12, 2013, 6:44 am

≫ Next: New Franklin Typewriter: Any Clean Up Advice?

≪ Previous: Typewriter Mystery Men: The Barron Brothers, Brooks, Davidson, Hall and Spiro - Pioneers We Don't Know an Awful Lot About

$

0

0

My secretary, Phonetica Longley, seen here typing on my "go-to" Bijou, is getting sooooo utterly sick and tired of me not answering my correspondence, she's threatening to walk out (and take the Bijou with her). So I thought I should at least acknowledge some of the mountains of mail (and gifts) I've received these past few months.
I find it hard enough to keep up with electronic mail (in fact I fail miserably), let alone real mail, but my intentions are as good as those marvellous friends who send me things. I promise I'll get around to replying one day ... soon ...
But when, as happened the night before last, I get almost 2000 page views in a single 24-hour period, I just feel locked into this blog - I have become its slave, compelled to keep posting. Which means my mail suffers - as you will see.

Where to start?

These fabulous letters came from new dad Ray Nickson, in Adelaide, and Typospherians Tony Mindling, in Cool, California, and Peter Eipers, in Helena, Alabama. Tony and Peter use such fantastic typewriter-headed writing paper - and Tony's envelope features my all-time favourite typist. Tony also sent a photo of his lovely burgundy Triumph portable. Lots of people alerted me to the Ermanno Marzorati story, but only one sent me a newspaper clipping: Gary McGill on the Gold Coast.

Mention of typewriter collector Ray Nickson (seen here with new All Blacks fan, his daughter Cynthia Sue, born on July 22) brings me to one of the most useful gifts I've received in a long time. Ray made me a typewriter toolbox! Unfortunately, it was quickly filled up with typewriter spare parts which had been lying around the place, instead of tools. It may not compare with Richard Polt's typewriter parts drawers, but it's still a pretty handy piece of work:

Ray's lovely American-born wife Alice, while waiting for Cynthia to arrive, very kindly made me oven gloves made from material with typewriter patterns. They're among this little lot, along with my sets of Typosphere postcards and a nice note from Rob Bowker, plus a DVD I haven't even had a chance to watch yet:

Alice's use of the typewriter material inspired me to get a few square metres of it myself and get some more typewriter ties made up. Of the seven ties here, the only ones I didn't get made myself are the two silky ones in the bottom photo. A couple of Typospherians commented favourably on me wearing one at the Ionian Club presentation last week:

Someone else had a similar idea, except this time for cushion covers:

Richard Amery in Sydney was also kind enough to send me some samples of the typewriter ribbons he is importing from China and selling on eBay:

Peter Muckermann in Germany keeps me well supplied with typewriter reading material (as does Herman Price in West Virginia) and Georg Sommeregger in Switzerland sent me a wonderful Swiss typewriter magazine, to which Georg had contributed a feature on Otto Petermann (see front cover with "Hermes" on it):

I was thrilled to receive from Louise Marlar (www.lamarler.com) the first of her "Talk QWERTY to me" T-shirts (a line Richard Polt first alerted me to), plus the "You are my type" shirt. They're still a bit crumbled from being squeezed into their package, but a warm iron will soon fix that. It's been too cold for T-shirts in Canberra these past three months, but I'm sure to get some wear out of these in the very near future:

This cardboard IBM Selectric turned up from the US. It was created in 2006 to send to Emmy Award judges and includes inside it a DVD of the nominated Hunter S.Thompson documentary Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride:

Call me a sucker for any typewriter-related item on Etsy if you will, but I have no absolutely qualms about wearing my love of typewriters on my sleeve - or, in these cases, on my chest:

And that's just the tip of the iceberg! (Most deliveries contain actual typewriters!)

New Franklin Typewriter: Any Clean Up Advice?

September 12, 2013, 3:45 pm

≫ Next: Colourful Typewriter Life: 60 Years of Corona Portable Adverts - 80 Colour Ads, 1916-1976

≪ Previous: Goodies and Such Good People: The Wonderful Wide World of Typewriters

$

0

0

The vice-president of the Fellowship of Australian Writers Western Australia (FAWWA) is flying across the continent in a fortnight to bring me Joseph Furphy's New Franklin typewriter to have a look at.
The typewriter, upon which Furphy wrote his 1903 book Such Is Life (under the pseudonym of  "Tom Collins") is usually housed at the fellowship's Tom Collins House in Swanbourne, Western Australia. It has been on display at the Fremantle Library during Fremantle's heritage celebrations and after coming to me in Canberra will be seen by members of the Furphy family in Shepparton, Victoria, north of Melbourne. It may then go on display at the Shepparton Library.

I have never touched a Franklin before - although I did see one in the metal, in excellent condition, in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney some years ago. I am wondering if anyone out there is familiar with this machine? I envisage doing little more to it other than simply cleaning it up a bit. Does anyone know of any quirks I should be looking for (carriage and platen movement etc)? Or any advice on a very gentle polish up?
I will only have the typewriter for four days before it goes on to Victoria, so will be keen to hear back from collectors in advance (forewarned is forearmed) with any suggestions they might have.

