↧
Last of the Empire's Aristocrats
↧
Noiseless Typewriters: Remington v Underwood I
So how did to come to be that in September 1929 Remington started to make noiseless typewriters for its greatest rival, Underwood? This is a question which has intrigued and perplexed typewriter enthusiasts for many a year.
Well, oddly enough, this fresh-faced and hardly hard-nosed young military cadet had a lot to do with it. The thing was, he had something Remington badly wanted, and Remington was prepared to bargain for it.
His name is Jesse Alonzo Braddock Smith and he was born in New York City on October 23, 1880.
At 9.20 on the morning of Tuesday, May 4, 1915, a 34-year-old Jesse was working for his father, the general manager of the Underwood Typewriter Company in New York City, when first his father received news that his good friend, the great typewriter inventor Lee Spear Burridge, had suddenly died at the age of 54, and then his father, Stephen Terhune Smith, collapsed and died too, aged just 61.
Stephen Terhune Smith
Almost exactly a year earlier, Stephen Smith had applied for a patent, assigned to Underwood, for a typewriter copy-holder. It was not issued until 18 months after his death, but in the meantime Jesse had taken up the project and made it his pet - expanding it to a sheet-collating device. He applied for a patent for this in June 1916 and it was issued in October 1918. By that time, the device had already become known as the Underwood fan-fold biller machine:
And in 1929, just before the original Stephen Smith patent was due to expire, Remington made it known it wanted to make its own fan-fold machine, albeit one in the Underwood style. Remington, through Arthur William Smith in 1915, Clio Brunella Yaw in 1919, Morris Wright Pool in 1921 and Oscar Woodward in 1923, held four fan-fold patents, but had not gone into production with any of them; none could match the established efficiency of the Smith-Underwood device.
With an enormous array of patents, from the Smiths to Lester Adelbert Wernery (1914 onwards), Benjamin Paskel Fortin in 1916, Christian Albert Marschel and Earle Henry Wheaton in 1917, Julius Duckstine in 1918, Lee Fisk Messenger and Ellis Wildes Cooper in 1919, Arthur Albert Johnson, Joseph Frank Allard, Hiram Stickle Lasher, Daniel Thomas Glackin and John Waldheim in 1920, Burnham Coos Stickney (1922-24), Henry LaFayette Pitman and William Ferdinand Helmond in 1922, Hervé Schwedersky, Maximilian Richard Urban and George William Renz in 1923, Adolph Gustav Kupetz, Clarence McKinnie Crews and Carl Emil Norin in 1924, Alphonse Edward Imbus, Harry Elmer Cripe and Raymond Hanus in 1925, Alfred Gustav Franz Kurowski in 1926 and John Toggenburger in 1927, Underwood had all the bases covered. Between them - a remarkable 28 different inventors - these men held more than 140 patents on the fan-fold, the vast majority issued to Jesse Smith himself.
Underwood has a fan-fold in its wide range 1922, above, while in 1926 Remington, below, doesn't. But it does have a Noiseless:
Underwood had placed an inordinate amount of emphasis on its fan-fold, as one of its innovations, with this vast number of patents covering every single aspect of the machine. Thus Underwood had the whole thing well and truly stitched up, leaving Remington virtually no room to manoeuvre. Remington was thereby forced into negotiating, if it wanted its own fan-fold. And the Noiseless become the negotiating point.
Once Remington's move toward a fan-fold became apparent, Jesse Smith quickly moved to strengthen his and Underwood's hand. He tried to get his patents, and those of Underwood design engineers such of Wernery and Waldheim, re-issued by the US Patent Office. The Patent Office, however, was having none of it, and rejected Jesse's applications for "want of invention". Represented by Underwood patent attorney Burnham Coos Stickney, Jesse appealed, but lost again.
The Remington version, when it eventually appeared in electrified form.
