Typewriters

Typewriters were the standard machine in any office.   From the year 1890 until about 1990 almost everything an office produced would be turned into clear text on letterhead paper by typists.   If it was an accounting office there might also be adding machines called ‘ comptometers ’.   Both typing and comptometer operation were special skills and people (mainly women) went to secretarial college to learn them.

Information & Machines

A printing press with movable type was invented by Gutenberg around 1436.   Within a century it had lead to an explosion in the availability of books. What the printing press produces is easy to read,   but setting up a press to print a page is time consuming and running it tends to be messy.   Printing is only worthwhile if the press will print hundreds of pages. A printing press is an appropriate tool where information will be read by hundreds or thousands of people.

Before printing, having information or a thought and writing it down were a seamless action. There wasn't much distinction between penmanship and painting. The roles were divided by the printing press. There was a thinker / creator writing a manuscript that might be read by a few. Then if the manuscript had wider interest it would be edited, and then finally taken to a press for printing. The arc of recent technology - PCs, laptops, tablets, websites, inkjet printers and e-readers - is to scale up from one reader to many but remove the division of roles, costs and delays of the press.

The typewriter was the first machine providing information flows in between those provided by the pen and those of the press.

A lot of information will only be read by a narrow circle of people:

  • The drafts that become newspaper, magazine and book articles are written by one person and possibly read by two or four people on their journey from editing the manuscript to press.  Typing a manuscript makes it more likely to be read, less likely to be spiked.
  • Business plans and policies, research and academic papers, performance statistics, agendas and minutes of meetings are all things that are below the threshold where printing would be an option but where readability is important.   Before typewriters such things relied on nice penmanship.
  • Workplaces are full of examples of things read a few times. An order for stock will be read a couple of times by accounts clerks and a couple of times by stock pickers, delivery men and goods inwards.   If it is handwritten and ambiguous then the chances of misdelivery are higher.

Jobs like these are where the typewriter and now the computer prove valuable.

A typewriter takes pieces of printer's type and gives a swift way to press them through an inked ribbon onto paper. The result is a neat copy of a persons thoughts on paper. Benefits are that:

  • writing can be quicker .   Forming a character is reduced to the simple act of pushing a button. This improvement may be important, people talk at 150 to 200 words per minute but handwrite at 20 to 30 wpm. Hunt and peck typists work at about 30 wpm but professionals at 60 wpm.
  • reading can be quicker too  another person will be able to read the page swiftly and easily, without the problems of deciphering handwriting. Average reading speeds are 250 to 300 words per minute from clear text.

Typewriters provide some superficially minor benefits as well. A typist is sitting in a dignified position, not hunched over a desk, which fitted the standards of the time. Also, people have always loved the new and apparently well organised, neat typescript gives that image. Typing things is actually an effort so these points aren't enough to give the typewriting idea a century long hold unless it is doing a seriously useful job.

The printing press is celebrated as the fundamental technology underlying the modern age. The typewriter is noticed less often, but in making the wheels of industry turn it may have been just as important.


Offices & Economics

Typewriters became possible and desireable in the wider context of how industry was reorganising itself. In the late 18th century production moved away from the farm and cottage to the factory. A century later as railways and telegraphs improved the flow of goods economic power was moving to department stores, newspaper advertising and brands.

The growth of clerical work is one of the mysteries in economics.   Before 1830 there were few offices. A successful trader or a government official might have a counting house where the book-keeping tasks were done. It would not be a large operation, three or four clerks at most. Matthew Boulton built a great factory and warehouse at Soho in Birmingham. The clerks or managers had quarters on the upper floors of the warehouse. So far as there was an office it was the owners house nearby. The running of most mills was a matter for the owner, his family and a few foremen.

Government officials who held “ Offices of State ” might have secretaries to undertake some of their work - but only perhaps two or three of them. In London, when the Palace of Whitehall was destroyed by fire in 1698 it gave an opportunity to put up new buildings that would start to function as offices in the modern sense: the admiralty, offices for the army and Horse Guards; the Welsh and Scottish Offices, Scotland Yard was to be the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police. The India Office and Foreign office and round the back of Guildhall the Stationery Office. And of course the Treasury, the governments counting house.