Joseph Furphy

Incidentally, the fellowship's president, Trisha Kotai-Ewers, told me a wonderful story, contained in a letter Furphy wrote to Kate Baker in July 1910: "There is not a Franklin ribbon to be had in Fremantle or Perth, so I had to get mantymakers' [makers of female outer garments] ribbon of suitable width, and ink it myself. Hence the copy is blotched, owing to the coarseness of ribbon. I am probably the only bloque [sic] alive who knows how to make and apply this ink. For colouring matter you use ivory black or Prussian Blue (the aniline colours won't do). Vaseline is the only mordant I can find as yet; and for a volatile solvent there is nothing to beat a mixture of kerosene, turpentine, and benzine ..."

Trisha wondered if there are any other accounts of authors making their own typewriter ribbon.

Kate Baker

Kate Baker, by the way, was a young Irish-born teacher who in 1886 was appointed to take temporary charge of a one-teacher school at Wanalta Creek near Rushworth. During the 10 months she spent teaching there and at nearby Burramboot East, she became friendly with members of the Furphy family, including Joseph, who came on a visit from Shepparton. Impressed by "the only girl in the Eastern Hemisphere who knew who Belisarius was", Furphy, nearly 20 years her senior, was glad to have her as a friend. They corresponded, and met when Furphy visited Melbourne. She retired in 1913 and the rest of her long life was devoted to the memory of Furphy, whose death in 1912 affected her deeply. Kate's belief in his ability had helped to sustain Furphy during the long labour of writing Such is Life. Kate died in 1953. Please see her interesting biography here. Furphy's is here.

Interestingly enough, I had a visit a couple of weeks ago from a young man who is a fledgling typewriter collector in Canberra, and by sheer coincidence he too had made his own ribbon in a very similar manner - quite successfully, too, I hasten to add! 

Colourful Typewriter Life: 60 Years of Corona Portable Adverts - 80 Colour Ads, 1916-1976

September 13, 2013, 11:45 pm

≫ Next: Typewriter Truth in Black and White: 30 Years of Corona Mono Adverts - 112 Ads, 1912-1942

≪ Previous: New Franklin Typewriter: Any Clean Up Advice?

$

0

0

1916

1917

1920

1922

1923

(Courtesy of Peter Weil)

1924

(Courtesy of Peter Weil)
1926

1927

1929

1930

1935

1936

1938

1939

1949

1950

1952

1953

1954

1955

1956

1957

1958

1959

1960

1961

1962

1963

1964

1965

1966

1968

1970

1974

1976

If anyone wants to see black-and-white adverts from the same period, let me know and I will post of those as well.

---

Typewriter Truth in Black and White: 30 Years of Corona Mono Adverts - 112 Ads, 1912-1942

September 15, 2013, 11:11 pm

≫ Next: Into the Typewriter Darkness: 45 Years of Corona Mono Adverts - 85 Ads, 1943-1988

≪ Previous: Colourful Typewriter Life: 60 Years of Corona Portable Adverts - 80 Colour Ads, 1916-1976

$

0

0

1912

1913

1914

1915

1916

1917

1918

1919

This is the first Corona advert to appear in Australia, in Tasmania.

1920

First Australian advert with image

1921

1922

1923

1924

1925

1926

1927

1928

1929

1930

1931

1933

1934

1935

1936

1937

1939

1940

1941

1942

Into the Typewriter Darkness: 45 Years of Corona Mono Adverts - 85 Ads, 1943-1988

September 16, 2013, 7:28 pm

≫ Next: Yikes! It's Back! The Clark Nova Typewriter Returns from its Long, Naked Lunch

≪ Previous: Typewriter Truth in Black and White: 30 Years of Corona Mono Adverts - 112 Ads, 1912-1942

$

0

0

1943

1944

1945

1946

1947

1948

1949

1950

1951

1955

1956

1957

1958

1959

1960

1961

1962

1964

1965

1966

1967

1968

1969

1970

1971

1972

1975

1976

1977

1979

1980

1981

1986

1988

Yikes! It's Back! The Clark Nova Typewriter Returns from its Long, Naked Lunch

September 16, 2013, 11:04 pm

≫ Next: Typewriters and the Vietnam War

≪ Previous: Into the Typewriter Darkness: 45 Years of Corona Mono Adverts - 85 Ads, 1943-1988

$

0

0

The Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month launched its upcoming Cronenberg Project - and there at the press conference announcing the event was the Clark Nova typewriter used in Cronenberg's 1991 adaption of William S.Burroughs' The Naked Lunch.

The giant beetle typewriter will be included in "Evolution", the exhibition part of the Cronenberg Project, which opens on November 1 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto. According to one newspaper, the project embraces an "exhibition/retrospective/symposia/futuristic romp/art show/online experience/book launch and short film". It's been described as a "huge, multiplatform celebration of things Cronenberg".

Toronto born and bred, Cronenberg, 70, has been donating all his files and memorabilia to the festival's permanent home for the past 20 years, since TIFF director Piers Handling asked him, "David, let us be your garbage can." 

Also featured among the memorabilia will be the pod from The Fly, the gynaecological tools from Dead Ringers ("I always thought someone could make a wonderful set of jewelry based on those"), and a re-creation of the bar from The Naked Lunch, complete with a Mugwump. 

David Cronenberg at the press conference.

See Ted Munk's breakdown of the typewriters used in The Naked Lunchhere. Also, the inspiration for all this can be seen in the Burroughs photo sequence on Richard Polt's "Writers and their Typewriters" page at his Classic Typewriter Pagehere.