Jesse was merely trying to buy time, and in doing so to ensure Underwood was secure in its bargaining position. Underwood wanted a noiseless typewriter, the Remington patents for which were even fresher than Underwood's on the fan-fold machine. By the time the Court of Customs and Patents Appeals had found against Jesse a second time, on December 30, 1929, Remington had already started to make (on July 1, 1929) and then ship noiseless typewriters from Middletown, Connecticut, to Underwood.
That latter process had begun precisely three months earlier, on September 30, 1929, and the Underwood Noiseless, the Model N, was introduced to the market in January 1930, with No N3600001.
Jesse Smith retired from Underwood in 1952, after 52 years with the company, and died in Stamford, Connecticut, on February 4, 1967, aged 86. In some obituaries, he was credited with 400 Underwood typewriter patents, a Braille typewriter and the Teleprompter.
As for his father, here is a letter Stephen Terhune Smith typewrote to a newspaperman in 1906 about his own typewriter career:
↧
↧
No Kidding - Kidder Made No Din: Prototypes of the Noiseless Typewriter
My collection
Wim Van Rompuy Collection
The name of the proposed typewriter was discussed in correspondence between the inventor Wellington Parker Kidder and the company founder Charles Carroll Colby in the late 19th century and early 1900s. "Nodin" and "Silent" were both considered before "Noiseless" was settled on.An article by Alexander Sellers in the September 1995 issue of ETCetera (No 32) regarding correspondence between Kidder and Colby can be downloaded in PDF form here.
↧
Imperial Model D Typewriter looking for new British home
If any of my friends in Britain are interested in making Marion an offer, please let me know and I will forward Marion's contact details on.
↧
Typewriting's Boy Wonder
This is Parker Claire Woodson, born in Chicago on August 31, 1895, who in August 1910 emerged as the "Boy Wonder", the "Marvel" of the speed typewriting world. In January of that year, Woodson had entered a business school in Chicago to learn shorthand, and while there took up typing. Within six months, and still aged just 14, "Master Woodson" mastered the impressive art of carrying on a conversation while simultaneously typing at extraordinarily rapid speeds - exceeding 230 words a minute!
As the Tacoma Times said on March 14, 1912, "Can Go Some On Typewriter - WHEW!" - "Greased lightning is slow compared to Parker C.Woodson ...":
On December 6 that same year, the Urbana Daily Courier reported:
Born the son of James and Bessie Hurst Woodson, Parker C. Woodson first came to public attention in 1910 with this little item in the trade journal, Typewriter Topics. Woodson, living at the time with a widowed aunt, Florence Reber, in Chicago, won a typing contest in Omaha, Nebraska. Despite his tender age, Woodson was immediately snapped up as a demonstrator by the Remington Typewriter Company and started giving exhibitions of typing, such as in Brooklyn later in 1910.
By 1911 he had moved to New York and was demonstrating his amazing skills on a Remington 10.
By 1915, now living with his wife at No 525 146th Street West, New York City, and describing himself as a "typewriter demonstrator", Woodson had entered the major national and international speed typing competitions as an amateur. Using a Remington, he found himself well off the pace of the crack Underwood team members. In the Boston amateur half-hour test, he finished fourth behind future (1919) professional world champion William Friedrich Oswald (1896-1963), and in the world championships in New York he moved up to third behind Oswald. Woodson was, nonetheless, the fastest of the Remington typists, amateur or professional, and finished away ahead of future Underwood great George Hossfeld:
Boston
World championship, New York
Still ranked an amateur in 1916, Woodson dropped further down the finishing order, behind 1915 novice champion Hortense Stollnitz (below), using a Remington, and Hossfeld. Oswald finished second behind Margaret Owen in the professional event.
William Oswald
A young George Hossfeld
Margaret Owen
By 1917, Woodson had seen the light. At the time he registered for military service in World War I, he too had switched camps and joined the Underwood team:
Woodson served in the last few months of the war and afterwards packed up his typewriter and in 1920 went back to Chicago with his wife and young son Parker Jr to become a private secretary. After marriage break-ups he married Ruth O'Brien and moved to Detroit to be an advertising company manager; then married Minnie Lee Collins and moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia, as manager of a meat packing company, Wilson & Co. He retired to California and died in Novato, north of San Francisco, on March 21, 1981, aged 85.