Before railways and steam-ships goods moved in fairly small quantities. Shop basements and backyards were often the factories where the goods were made from raw materials (bakers, brewers, butchers, iron-mongers, blacksmiths and potters. Or a shop might be showroom for factories elsewhere, as Boulton had in London. So far as there was clerical work a great deal of it was copying material; James Watt invented an early copying machine.

Around 1870 employment in the US and Europe started to move into back-offices rather than shop and factory floors. Factories merged into larger groups that needed more coordination. Department stores emerged, with product-lines drawn from national and even worldwide suppliers. Both productivity and purchasing power increased, it wasn't a matter of straight forward growth but something like a modern economy emerged. There were no computers (invented 1944) or copiers (1960) but limited office automation using typewriter, index and punch cards was possible.

In the US growth rates regularly exceeded 4% for a couple of decades before World War 1 and again in the 1920s; it has rarely achieved that since. In the US clerical work employed 5% of the population in 1900 and doubled to 11% in 1920. Just for comparison the US service sector now employs 68% of the workforce.

That isn't to say that what we need to restore economic growth is more typewriters, or that the best way to run a hospital is to take over wards and fill them with administrators. But an economy does grow when people are getting better at handling information, so there is a correlation between the rise of the typewriter and growth in the economy. If we get better at using computers the real economy should grow.

Office Machinery

Offices need stationery in all sorts of sizes. For a small office a bound ledger is convenient and can be kept on ordinary bookshelves, but in a larger concern people contend for access so lose-leaf forms or index cards might be better. Companies like Globe Files introduced their patented Globe System of Filing Papers and the idea of filing business papers hanging vertically in a drawer. they also came up with modular furniture - the “Elastic Bookcase”. Filing small things became a big business  kardex  linpic .

Typewriters make text clearly readable. Handwriting done carefully can be quite legible, but that isn't what happens in a busy office. Notes get scribbled, a name, phone number, product code and price - and later on those notes are incomprehensible if they aren't lost. We are still trying to overcome the problems of big organisations sharing malformed information a century later, hence the interest in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.

Typing is supposed to be faster than handwriting, and for many people with a bit of experience of a keyboard it is. There is a problem in recent times because computer keyboards have given people the idea that everyone can type. Hunt-and-peck typing tends to be below 30 words per minute - if that is true for you then think about a touch-typing course. As will emerge later in the typewriter story, touch-typing is an important skill.

So why do most people still have a pad of scribbled notes alongside their keyboard? Perhaps the computers aren't responsive enough? Or the position on the page is meaningful and a keyboard (and word processor) doesn't let you control that adequately.

There is more on the theme of the aims people have when they write after the section on how writing was done- which for a century was often the typewriter.

Typewriters have been replaced by computers. The last typewriter factory, India's Godrej & Boyce, shut down in April 2011.  metro .

Computers have been called a glass typewriter and it's an epithet that often fits. A lot of the time the computer is just a recording device and other than sharing records and files without leaving the desk they don't currently do a great deal that was not once done with a typewriter, filing cabinet and postal service. And of course the computers haven't yet delivered a paperless office.

Sharing on the scale of the World-Wide-Web may be different and makes things like the Semantic Web possible.   But those are relatively new ideas.


Typewriter Invention

Typewriters had the same problem that computers were to have a century later and the semantic web does now.   A few people could see the importance of the idea but most could not. They could write, what did they need a typewriter for?

Workable typewriters were invented somewhat later than the first telegraph printers. The earliest printing telegraphs were made around 1844 by Wheatstone and by the late 1850s David Hughes' printing telegraph was quite common. Printing telegraphs use a ticker-tape mechanism with a little print wheel carrying embossed characters that turns to position and then strikes through an inked or carbonised ribbon at the paper tape.

The earliest manufactured typewriter was arguably the Hansen writing ball of 1870, but the first typewriter having a resemblance to what was use in offices was the Sholes and Glidden - or Remington No1 first made in 1874-5.