Typewriters and the Vietnam War

September 17, 2013, 8:13 pm

≫ Next: Fifty Shades of Grey: The Sadism of Selling an Olympia SM3 Portable Typewriter

≪ Previous: Yikes! It's Back! The Clark Nova Typewriter Returns from its Long, Naked Lunch

$

0

0

Having by now developed an eagle eye for typewriters appearing on screens both big and small, I was surprised to see this image pop up on an Australian commercial TV network on Sunday night, during an interesting program on Vietnam War veterans seeking to return personal items to the families of fallen North Vietnamese soldiers.
Surprised because, for reasons I cannot explain, images of typewriters related to the Vietnam War aren't all that common. Indeed, if one keys in "Vietnam War+typewriter" in a Google images search, the first one that appears is one from my own blog. This is a photograph taken by a friend of mine, Peter Crossing, during a visit to Vietnam 2½ years ago, and is of a Voss portable used by Ngo Ba Thanh ("The Rose in the BarbwireForest") (1931-2004). It is now on display in the Hanoi Women's Museum. See the post here.

Now back to this post: A day after I first posted it (September 18, 2013), a reader sent me these images he had snapped of a Vietnamese keyboard Olympia Splendid 66 portable "used in the field" by the Viet Cong. It is on display in the Hồ Chí Minh City Museum, where its history is described:

Still, compared to the Korean War or either of the two World Wars, there seems to a strange shortage of Vietnam War images which involve typewriters. Here are some others, including two of US Women's Army Corps members (one with a Remington with a wingspan almost as wide as Rob Bowker's Adler) and a series of Associated Press correspondent George Esper (at the Underwood) with AP bureau chiefs in Saigon in 1972:

As well, there is this February 1967 image of French freelance photographer Michèle Ray  (later movie producer Michèle Ray-Gavras, also see here), who had been captured near Bong Son by the Viet Cong. She is seen recuperating with the aid of her Antares Domus portable typewriter in a private hospital:

Ray with her Renault.

Zalin Grant looks under Ray's Renault after she had been captured and the car was booby-trapped.

Ray was the first journalist to be captured in Vietnam. She arrived there in 1966, a former Chanel model who had made a name for herself in France by driving from the tip of South America to Alaska. The Viet Cong treated her well and she was converted to their cause. In later life, Ray recovered Che Guevara's diary in Bolivia and gave it to Fidel Castro. There is a very interesting story about her and other Vietnam war correspondentshere. However, there isnot a typewriter in sight on this post.

From LIFE magazine, February 1967

Ray soon after her release. Another typewriter, an Olivetti, can be seen in the background.

Why? Well, the caption on top of the LIFE magazine article about Ray might explain something. It quotes Ray as saying Americans never left Saigon for the DMZ by road (I have heard similar stories from the Six-Day War. I have also been told that Vietnam was the first war in which correspondents were deliberately kept away from the war zones and fed "official" information from a distance.). So is it because, unlike Korea and the two World Wars, war correspondents in Vietnam didn't get that close with typewriters to the front lines? Cameras were abundantly seen, but not typewriters. The typewriters that were seen, at least from the US point of view, were in offices in Saigon or other relatively safe havens in the south.

Another painting from the collection now held by the Operation Wandering Souls project team in Australia, which wants to return the paintings to the family of the dead North Vietnamese soldier who painted them.

Americans did use typewriters - and Vietnamese language ones at that. This letter was written to his Viet Cong counterpart by US Major-General John H. Hay after the Battle of Ap Bau Bang in March 1967, complaining about the Viet Cong "disgracing themselves" and behaving in an "unsoldierly manner". It was, apparently, subsequently used as an somewhat effective propaganda leaflet. See here (but turn off the sound).

One thing we can be fairly certain of - the North Vietnamese used portable typewriters, and they did so close to the action. The image at the top of this post is ample proof of that.
This image is of a painting from a North Vietnamese soldier I believe was called Haung Sương. However, I cannot confirm that that was his name, as although many paintings by this man were found by Australian soldiers at the battlefront and brought back to Australia, and attempts are now being made to return them to their rightful owners (presumably any of his family still alive) nowhere other than on the paintings themselves is his name mentioned.

And there are many online stories about what is called Operation Wandering Souls, concerning the quest to return these items found during the Vietnam War. What's more, on none of these sites is this image of a North Vietnamese soldier at a typewriter seen (apart, now, from this one).

Yet another of Haung Sương's paintings.

The story I saw on the Seven Network on Sunday night can be seen here.  The presenter is giant Australian soldier Ben Roberts-Smith, who won the Victoria Cross in Afghanistan. The image of the North Vietnamese soldier at the typewriter can be seen at 8 minutes 17 seconds.

Roberts-Smith, centre, with Vietnam War Victoria Cross winner Keith Payne, right, and another Afghanistan War VC winner, Mark Donaldson, left.

The Operation Wandering Souls project aims to return to Vietnamese families items that were "liberated" from bodies or captured on the battlefield by Australian and New Zealand soldiers. Vietnamese people helped Australians find, identify and repatriate six "MIAs" (missing in action). The Geneva Conventions (Convention 1, articles 16 and 17) say this must be done. The project is now asking Vietnam veterans who may have taken documents or other items from bodies, or collected items from the battlefield, and still have them, to consider returning them to Vietnam so that Vietnamese families can be reunited with items their loved ones once carried.

This portrait has been returned to the surviving brother of the artist. It is of their mother.

The brother of the artist with the portrait of their mother.