↧
↧
Ribbon Vibrator Mechanism on Patria-Swissa Piccola-Voss Portable Typewriters
It's always difficult to try to help out a young chap - or young lady for that matter - with a typewriter problem when the typewriter is not within easy reach - and the person with the problem is probably thousands of kilometres away. I most certainly would never call it "easy-peasy". I don't know where Joji Furukawa lives, but I'm guessing it's not just around the corner.
What I do know, because he told me so, is that Joji is 14 and has just got himself a lovely little sky blue Patria portable. And the ribbon vibrator doesn't work. He doesn't have the money, he says, to pay for a typewriter technician to fix it for him, and he wants me to help.
The best I can do, in these circumstances, is to shoot a video of the ribbon vibrator mechanism in operation in these models, and take some photos of it. The typewriters I used were a Swissa Piccola and a Voss Learnette, both the same machines as Joji's Patria.
Joji, if I were you I'd be looking closely at the photos and comparing them with all the lever and spring connections on your Patria's vibrator, and watching the video to see how they all work together to lift the ribbon to the print point with each key stroke. Good luck with it!
And now for something completely different ...
Typewriter Anatomy Quiz
What brand of typewriter does this ribbon spools set-up come from?
↧
Departure Lounge
There are 45 post-war portable typewriters stacked up in storage boxes in the stairwell. By this time tomorrow I am hoping most if not all of them will have gone to new owners. Fingers crossed ...
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
↧
The French Contin Typewriter: Ideal or Continental, or Neither?
Has anyone ever seen a Contin? It's the typewriter I will probably NEVER use!
This is a 1922 Continental
I don't think it is. To start with, Contin is actually short for Continsouza (as in movie projectors, rifles), not Continental.
What's more, if it is a French version of a German typewriter, it's much more likely to be an Ideal:
Image courtesy of Georg Sommeregger
The Ideal model C
But I'll let you be the judge.
.png)
Typewriter Topics, 1922
Michael Adler has an entry on the Contin without mentioning the Continental or the Ideal.
The Iberia. See Richard Polt's comment. I don't think I'll be shipping one in from Spain or France!
↧
Learning to Read With a Typewriter, Aged 2
.jpg)
Willmoore Kendall Jr (1909-1967)
.jpg)
Typewriter Topics, October 1922
Willmoore Kendall Jr was an American conservative writer and professor of political philosophy. Kendall was born on March 5, 1909, in Konawa, Oklahoma, to a blind First Methodist Church minister, the Reverend Willmoore Kendall Sr (1887-1942), and his wife, Pearl Anna Garlick Kendall (1887-1977).
Willmoore Jr learned to read by using a typewriter at age two, graduated from high school at 13, from the University of Oklahoma at 18, and published his first book at 20. In 1932, he became a Rhodes Scholar and studied at Oxford University. He became a Trotskyist and went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War. His experiences with the Spanish Republic led him to renounce his communist convictions. In 1940, he obtained a PhD in political science from the University of Illinois. He served in the OSS during World War II, and stayed on when it became the CIA in 1947. He joined the Yale University faculty, where he taught for 14 years. Among his students was William F. Buckley Jr, with whom he founded the National Review. Kendall later converted to Roman Catholicism, taught at the University of Dallas and was a founder of the politics program and co-founder of the doctoral program there. He died of a heart attack on June 30, 1967, aged 58.
Kendall is the model for the character Jesse Frank in S. Zion's 1990 novel Markers.
↧
↧
Typing and Playing the Piano at the Same Time
%2B-%2BCopy.jpg)
.jpg)
Look, ma! No hands (on the typewriter, that is!):
Backhaus in 1920
Backhaus (March 26, 1884-July 5, 1969) was one of the first modern artists of the keyboard. He was particularly well known for his interpretations of Beethoven and romantic music such as that by Brahms. He was also much admired as a chamber musician. He was an enthusiastic user of Bechstein pianos and Remington portable typewriters.