If may seem topsy-turvey that printing telegraphs preceded typewriting but once the telegraph had been invented there was an economic imperative to get the best use out of the wires and Morse code transcribed by hand didn't always do this. Although typewriters subsequently became far more commonplace than telegraph machines it wasn't so evident why anyone would need an office typewriter.

Typewriters are more elaborate than a telegraph in some ways. The page produced has to be sufficiently conventional to be accepted. So the typewriter can't just print on a tape. To cover the x-y grid of a page with characters either:

  • the printing mechanism has to traverse the paper (moving carriage)
  • the paper and the platen holding it have to move (moving platen)

Typewriters and telegraphs do a rather similar job in some ways, so their development overlaps, as might be expected.

The Hammond typewriter uses a rotating C-shaped shuttle halted by a stop. Hammond apparently got the idea from an invention called the Pterotype but the implementation as a rotating shuttle hitting a stop might also resemble a Wheatstone ABC.

Teleprinter inventors such as Charles and Howard Krum or Frederick Creed would later try to base their ideas on typewriters.

Some of the early typewriter inventors (Beach, Densmore, Hammond, Sholes ) were journalists and stenographers. It was an age when newspapers were very interested in reporting Parliament, the Courts, learned societies and speeches. There was no recording, so fast accurate transcription was important and by reducing words to button pushes typewriters offered that possibility.

Early Writing Machines

Writing machines became technically feasible with the invention of metal type in the 14th century. Presumably it was not just happenstance that the invention of typewriters waited until the late 19th century. A typewriter needs hundreds or even thousands of intricate parts but clockmakers could produce those. There were plenty of attempts to make something like a typewriter.

Until the late 19th century there was no great need for typewriters so even if they were feasible the technical difficulties weren't overcome. It is only with the growth of railways and telegraphs that big offices and national newspapers became possible. One source reckons there were at least 112 inventions before the Remington Typewriter became a success.

The most nearly succesful seems to have been the Hansen Writing Ball, and it is of interest because it is so different from anything today.


Hansen Writing Ball

The Hansen Writing Ball was the first typewriting device, going into commercial production in 1870 (Patented 1865). The Reverend Malling-Hansen was principal of the Royal Institute for Deaf-Mutes in Copenhagen. His original motivation was to create a way for the children to communicate more easily.

As so often there is dispute about who should be credited as first, typewriters before that time were prototypes, not intended for manufacture. The Writing Ball was made in some numbers.

The Writing Ball is an extraordinary looking machine. At the top it is a hemisphere, effectively a pin cushion in shape. The typewriter keys are the pins sticking out, with a keycap on a plunger pointing down to the paper where a matrix of shaped letters converge on the cursor. Underneath the head the paper moved past the typehead on a curved carriage. Experiments were made typing against a stopwatch to optimise the typing speed.

Hansen presumably knew a considerable amount about telegraphy, the device had an electromagnetic escapement. However he doesn't seem to have tried to interest the telegraph companies in it.

The writing ball may look weird but its quite a neat device. Could a ball-shaped keyboard be an answer to the poor ergonomics and lack of mobility of conventional QWERTY keyboards? It would be relatively easy to manufacture one with keyswitches.


Remington Number 1

The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, later known as the ‘ Remington Number 1 ’ became the basis for most of the office typewriters produced in the 20th Century. There were hundreds of millions of typewriters, one every office if not on every desk, so that was quite some feat.

The effort to produce it was also extraordinary; it took half a dozen people something like 6 years to invent. It then took another decade to hone the marketing strategy.

Invention took a great deal of ingenuity, backtracking and re-invention, a foreruner of the sort of things that seem necessary for success in the 21st Century.

Three men living in Milwaukee were the inventors. Samuel Soule was a printer, he and Christopher Latham Sholes who had been both a printer and a politician invented a mechanism to do things like automatic page numbering as material was printed. They had their parts made in Kleinsteuber's machine shop, where they met Carlos Glidden, a lawyer and inventor working on a mechanical spader - a device he hoped would replace the plough. They came across an 1867 Scientific American article describing a Type Writing Machine invented by Mr Pratt of Alabama and decided the page numbering device would make the basis of something better. .