In Vietnamese culture, those who lie in unrecorded graves are believed to be "wandering souls" unable to find peace. The Vietnamese government estimates that there are more than 300,000 of their soldiers still listed as MIA since the war. Vietnamese families want to perform the rituals that will allow the souls of the dead to find peace. They also want to hold, and place on the family altar, items that are tangible reminders of their lost relatives. 

Bob Hall, right, and Derrill de Heer.

The Operation Wandering Souls research team's website is here. The team is based at the University of New South Wales branch at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. It is led by Vietnam War veterans Bob Hall and Derrill de Heer.

This image of Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969), founder of the Vietnam Workers' Party, was taken in 1950 in the Viet Bac military base during a campaign against French forces. He is using a Hermes Baby portable typewriter.
Below, more images from the collection awaiting a return to the surviving families of the fallen in Vietnam:

 Derrill de Heer shows surviving family members a database indicating where the bodies of fallen Vietnamese soldiers may be recovered.

Bob Hall, left.

Fifty Shades of Grey: The Sadism of Selling an Olympia SM3 Portable Typewriter

September 18, 2013, 3:22 am

≫ Next: Underwood Portable Typewriter Case Stand

≪ Previous: Typewriters and the Vietnam War

$

0

0

I know how Brisbane collector Steve Snow felt when he said he had to lessen the pain with a beer or two after lightening his typewriter load by three machines. I own, as of Sunday afternoon, one portable typewriter less than I did a week ago. I was already missing her the moment she walked out the door and I am still missing her. She was one fine typer:

Charlie the Typewriter Guard Cat: "I was 50 shades of grey before it was cool! ...
"By the way, where's that grey Olympia SM3 gone?"

Underwood Portable Typewriter Case Stand

September 19, 2013, 5:01 am

≫ Next: Questions on Typewriter Case Stand

≪ Previous: Fifty Shades of Grey: The Sadism of Selling an Olympia SM3 Portable Typewriter

$

0

0

This case is an Underwood adaptation of a design patented by William John Wade of Toledo, Ohio, in 1956 (he applied for the unassigned patent in 1954). Wade's original idea was for telescoping tubes to extend four legs. Underwood compacted it to three legs with support braces. Wade, a draftsman for a car manufacturer and an artist,  was born in Toledo on May 8, 1907, and died on May 27, 1970, aged 63.

Questions on Typewriter Case Stand

September 19, 2013, 11:43 pm

≫ Next: Boy Who Wanted to 'Make a Typewriter' Instead Became Father of Computer Science

≪ Previous: Underwood Portable Typewriter Case Stand

$

0

0

I apologise profusely to everyone for not fully explaining and demonstrating the Underwood portable typewriter case stand yesterday. I did the best I could in somewhat trying circumstances (a rushed job before the one and only member of my film crew, lady friend Elizabeth, flew out to the US). But my post understandably drew a number of questions about the real height of the stand and the extendablility of its legs. Here, I hope, are all the answers:

This is the full height of the stand, with the three legs fully extended. It still differs from the original William John Wade design, which had four legs. With the one leg supporting the shelf extended, the shelf can support the weight of the typewriter, which doesn't unbalance the shelf, but it would be risky.

The height of the shelf is 25 inches. On a modern computer desk I bought the other week, the height to the pull-out keyboard shelf is 26 inches, which seems to be about average.

I tried a stool, which was 24 inches high itself, so there was a bit of a squeeze for the knees (I'm six feet tall). My normal computer or working desk chair is 20 inches from ground to seat, so I guess if I'd used that (or any other normal chair at a comfortable height) it would have been more suitable.

Tony Mindling was right, there is a small rubber pad on the end of the third and bottom section of the extended legs, to protect the surface upon which the desk is standing. The extensions clip into place to keep the legs rigid and steady.

Here the third and bottom section of the leg is folded back down again.

And here the middle and bottom sections are folded back down into the top section, so the leg is ready to be unlocked at its joints and folded into the typewriter case lid. All this takes, as you may imagine, a matter of a few seconds.

Straightening out the middle section of the leg, with the third section still inside it.

Straightening out the bottom section of the leg.

My sincere thanks to Tony Adams, Tony Mindling, Rob Bowker and Richard Polt for the questions in their comments on yesterday's post. Tony Adams pointed me in the direction of this image of actress Margaret O'Brien using an Underwood portable and one of these stands:

Many, many moons and a yellow brick road or two later, the very same said Margaret O'Brien would provide an odd omen that I, too, would one day own one of these stands:

I didn't set out to create the wrong impression, as some may think, but the way I demonstrated it last night was as good as I could do, all things considered. As I say, I hope this now answers all questions about the wonderful William J.Wade Underwood portable typewriter case stand.

---

Boy Who Wanted to 'Make a Typewriter' Instead Became Father of Computer Science

September 20, 2013, 8:25 pm

≫ Next: Thurber's Kaligraph Sells for $40,250

≪ Previous: Questions on Typewriter Case Stand

$

0

0

On June 23, 1912, the 44th anniversary of Christopher Latham Sholes' first type-writing machine patent being issued - a date now celebrated across the world as Typewriter Day - Ethel Sara Stoney Turing, daughter of the chief engineer of Madras Railways, gave birth to a son at Maida Vale in London, England.

Alan Turing, far left, aged 13 in early 1926, heading off to school

from Waterloo Station, London.

Alan Turing at Westcott House, Sherborne School, 1926, aged 14.