Born in Leipzig, Backhaus began learning piano at the age of four. He toured widely throughout and made his US debut on January 5, 1912, as soloist in Beethoven's 5th Piano Concerto with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Orchestra. In 1930 he moved to Lugano and became a citizen of Switzerland. He died, aged 85, in Villach in Austria, where he was to play in a concert.
![]()
Composer Robert Stone does it differently.
↧
Typing at the Hairdresser's, in the Bedroom and in the BMW Roadster
Getting her hair done for Santa, on December 7, 1959, English secretary Jean Walker, of Forest Gate, London, types away on a Remington Monarch portable typewriter under the hair-dryer. Apparently the hair salon in the Gamages Store in Holborn was set up for secretaries to continue working while getting a quick shampoo and set.
![]()
Gamages 60 years earlier, before it had hair salons.
Scottish fashion retailer John Stephen (1934-2004) continues to run his business from bed while suffering from a bout of flu on February 24, 1965. With him are staff members (from left) Doris Humphries (on a cream Olympia Monica portable typewriter), Michael McGraw, Austrian model Girda Eder and Frank Merkel.
![]()
Taking beside notes below is Jean Riddell. Stephen was an influential figure on the London fashion scene, known as 'The Million Pound Mod" and "The King Of Carnaby Street".
Happy to stand corrected on this, but I believe the roadster the journalist is sitting in (above) may be a BMW 319-1.
↧
Sufferin' Suffragettes! Typewriters in the Fight for Women's Rights
The posters and photographs adorning the office give some clue as to the esteem in which the suffragette leaders were held. On the far left is a poster of WSPU co-founder Christabel Pankhurst and above the mantelpiece is a framed photograph of Christabel's mother, suffragette pioneer Emmeline Pankhurst, below which is a marble bust, also of Emmeline. But apparently Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst was the typist in the family.
In 1913 the WSPU moved its headquarters from Clement's Inn on The Strand in London (where the photograph at the top of this post was taken) to Lincoln's Inn House, Kingsway. In April of that year the Lincoln's Inn offices were raided by police, and the WSPU workers arrested, charged and in most cases given lengthy jail sentences for conspiracy.
The images below were taken at the WSPU's Clement's Inn headquarters in September 1911 and show the WSPU workers producing the union's posters and other publications.
.jpg)
Another typewriter company manager who became an WSPU organiser was Flora McKinnon Drummond (1878-1949), nicknamed "The General" for her habit of leading women's rights marches wearing a military style uniform with an officers cap and epaulettes and riding on a large horse. Drummond was imprisoned nine times for her activism in the women's suffrage movement.
Drummond, centre, in the docks in October 1908 with Christabel Pankhurst, left, and Emmeline Pankhurst, right.
On leaving high school on the Isle of Arran at 14, Drummond moved to Glasgow to take a business training course at a civil service school. Prevented from becoming a postmistress because she was an inch too short at 5ft 1in, she went on to gain a Society of Arts qualification in shorthand and typing. Drummond was working in the typewriter business in Manchester when she joined the WSPU in 1906. She became known for her daring and headline-grabbing stunts, including in 1906 slipping inside the open door of 10 Downing Street and hiring a boat so she could approach the Palace of Westminster from the River Thames.
More Oliver typewriters are put to work in the women's cause. This is the Clement's Inn secretary's office of Lady Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence (1867-1954), a member of the Suffrage Society who as business manager and treasurer of the WSPU raised £134,000 over six years.
Pethick-Lawrence (above) started the publication Votes for Women in 1907. She was arrested and imprisoned in 1912 for conspiracy following demonstrations that involved breaking windows.