The prototype used type levers with printer's type attached, arranged in a circle under a print position. The levers were driven by piano keys labelled left to right ABCDE etc. It printed upwards onto flat tissue paper.

Sholes wrote to various people on the new machine. One was James Densmore, an old newspaper acquaintance. Densmore knew the need for speedy and accurate stenographers reports from the courts and legislature. He had also made some money from inventing a railroad tanker to carry oil. Without seeing the machine he bought a quarter share in return for paying the expenses so far.

Densmore visited Milwaukee some months later. By now there were two machines, one using wires to connect keys to typebars, the other using a kicking mechanism that Soule had devised. Densmore took the machines to Washington and had them patented. He then attempted to make some but found manufacturing them wasn't very practical. The inability to use ordinary paper would have limited sales as well. Densmore knew that economies of scale were important. Sewing machines had recently become popular, they were priced to sell to households, a price made possible because they sold in great numbers.

Sholes had made a study of what information he could find on typing devices and had a new idea. Replace printing upward onto tissue paper with printing upward onto paper wrapped around a horizontal cylindrical roller about 3 inches across and held on a carriage over the print position. At each hit of the key the roller would rotate so that a line was printed around the cylinder, then the roller would move left for the next line. Paper rolled around an axle could be any thickness wanted as he demonstrated in a letter to Densmore on thick card.

Rather than piano keys smaller metal key levers with round buttons in four banks took their place, an idea suggested by Mathias Schwalbach who worked for Kleinsteuber and was hired by Sholes. This idea worked better but being wrapped round the roller meant the paper had a fixed width and limited length. The Automatic Telegraph Company showed an interest and bought a few machines. Later they suggested they would be more useful if they could take a continuous roll of paper.

Soule and Glidden had rather lost interest by this time and had not contributed to the roller idea. Glidden wanted to get on with his spader. At various points Densmore, who was determinedly optimistic about the type-writer, bought out their shares,

To meet Automatic Telegraph's idea for roll feed the third set of typewriter ideas took the paper into the carriage at the back, wrapped it round the platen where it was printed on the underside and out at the top, almost as modern typewriters do. The carriage moved left at each keystroke on a rachet, pulled by a spring. The roller rotated at the end of a line. The roller and type were the other way round from the axle machine. This gave clear writing on almost any thickness of paper. The paper could be almost any shape and could come from a roll. A disadvantage was that the person typing (soon the word ‘ typist ’ was coined) couldn't actually see the results as they happened. To see what had been typed the roller was held on hinged arms, which had to be lifted away from the print position. As it happened that idea had been patented by a Californian inventor called Charles Washburn so he got a royalty on every typewriter sold.

The keys moved swiftly - so that if two hit the print point quickly they tended to jam. To stop this happening the inventors and James' brother Amos Densmore, came up with a layout where a succession of nearby keys were less likely to be used - hence the QWERTY keyboard we still use today.

Densmore was tireless in testing, developing and re-testing the idea. Soule and Glidden had more or less dropped out. Densmore cajoled Sholes into continuing, he was an inventor himself but he saw something extra in Sholes. Many of the machines were sent to stenographers around the country for testing, in all something like 50 prototypes were built, Densmore reckoned they had cost about $250 each to make. However he was enthused with the idea that mass production would allow them to be made for a much lower price, something which had happened with sewing machines.

Densmore tried making the machines directly about four times, in 1872 hiring Schwalbach and a mill to do the job. He also tried to interest various manufacturers. Eventually in 1873 his friend Yost suggested that the best manufacturer would be gunmakers E. Remington & Sons. Remington apparently charged Densmore for making the machine suitable to manufacture and $10,000 for a run of 1,000 machines, with 24,000 more if it proved successful. The early machines were labelled Sholes & Glidden, the latter insisted on a credit although Densmore doesn't seem to feel he deserved it.