Eleven years later, in the summer of 1923, that boy, Alan Mathison Turing, wrote to his parents, then in Chhatrapur, Odisha, India (his father, Julius Mathison Turing, was with the Indian Civil Service) from his school at Hazelhurst, Sussex.
He told them that "this week I thought of how I might make a typewriter like this".

Alan Turing never did invent a typewriter. But he used the inspiration of a typewriter to become the Father of Computer Science.

Last night I happened upon a very moving documentary about Turing on TV. It led me to look a little further into his life and to discover the connection in his work with the typewriter. This is a Welsh slate statue of Turing at Bletchley Park, sculptured by Stephen Kettle, having been commissioned by the late American billionaire Sidney Frank:

Below, from Hodges' Alan Turling: The Enigma:

Cryptographers  working at Bletchley Park.

Turing, right, in 1951. Ferranti, a weapons and electronics company, was commissioned by the British Government to manufacture this computer. It was based on a prototype known as the Manchester Mark I, which was built at Manchester University in 1946 under the supervision of Professor Max Newman. Turing had previously been involved with the construction of the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) at the National Physical Laboratory, and with the construction of 'Colossus', the world's first electronic programmable computer, built at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, during World War II. Below, "Colossus":

Bletchley Park was the British forces' intelligence centre during World War II. Cryptographers intercepted and deciphered top-secret military communiques between Hitler and his armed forces. The communiques were encrypted in the Lorenz code which the Germans considered unbreakable, but the codebreakers at Bletchley cracked the code with the help of Colossus. Below, the  'Enigma' deciphering machine used by the German Navy, displayed last year at the Heinz Nixdorf Museumsforum (HNF) in Paderborn, Germany. The HNF presented a special exhibition 'Eminent & Enigmatic - 10 Aspects of Alan Turing' on the 100th anniversary of Turing's birth.

Below, from Friedrich A.Kittler's Gramophone, Film Typewriter:

Hollymeade, Wilmslow, Cheshire.

Turing was a mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, giving a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. 
Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence.

A sample of Turing's typing

During World War II, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre. For a time he was head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.
After the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the ACE, one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Laboratory at Manchester University, where he assisted in the development of the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, which were first observed in the 1960s.
Turing's homosexuality resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952. He accepted treatment with female hormones (chemical castration, or "organo-therapy", through stilboestrol, a synthetic oestrogen, causing gynaecomastia) as an alternative to prison. Turing died in 1954, just over two weeks before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined that his death was suicide.
In September 2009, following an Internet campaign, then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British Government for "the appalling way he was treated". In May last year, a private member's bill was put before the House of Lords to grant Turing a statutory pardon. In July this year it gained Government support.
In 1999, Time Magazine named Turing as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century. It said, "The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine." In 2002, Turing was ranked 21st on the BBC nationwide poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.

Thurber's Kaligraph Sells for $40,250

September 22, 2013, 5:09 pm

≫ Next: Rudyard Kipling, J.M.Barrie Talk About Their Typewriters, 1902; Film of T.P.O'Connor Typing on a Corona 3, 1923

≪ Previous: Boy Who Wanted to 'Make a Typewriter' Instead Became Father of Computer Science

$

0

0

Martin Donnelly, of Martin J. Donnelly Antique Tools, Avoca, New York, has let me know that Charles Thurber's 1857 and 1860 patent 'Kaligraph', in its original shipping crate, sold for $40,250 (including buyer's premium) at an auction in Nashua, New Hampshire, on Saturday. The anticipated price range was $6000 to $12,000. Here is my post about the auction from a month ago. The artist's impression of Thurber I used in that post showed, quite clearly, an earlier Thurber invention (and captioned as his "patent printer"), which is explained in my 'Truth about Thurber' post here.

Rudyard Kipling, J.M.Barrie Talk About Their Typewriters, 1902; Film of T.P.O'Connor Typing on a Corona 3, 1923

September 22, 2013, 11:15 pm

≫ Next: Islands in the Stream of Consciousness: From Typewriters to Spratlys

≪ Previous: Thurber's Kaligraph Sells for $40,250

$

0

0

This must be one of the earliest films of an author using a typewriter - in this case a Corona 3 portable, being used by Irish nationalist politician and journalist Thomas Power O'Connor on his 75th birthday, on October 5, 1923.

O'Connor hands his draft to his secretary, who then takes it for re-typing on a standard-size typewriter.

O'Connor was born in Athlone, County Westmeath, on October 5, 1848. Known as T. P. O'Connor and occasionally as Tay Pay, he was a Member of Parliament in the British House of Commons for almost 50 years.

O'Connor entered journalism as a junior reporter on Saunders’ Newsletter, a Dublin journal, in 1867. In 1870 he moved to London and was appointed a sub-editor on TheDaily Telegraph, primarily because of his mastery of French and German in reportage of the Franco-Prussian War. O'Connor later became London correspondent for the New York Herald. In 1885, O'Connor married Elizabeth Paschal, a daughter of a Judge of the Supreme Court of Texas. O'Connor was elected MP for Galway Borough in the 1880 general election, as a representative of Charles Stewart Parnell's Home Rule League. At the next general election, in 1885, he was returned both for Galway and for the Liverpool Scotland constituencies; he chose to sit for Liverpool and represented that constituency in the House of Commons until his death in 1929. This is the only constituency outside Ireland to return an Irish Nationalist Party MP. O'Connor was re-elected unopposed in the 1918, 1922, 1923, 1924 and 1929 general elections. During much of his time in parliament, he wrote a nightly sketch of proceedings there for the Pall Mall Gazette. O'Connor became "Father of the House of Commons". The Irish Nationalist Party ceased to exist effectively after the Sinn Féin landslide of 1918, and thereafter O'Connor sat as an independent. 