Another leading British suffragette was Australian-born Marion Phillips (1881-1932), seen above in 1908. Born in St Kilda, Melbourne, in July 1904 Phillips went to England and became immersed in the working-class and women's movements through her membership of the Fabian Society, the Independent Labour Party, the Women's Labour League, the Women's Trade Union League, for which she was briefly an organiser, and several suffrage societies. By 1914 she was effectively running the Women's Labour League and edited The Labour Woman. In 1926 Phillips was nominated by the Durham Women's Advisory Council and the Monkwearmouth miners as a prospective Labour Party candidate for Sunderland. Returned in 1929, she unsuccessfully recontested the seat in 1931. By this time she was already ill with the stomach cancer which caused her death in London in 1932. Phillips was the first Australian woman to win a seat in a national parliament, and the only one to have been elected to the House of Commons.
Above, US National Women's Party, Washington DC, 1919. Below, the NWP press room in 1915, with Alice Paul on the right:
The NWP was founded by Paul and Lucy Burns in 1913. After their baptism into militant suffrage work in Britain, Paul and Burns reunited to the US in 1910 and were appointed to the Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. After the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the vote in 1920, the NWP turned its attention to passage of an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.
Alice Paul
Lucy Burns
Below, the NWP publishing office in 1916:
.jpg)
Abby Scott Baker, NWP 1916:
↧
Not Again! From Miss Remington to Peter B in Tacoma - the "new" Remington 10
Remington Notes, Vol 3, No 10, 1915
Typewriter Topics, July 1915
↧
↧
Adler Favorit Typewriter Manual (in German)
From Fräulein Semmler in Stuttgart to Fräulein Jones in Melbourne ...
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
↧
What's What and Where's What on a 1950 Standard Typewriter
↧
Remtor Portable Typewriters
I suppose Remtor portable typewriters could at best be described as a sub-species: rebranded Torpedo models made during the period of Remington's control of Weil-Werke GmbH's typewriter arm in Frankfurt am Main-Rödelheim from 1932 (as Remington Buromaschinen GmbH).
No doubt these Remtor machines are to be easily found for sale online on European sites, but in Australia they are quite unusual. So I've been surprised to be contacted by two Australian readers in the past fortnight, both asking about their Remtor portables (which, incidentally, may be for sale - contact me for details).
![]()
My own Remtor (above) was imported from Hungary, where it was originally sold (by Magyarországi Vvezérképviselet Irógép Korlátolt Felelõsségû Társaság, Budapest; it has a Hungarian keyboard, as Bence Sebestyén pointed out at the time), and I posted on it in December 2012. I found it an excellent machine to use, but it too is for sale now. It is a Torpedo 17, and was first marketed as a Deutsche Remington Junior in 1933. Alan Seaver has a lovely yellow-keytopped example of the Deutsche Remington in his Machines of Loving Grace collection:
![]()
The latest of the two which have popped up out of the woodwork in Australia is interesting because it says Remtor Junior on the paper plate and Remington Schrijfmachine Mij NV on the front right above the keyboard, which would indicate it was sold in Holland (but, I would think, unlikely to have been made there). I can't make out what it says on the shift and shift lock keys, but, like mine, it has a QWERTY keyboard:
![]()
The second Remtor to emerge in this country is even more interesting, in that it is a green-keytopped early model Torpedo 18 called a Remtor De Luxe. The keyboard might be Bulgarian? ("Veliko" is on the shift key.) This is the first time I have seen the 1936 model Torpedo as a Remtor:
![]()
![]()
Here are my Torpedo versions of this same model (also both for sale):
![]()
![]()
No doubt these Remtor machines are to be easily found for sale online on European sites, but in Australia they are quite unusual. So I've been surprised to be contacted by two Australian readers in the past fortnight, both asking about their Remtor portables (which, incidentally, may be for sale - contact me for details).
↧
Too Late, He Cried! A Lament for the Late Remington Riviera Portable Typewriter
Someone out there has taken pity on me. They've reckoned that Richard Polt has been hogging all the mysterious mail from the Typosphere.
My own mystery started the week before last when John Paul Moloney, chief of staff of The Canberra Times, contacted me through Facebook: "We still get occasional mail for you, including a pretty cool postcard this week. Can you flick me your postal address and we'll send it on."
I got around to answering JP's message earlier this week and today the postcard arrived.
