You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November, 2007.
The ever-brilliant Jezebel ran a post about a typewriter ad from 1955, which not just advertised the machine but also a spin-off nail varnish called Underwood Red. See the full advert here.
Blogging by typewriter. Remediation at its finest.
In pursuing images for publication, I have become somewhat obsesses with finding new ones. Hence two more resources to add:
- The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Collection
- The New York Public Library’s Digital Collection. [With many thanks to the curator of the Early Office Museum website.]
Also, with Eames on the mind for other reasons, I find that a collection of images from the IBM Antique Typewriter collection comes from the Eames Office, as research for the staging of their exhibition A Computer Perspective. (See Library of Congress records for file references – sadly no images online.)
In preparing to write a journal article, I am re-reading all my old notes and going through all my references again to refresh my mind. In doing this, I came across two notes on the Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, a favorite and intensely interesting typewriter of which, if memory serves correctly, there are only eighty left. (NB The Science Museum has one.)
Up until at least 1971, these machines, first invented in 1865, were still being used by both the Institute of Biblical Studies, in Rome, and by the Dutch Court.
Ref: Michael Adler, History of the Typewriter, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1973. p.39.
When the Sholes and Glidden machine was first sold on the open market, it was called a “Type Writer”, a name which has been attributed as coming from James Densmore, the financial backer of this particular invention. However the phrase “Type Writer” had other definitions during the latter part of the nineteenth century, which were:
- The person – eventually the woman – who operated the machine. This definition led to a proliferation of risqué postcards that played with this double entendre. This paved the way for a rare but important branch of unexplored history, typewriter pornography.
- An author who writes in a certain manner. This meaning comes from interchangeably nature of the words “type” and “style” at this time.
- An author who does not write a manuscript but rather composes it directly in printers’ type blocks.
- Writing automatons.
Ref: F. Masi, The Typewriter Legend, NJ: Matsushita Electric Corp. of America, 1985. p. 39-40.
This phrase, most popular as a typing phrase alongside “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, came from a demonstration of the type-writer by Latham Sholes et al. to Charles Weller, the superintendent of the local (i.e. Wisconsin) Union Telegraph Office in 1867. (NB. Weller’s assistant, who was called in to give his view on the demonstration, was a very young Thomas Edison.)
Stuck for a phrase to show the power of the machine, Weller’s suggestion was lifted from an article in that morning’s local newspaper. Now to find the newspaper …….
Ref: The Typewriter in Wisconsin by Frederic Heath.
UPDATE 2: Gale contains a database of 19th American Newspapers. The newspapers in Milwaukee at the time were the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel and the Milwaukee News, both of which Sholes had been editor of.
UPDATE 2: The relationship between Weller and Sholes began when, in July 1867, Sholes went to the telegraph office where Weller worked looking for a piece of carbon paper, which was at the time very rare. On enquiring from Sholes what it was wanted for, Sholes invited him to the Kleinstuber machine workshop, what we would nowadays call an inventors’ hothouse.
Weller’s visit to the workshop became a demonstration of a single letter, the letter w, on what is described as a ‘crude experimental affair rigged up with a single key.’ It was further explained that this mechanism was to be expanded to include all letters of the alphabet. Soon after this demonstration Weller is noted to have moved to St Louis to take up a post as a short-hand reporter. However the relationship between Sholes and Weller continued with Weller become a tester of the many prototype machines (somewhere between 20 and 30 machines were created by Sholes, Glidden and Soule between 1867 and 1872).
Weller was a early typewriting machine tester alongside James Ogilvie Clephane, a shorthand reporter in Washington DC, and E. Payson Porter, a telegraph operator and expert from Western Union Telegraph Company of Chicago, Illinois.
Ref: Herkheimer County Historical Society, The Story of the Typewriter, 1873-1823, NY: Herkheimer: 1923.
In a (failed) attempt at a Googlewhack and following on from the previous post about newly launched projects, my good friend has launched a new stationery business called Ta-Daa!, where you can build a face and then have it printed on various media. Have a look here.
RSS Feed