O'Connor founded and was the first editor of several newspapers and journals: the Star (1887), the Weekly Sun (1891), the Sun (1893), M.A.P. and T.P.’s Weekly (1902). He was appointed the first president of the Board of Film Censors in 1917, and was appointed to the Privy Council by the first Labour government in 1924. He was also a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Journalists, the world's oldest journalists' organisation. O'Connor authored a range of books, including The Parnell Movement (1886). He died in London on November 18, 1929, aged 81.

In June 1902, The Shorthand World and Imperial Typist, a Pitman publication, re-printed a story from the Glasgow Evening News in which famous authors of the day spoke amusingly about their typewriters. The writers were O'Connor, J.M.Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, George Douglas and S.R.Crockett:

Typewriters are human: Crockett

Typewriters are vixens: Barrie

Bar-Lock falls in love with author!

Typewriters cynical and misanthropic: Douglas

'Preternaturally moody': Barrie

 

O'Connor must have been widely known for his typewriting. This appeared in a New Zealand newspaper in 1919, referring to Woodrow Wilson's use of Hammond typewriters:

And again five years later:

Sir James Matthew Barrie (9 May 1860–19 June 1937) was a Scottish author and dramatist, best remembered today as the creator of Peter Pan.

Barrie with Henry James, London, 1910

The Twelve Pound Look was a 1910 play by Barrie in which the price of a typewriter (£12) allows a woman to leave an unhappy marriage and support herself.

'The vixen typewriter's in the tree hut, Wendy'

It seems amusing that latter-day performances of this play have used Victorian dress and 1950s Underwood portable typewriters. Kate no doubt, however, did carry around with her a portable, even in 1912:

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865–18 January 1936) was an English short-story writer, poet and novelist, chiefly remembered for his tales and poems of life in British India and his tales for children.

George Douglas was the pseudonym of George Douglas Brown  (26 January 1869—28 August 1902), a Scottish novelist who was instrumental in the realistic literature movement of the early 20th century. Douglas’ novel The House With the Green Shutters (1901), one of the first literary works to forego romance or adventure, received much attention for its realistic study of contemporary Scottish life.

Samuel Rutherford Crockett (24 September 1859–16 April 1914) was a Scottish novelist. The success of J. M. Barrie and the Kailyard school of sentimental, homey writing had created a demand for stories in Lowland Scots, in which Crockett published his successful story of The Stickit Minister in 1893. Crockett made considerable sums of money from his writing and was a friend and correspondent of Robert Louis Stevenson. In 1900 Crockett wrote a booklet published by the London camera manufacturer, Newman & Guardia, comparing cameras favourably to pen and pencil (but not typewriter?!).

Islands in the Stream of Consciousness: From Typewriters to Spratlys

September 23, 2013, 5:28 pm

≫ Next: The Extraordinary Emik Avakian (1923-2013): Inventor of the Breath-Operated Typewriter

≪ Previous: Rudyard Kipling, J.M.Barrie Talk About Their Typewriters, 1902; Film of T.P.O'Connor Typing on a Corona 3, 1923

$

0

0

I just love this photograph. For one thing, it shows a journalist using a tiny typewriter while working under trying conditions, a situation with which I was once very often familiar. Yes, the typewriter is a first model Gossen Tippa, one of my favourite portables, so for me that adds a lot to the value of the image. Indeed, I wish that in my own experiences, I had had the chance to use a Gossen Tippa as a work tool. But I didn’t know about the Tippa until about 10 years ago, when I found one in a Salvation Army store here in Canberra – a badly battered one at that, yet one still in good working order. It had previously been used in what were, at least for the Tippa, extremely trying conditions.

But perhaps, more importantly, this picture contributes at least 1000 words to the story of my long fascination with tiny islands, islands that are often uninhabited and seemingly inconsequential dots on the world map, specks sitting out in vast oceans and yet fiercely contested by nations. Islands to which I'd like to go, Gossen Tippa in hand, and just disappear for a while. I actually had a taste of it in New Caledonia a few years ago, with a Remington portable, and loved it.

The photo at the top of this post was taken on Heligoland in 1952, and naturally, as a portable typewriter disciple, my immediate thought upon looking at the image was this: The story this man is writing would have been transmitted somewhere, somehow, to be published in a newspaper. He would not have had access to telephone or telegraph lines, and by the look of it, there was no electricity. The island is just in the process of being re-inhabited, with facilities and utilities still to be re-established. How would that challenge be met today?

Barreiro da Faneca, Ilha de Santa Maria, Açores

My fascination with extremely isolated spots around the globe may well have been borne of fright – on an emergency refuelling stop on the Ilha de Santa Maria in the eastern Azores, in middle of the Atlantic in July 1975, during a Dan-Air flight from Gatwick in London to Bridgetown, Barbados. Anyone else out there old enough to remember a hit song of that same year, Barbados by Typically Tropical, about Coconut Airways Flight 372 and Captain Tobias Wilcox? Well, let me tell you this wasn’t in any way the fun that Flight 372 sounded, not one bit.