Typewriter Marketing

Sales were initially difficult. Sholes and Densmore knew that stenographers (court reporters) would be interested and several of them had helped develop the machine by reporting their defects. Telegraphers also needed to reproduce text accurately so they would be interested. However they thought the main users would be men of letters and clergymen. The machine was demonstrated in department stores and at exhibitions where it tended to be overshadowed by Alexander Graham Bell's new telephone.

Early typewriters were upper-case only and whilst the pages were clear people didn't like the look much.

Marketing was done by Western Electric initially. As the telegraph company they had an interest in mechanical type, but they didn't make a great success of typewriters.

The Fairbanks scale company then tried their hand. This may seem a curious choice,   but Fairbanks had invented the weighbridge and patented many improvements in weighing. Fairbanks were making 80,000 scales per year in 1882 in a huge Vermont factory - so they were interested in office machinery. However they didn't make a huge success of typewriters. What did happen is that Fairbanks salesman Clarence W. Seamans became an enthusiast for typewriters, so when Remington took sales back in house he went as well.

Celebrity Endorsement

It seems to have been Clarence Seamans who came up with the idea of educating business in the use of the typewriter. He put several hundred out on trial and then made judicious use of the testimonials from famous people. For instance this:

Phenix, R. I., March 28, 1875. Gentlemen : We have now had the Type-Writer about a month, and are entirely satisfied with it. There can be no doubt in regard to its usefulness. When I saw the advertisement of the machine originally, I had little faith in it. An examination surprised me, but not so much as the practical working has. We have no trouble whatever with it, and it is almost constantly in operation. I think that it must rank with the great beneficial inventions of the century. Very truly yours, Henry Howard, - Governor of Rhode Island.

Quote from Mark Twain .

The Remington Number 2 had various improvements such as a shift key lower case as well. This may also have significantly improved the market

A couple of years later when the machine was beginning to succeed Remington spun the typewriter manufacturing work off to the Remington Standard Typewriter Company under William Wyckoff, Clarence Seamans and Henry Benedict .

Competitions

Extract from Oden "Evolution of the Typewriter" (1917)

Typewriter competition had become so active, and opposition to the front stroke visible machine so pronounced, that the manufacturers of the older "blind" machines sought to prove the superiority of the principle of their product by arranging a series of typewriter contests. It is believed that this action was largely for the purpose of discrediting the front stroke machine, the typebars of which were encompassed within the space of less than a half circle, whereas the typebars in the blind machine occupied a full circle. The first of this series of contests, which have been kept up continually since, took place March 20, 1905, in Chicago. The Underwood did not enter.

To force the issue, however, and bring the Underwood out, another contest was arranged in the same year for October 31, held in Madison Square Garden, New York City. The one hour dictation contest was won by Miss Mae Carrington; Miss Rose L. Fritz, then just out of school, second, both using Underwood typewriters. This was a blindfold championship contest. For the American Typewriting Championship (copying) two elimination contests were held, one for five minutes and the other for ten minutes, Miss Rose L. Fritz winning both, using the Underwood; Mr. Paul Munter, second, using the Remington ; Miss Mae Carrington, third, using the Underwood ; and Mr. Chas. M. Nelson, fourth, using the L. C. Smith. In both of these elimination contests the typists stood in the same order, Miss Fritz winning at the rate of 73 words a minute, and Mr. Munter, her nearest competitor, at 59. In the final thirty minute contest, however, Paul Munter was first at 70 words a minute and Miss Fritz second, at 69 words a minute.

...

In consequence of Miss Fritz having won the World's Championship Trophy three successive times, and about thirty other championship medals and prizes, her services were in such demand all over the world that she had to abandon contest work for the purpose of giving exhibitions, which she did, not only in the United States and Canada, but all over Europe. Miss Fritz was the first to demonstrate the infinite superiority of touch typewriting over the old sight, "hit and miss" method, and her pioneer work in the practical development of typewriting cannot be over-estimated.

Competitions

It may seem curious, but another way to get sales up and establish some interesting facts was to hold a typewriting competition. We don't see typing competitions at Maddison Square Gardens today, it isn't generally regarded as a spectator sport. One of the results was the development of touch-typing.