The mysterious "someone" - and I might be thick but I have absolutely no idea who it might be (it's postmarked Hobart) - has gone to a lot of trouble (except they apparently don't know that I have been gone from The Canberra Times for 22 months now). The postcard is elaborately and carefully designed (in the colours of the Remington Riviera portable typewriter), artistic, almost poetic, possibly even prophetic - and spookily insightful.
The card reads: "Hi Rob. Although I've been long awestruck by your typewriterly wisdom, I'd ask that you reconsider the Remington Riviera. That maverick Carl Sundberg designed the Riviera not for 20th or 21st centuries but for the 22nd. Come the year 2101 the Riviera's 'flaws' will start making sense."
Had I replied to JP last week, I might still have my Riviera. Armed with this postcard's prophecy, I might have hung on to it, with a renewed appreciation for the thing, given this long-term forecast for its future.
But no.
On Friday, the Riviera was one of 43 portable typewriters to leave this house, never to return.
The lady who took it asked, "Are you sure you want to let this go?"
"Out damned Riviera," I declared. "Never let it brighten my door again."
I hadn't missed it at all. Until this postcard arrived today. And then only for a second or two.
After the 43 portables left here last Friday, I did a quick "inventory" and worked out that I wanted to hold on to 80 typewriters and let the remaining 290 go.
There will be a lot more empty spots on the shelves in the coming weeks and months. The Riviera, I'm afraid, was just the beginning.
↧
↧
For the Record: A Brief Appearance by the Barratt Typewriter
.jpg)
The Barratt, an aborted 1915 attempt to built a British version of the German Stoewer Record.
.jpg)
Just before the outbreak of World War One, 100 years ago this month, Charles Spiro’s Columbia Typewriter Manufacturing Company decided to end production of the Bar-Lock in the US and sell all its patents, trademarks and tools to the (British) Bar-Lock Typewriter Company, makers of the Royal Bar-Lock. However, the British company, run by William James Richardson (1863-1949) and his sons Donald Southwell Richardson (1888-1972) and Conrad Richardson (1891-1937), had recognised downstroke typewriters were outmoded and had no intention to continue making them beyond 1914.
In May of that year, the Richardsons had commissioned ace typewriter design engineer Herbert Etheridge to begin designing a frontstroke typewriter for them. At the same time, the Richardsons announced they would build a factory in Nottingham to produce the new "all-British" Bar-Lock. (The war delayed things, the plant was not completed until 1919 and the frontstroke Bar-Lock first appeared in 1921.)
Upon becoming aware of these plans, the Rimingtons, arch British rivals of the Richardsons, hatched their own scheme - to produce the "first British built frontstroke standard typewriter". Trouble was, it wasn't a British design - it was to be no more than a British version of the German Stoewer Record (aka the Swift), launched in an updated form in 1912.
.jpg)
It was in part to be backed, according to Typewriter Topics, by the British Government. But the major financier, Thomas James Barratt, the chairman of soap manufacturer A&F Pears and "the father of modern advertising", died aged 72 in Greater London on April 28, 1914, leaving £405,564 16 shillings and six pence, none of it earmarked for the Rimingtons or their projected typewriter enterprise. To top it all off, on August 4 Britain declared war on Germany. The Barratt typewriter was doomed before it ever even got off the ground.
Thomas J.Barratt
In early 1914 the Rimingtons - brothers George Garthwaite Rimington (1874-1951) and Walter Rimington (1879-1941), the sons of British Blickensderfer agent John McNay Rimington (1841-1908) - had found themselves in a very similar position to the Richardsons. George Canfield Blickensderfer had from December 1913 increasingly leaned toward a conventional typebar machine (the Blick-Bar), and the Rimingtons saw that they too had to move with the times. Thus the arrangement with Stoewer to make its Paul Grützmann-designed standard in England, by expanding their Cheapside, London, plant further down the road.
Paul Grützmann
The "preliminary announcement" of the Barratt - "now in the process of manufacture" - was made in March 1915, and selling agents were called for across the globe. But that's as far as the Barratt typewriter project ever went. The Rimingtons instead went on to make the British Blick, the British and the British Empire, using the manufacturing facilities of George Salter and Co in West Bromwich.