It was one scary touchdown, on a runway which seemed to take the full length of the 10-mile-long island. I stopped thanking God for still being alive, and gazing out at the cliff edge which seemed just yards from where the Boeing 727-46 had pulled up, to look back and wonder how anyone could thank God for being alive in such a barren, remote place.

Then again, my obsession might have stemmed from silly, romantic dreams, such as those brought on by stepping on Gauguin’s grave in the Cimetière Calvaire at Atuona on Hiva ‘Oa in the Marquesas Islands (where Jacques Brel has since been buried).

Or, back home in Ireland, being inspired by the apparently nonsensical fight for Rockall (to which I will return, if only in subject matter). More likely, it had actually lain dormant since, as a child, I had read Robinson Crusoe (set on Más a Tierra?)or Treasure Island (not written by Robert Louis Stevenson on a Hammond typewriter).

Wot? No typewriter?

Simon Winchester, somewhere in the world

One of the newspapers for which, in the mid- to late -70s, I used a tiny typewriter (an Olivetti Lettera 32) in often trying conditions was the London Sunday Times. Simon Winchester was its chief foreign features writer. I love Winchester’s works, especially Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire and Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories– both of which seriously fuel my own intrigue with small, isolated islands. I remember hearing Winchester interviewed about Atlantic and recounting, to my considerable amusement, the story of  how he had been sent to Tristan du Cunha and, after some time there, came to realise he had been completely forgotten about by his Australian-born “Insight” team leader Phillip Knightley, stuck on a tiny island in the middle of the  ocean.

Imagine my envy as Winchester travelled to Diego Garcia, Tristan, Ascension Island, Saint Helena, the Falklands and (most intriguing of all, as events transpired) Pitcairn Island. Winchester was in the Falklands when the Argentinians invaded, was captured in Patagonia and imprisoned on Tierra del Fuego for three months.

Anyway, back to the photo at the top of this post. It shows Fred Krause-Reussen, a reporter with the German newspaper Münchner Abendzeitung, working on the small North Sea archipelago Heligoland in 1952. The caption refers to “The state of war between England and Germany is not finished yet”. It says “The inhabitants [ethnic Frisians of Heligoland] have made themselves at home as far as possible. No one knows when bombs will fall again.”

Heligoland (in German Helgoland) is two-thirds of a square mile in size and sits 29 miles off the German coast. Once Danish and British possessions, under the German Empire the islands became a major naval base, and the first naval engagement of World War I, the Battle of Heligoland Bight, was fought in the first month of the war. But it is perhaps best known as the place where Werner Heisenberg, escaping hay fever in mainland Germany, conceived the basis of the quantum theory in 1925.

During the Nazi era the naval base was reactivated and became the target of the aerial Battle of the Heligoland Bight in 1939. During World War II, the civilian population remained and was protected from Allied bombing in rock shelters. Following a penultimate air raid, in April 1945, involving 969 Allied aircraft, the islands were evacuated.

From 1945 to 1952 the uninhabited islands were used as a bombing range. In April 1947 the Royal Navy detonated 6700 tonnes of explosives ("Big Bang" or "British Bang"), creating one of the biggest single non-nuclear detonations in history. The bang shook the main island several miles down to its base.

In 1952 the islands were restored to the German authorities, who had to clear a huge amount of undetonated ammunition, landscape the main island and rebuild the houses before it could be resettled.

Heligoland is now a holiday resort and enjoys a tax-exempt status, as it is part of the European Union but excluded from the EU VAT area and customs union. Consequently, much of the economy is based on sales of cigarettes, alcoholic beverages and perfumes to tourists. The Irish, not quite as frugal as the Scots, but nonetheless ever keen for a bargain, would no doubt flock there, if there was ever a trace of the sun. Which brings me back to my days on the Emerald Isle.

The naming of a tiny, exceedingly remote and uninhabited islet in the North Atlantic Ocean has always appealed to my unshakable sense of the ridiculous. It’s called Rockall. And yes, folks, it ain’t nothin’ but rock.

Rockallis just 83 feet wide, 102 feet long and about 70 feet high.  It is a sometimes visible fragment, 55 million years on, from the ancient continent of Laurasia. It is 229 nautical miles north-west from any sizable, constantly inhabited land mass (County Donegal in Ireland) and 163 nautical miles west of the Scottish island of Soay, Saint Kilda. But for such a mere dot on the horizon, a small drop in the ocean, it has been the cause of considerable fuss.  More on that later. Let’s first consider the name.

It’s a real shame such sublime imagination was not applied to the naming of some Australian states and territories. Western Australia, for example, might just as easily be called ‘‘Buggerall (Beyond Perth)’’, South Australia “Still Buggerall (Beyond Adelaide)” and the Northern Territory ‘‘Next to Buggerall’’ — all of which, I think, are about as descriptive as Rockall, and far more exotic than Western Australia, South Australia or the Northern Territory.

One may read all sorts of fanciful and esoteric theories about the origin of the name Rockall, such as that it derives from the Gaelic Sgeir Rocail,  “skerry (sea rock) of roaring”, and that it has an etymological link with the Old Norse “hrukka”.

But when one conjures the name, and looks at the place, such notions will mean stuff all. After all, as Michael Flanders and Donald Swan so subtly put in their 1955 song:

To free the isle of Rockall,

From fear of foreign foe.

We sped across the planet,

To find this lump of granite,

One rather startled Gannet;

In fact, we found Rockall.