↧
Typewriting as Physical Exercise
One hundred years ago, newspapers in country towns in the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria were preoccupied with the physicality of typewriting:
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
Published in 1914 in The Wyalong Advocate and Mining, Agricultural and Pastoral Gazette; Stawell News and Pleasant Creek Chronicle; The Picton Post
Published in 1914 in the Malvern Standard; Prahran Chronicle
Published in 1914 in the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate
Published in 1914 in the Great Southern Herald
↧
Camel Load of Typewriters in the Australian Desert
Englishman John Frank Batthews Bowden (1871-1951), of the United Typewriter and Supplies Co, helps an "Afghan cameleer", left, (with a boy assistant) to pack a camel load of Densmore, Yost and Caligraph typewriters headed for Coolgardie on the fringe of the Great Victoria Desert in Western Australia during the gold rush of 1898.
Two weeks ago I posted on the Union Typewriter Trust's thrust into Australia in the mid-1890s, through its international trading wing the United Typewriter and Supply Company.
At the time of researching the post, I came across this wonderful image, which I found in the National Library of Australia's Trove digital archives. However, the image had been reproduced in Perth's Western Mail newspaper from a copy of the Sydney Bulletin, where it had first appeared on September 24, 1898. The Bulletin has not yet been digitised by Trove. Not surprisingly, given the engraving processes used at the time, Trove's jpg of the Western Mail image was far from clear.
Yesterday my friend Bruce Coe took me to the National Library here in Canberra, found the microfilm of the Bulletin from 1898 and created a PDF of the image, which I have since been able to scan and upload here. I think it's much clearer than the one I used with my UTSC post.
The photograph shows a camel laden with Densmore, Yost and Caligraph No 4 typewriters on the Goldfields of what was at the time referred to as "Westralia" [Western Australia].
Herbert Hoover photographed in Perth in 1898
At the time this photo was taken, working of these Goldfields was Herbert Clark Hoover (1874-1964), later to become the 31st President of the United States (1929-1933). Hoover went to Western Australia in 1897 as an employee of Bewick, Moreing & Co, a London-based gold mining company. He worked at gold mines in Big Bell, Cue, Leonora, Menzies, and Coolgardie. Hoover first went to Coolgardie, then the centre of the WA goldfields. Conditions were harsh but Hoover was paid a $5000 salary (equivalent to $100,000 today). In the Coolgardie and Murchison rangelands on the edge of the Great Victoria Desert, Hoover described the region as a land of "black flies, red dust and white heat". He served as a geologist and mining engineer while searching the goldfields for investments. After being appointed as mine manager at the age of 23, he led a major program of expansion for the Sons of Gwalia gold mine at Gwalia.
In my book, BWh stands for "bloody witheringly hot". When Perth experiences a heat wave (and I've been through one), it's when winds blow straight off the desert toward the Indian Ocean.
The Australian United Typewriter and Supplies Co network was established by an Englishman Henry Gray Cambridge (1868-1922), who was sent to Australia by Milton Bartholomew (1855-1927), managing director of the trust-controlled Yost Typewriter Company on the Holborn Viaduct in London (where Cambridge had been Bartholomew's assistant). This was also the English headquarters of the United Typewriter and Supplies Co. At the time of setting up the UTSC in London, both Bartholomew and Cambridge worked for one-time London Lord Mayor Sir Sydney Hedley Waterlow (1822-1906), a judge of typewriters at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition.
%2B(1).jpg)
It is Bowden who is in the photograph at the top of this post. He was born to fine art publisher Felix Joyce Bowden and his wife Elizabeth Emma Batthews in Finsbury Park, north London, on October 5, 1871, and died in Brighton on May 1, 1951, aged 79. He arrived in Sydney on the Oroya on September 4, 1897. His wife Keturah and three daughters arrived in Fremantle on the Allinga the following March.
.jpg)
From Typewriter Topics, July 1907:
↧