The Flanders and Swan ditty was written by Flanders in a for-once successful attempt to get one past the “iron hand of the Lord Chamberlain” (a sort of the British censor, or keeper of morals).  It was called Rockall but listeners heard the lyric as proudly expressing a now too commonly (and openly) used phrase.

Flanders recalled, “You couldn't mention lavatories or anything dreadful like that! No sexual deviation, or four-letter words - you may wonder how we managed … But I did get away with one mild double entendre, in a song celebrating the occasion when our gallant British Navy annexed Rockall. It was really more of a single entendre, because the lyric looked innocent enough written down, but when you sung it, it was considered daringly near the bone then.  Nowadays, I don't think anyone would raise an eyebrow.”

The annexing to which Flanders refers occurred on September 18, 1955, at precisely 10.16 am, and it marked the last territorial expansion of the British Empire– something which has been sinking with the sun ever since.  A Royal Navy landing party was deposited on Rockall by helicopter and laid a plaque. In 2010, the plaque mysteriously disappeared. Which brings me to the Falkland Islands…

I was yet again reminded of Rockall when one day last year the Philippines announced it was seeking a summit on the Spratly Islands. The previous night I had seen Meryl Streep’s superb performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, a film which included some stark reminders of the folly of the Falklands War. 

There is, of course, a common link between Rockall, the Spratlys and the Falklands. That is, quite apart from them all being islands that are well down on my list of favoured holiday destinations – Rockall, for instance, doesn’t exactly have that alluring ‘‘come hither’’ look about it. No sirens there.

The common thread is that they all have been, surprisingly enough, keenly contested. And if you smell a rat here, you would on the right trail: it’s a rat that’s dripping in oil.

The Irish, who call Rockall Rocal, say it belongs to them; and if the Scots, who call it Rocabarraigh, do finally strike out for independence from Britain, they will probably lay claim to it as well. As of Lieutenant-Commander Des Scott’s landing in 1955, the British government has already done so, though not, naturally, on Scotland’s behalf.  But it is part of Scottish Gaelic folklore, a mythical rock which, upon its third appearance, the world will end.  Well, I suppose it’s fair to say it’s at one end of the world, though we tend not to think of that part of the globe as the arse end.  Anyway, I digress … there are two other claimants to Rockall - Denmark (on behalf of the Faroe Islands) and Iceland.

Rockall has aroused such passions that the former Lord Mayor of Dublin, Independent Irish politician Seán Loftus, changed his name by deed poll to Seán Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus. Greenpeace declared it part of “Waveland”. Similarly, the Spratlys were in 1956 part of what Philippines admiral, lawyer, millionaire and general stirrer Tomas Cloma called Freedomland.

Cloma: Man of Vision?

Greenpeace actually occupied Rockall for a short time, in a protest against oil exploration, declaring it a "new global state" and a micronation. It offered citizenship to anyone willing to take their pledge of allegiance.  But then, I suppose, you’d have to have been prepared to go to Rockall.

As for the more romantically named Spratlys, they are claimed by not only the Philippines (as part of the Palawan province) but Brunei, China (Hainan province), Malaysia (Sabah state), Taiwan (Kaohsiung municipality) and Vietnam (Khánh Hòa province).

Before being named after British sea captain Richard Spratly, a frequent visitor to these shores, the Spratlys were known as Horsburgh’s Storm Island. So I suppose Spratly is a bit of an improvement, though much less descriptive than Rockall. 

The Extraordinary Emik Avakian (1923-2013): Inventor of the Breath-Operated Typewriter

September 24, 2013, 4:17 pm

≫ Next: Lock Me Up in West Virginia - and Throw Away the Key

≪ Previous: Islands in the Stream of Consciousness: From Typewriters to Spratlys

$

0

0

The death at the age of 89 of Amelian ("Emik") Alexander Avakian, in Chicopee, Massachusetts, on July 11 this year, passed unnoticed by the mainstream media. But between 1952 and 1962, Emik was very much a newsworthy subject - and deservedly so. He featured in two LIFE magazine spreads and in Mechanix Illustrated. This Iranian-born American inventor of Armenian descent was one extraordinary man.

Avakian was born with a severe case of cerebral palsy, in Tabriz, then Persia, on August 5, 1923. The affliction left him quadriplegic, but his cognitive abilities were intact. After travelling with his family to Russia and Germany, Emik arrived in New York with his parents, Alexander and Gaharik, on February 16, 1935. He moved to Chicago in February 1944. Emik went on to graduate and attain a Magna Cum Laude degree in physics and mathematics from Eureka College, Illinois, and an MA from Columbia University. He became a US citizen in 1950 and went to work for IBM as an electronics consultant, as well as for Teleregister Corporation (established by Western Union in 1948) and the US Defence Department.
Emik invented the breath-operated typewriter and computer, as well as a mechanism that facilities putting wheelchairs on cars and a self-operating robotic wheel that converts manual wheelchairs into automatic. His inventions were largely geared towards the improvement of the lives of disabled people.
His IBM typewriter produced letters  from breath rather than typing. It operated according to breath measurement and sound that was blown into four microphones. Although the mechanism was slow, it was still more cost effective than hiring assistants to type for Emik.
In 1961, Emik received the President's Trophy from President John F. Kennedy for the "Most outstanding contribution to the employment of the handicapped." Emik also won an Eminent Engineer Award in 1979.