The invention of touch typing is credited to Frank Edward McGurrin, a court stenographer from Salt Lake City. In 1888 Caligraph and Remington organised a contest - no other manufacturer would take part - and McGurrin won  1888 contest .

Frank McGurrin's fast typing originated as an office rivalry as to who could type faster between him and his boss. He realised that to type quickly he would need to use all his fingers and not look at the keyboard, but simply remember where the keys were. Doing this he could write upwards of 90 words a minute in a new manner. By the next year the idea had caught on. According to Wikipedia, Bates Torrey coined the words writing by touch in an article Scientific Typewriting, The Writer Vol. 3, No. 7, p152-154, 1889 and the phrase caught on as touch-typing. (We haven't yet found the original article)

Wyckoff, Seamans and Benedict (Remington) thought highly enough of touch-typing that by 1900 they were publishing a little book on the subject. Most people who have been taught to touch type can achieve 60 words per minute, twice as fast and more accurately than those using hunt-and-peck methods.

Scientific Management

It gradually emerged that the real appeal of the machines was to the new class of businessmen interested in scientific management - swift, accurate recording of information was becoming a necessity in the new offices. With some experiment people gradually learned that typing could be much faster than handwriting and much clearer to read as well. As business became more complicated those advantages won out over the personal touch of handwriting. Remington's slogan was To Save Time Is To Lengthen Life, usually written around the border of a red seal picturing the first typewriter.

By 1891 Remington Typewriter could boast it had sold 100,000 machines. Densmore had made $1.5 million in royalties.

Several of the typewriters inventors went on trying to come up with better ideas. Sholes had a machine he called the little abortion which was much smaller than the machine he was known for. Densmore and Yost both started typewriter companies of their own.

Visible Typing

That isn't to say that typing wasn't difficult. Early typewriters had no delete key, so accuracy was essential (liquid paper for corrections was invented in the 1950s).

Furthermore all early typewriters pushed the typebars up onto the platen, the typist could only see the last few lines typed by hinging the platen open for a look. It was only with the arrival of the Oliver typewriter in 1895 with it's top-strike mechanism and the first Underwood machines with front-strike around that time that the typist could view the text almost as it was typed.

Ultimately the typewriter became a great success and Remington had an advantage for many years as first mover. The Remington Standard Typewriter Works at Illion, New York became an enormous place. By the 1920s they were able to boast on adverts and postcards of their production being A Machine A Minute. Underwood had made ribbons for Remington but decided to make typewriters when Remington's decided to make their own ribbons. Underwood's rather more modern design became popular and they were able to make the same boast of a machine a minute.

Sales Spectaculars

The 1890s and early years of the 20th Century are sometimes called the "Typewriter Wars". Visible typing threatened the survival of the older firms until they found ways to achieve it. At root typewriters were a hard business, to get prices down and sales up the factories needed volume production. They could get that by starting with low prices, by advertising or by sales promotions.

Two of the companies that only started production in the early 20th century deserve mention for their marketing.

Underwood built an enormous typewriter in the foyer of a hotel in Atlantic City. On special occasions they had a girl positioned on every key, Busby Berkeley style.  Underwood .

In 1926 Royal president GE Smith bought an aeroplane called the Royal Airtruck. To demonstrate the ruggedness of the companies new line of portable typewriters crates were dropped on parachutes to dealers. Apparently more than 11,000 typewriters were delivered and only 10 damaged  Royal .


Competitors

Typewriters initially proved a hard sell, but the new market began to attract competitors. By 1890 the time was ripe for the idea. Dozens of manufacturers emerged, Caligraph, Crandall, Hall, Hammond and especially Smith-Premiere.

Thomas Hall invented a typebar machine in the 1870s and it might take precedence over Sholes except that it was never manufactured for sale. Instead Hall began to manufacture a machine based on a pantograph - the user pointed a stylus at the required letter and this was then selected on a typewheel. The machine could be operated with surprising speed, but since it reduced typing to a one-handed activity it was inherently slower than the Sholes & Glidden.

The Hammond machine with it's rotating rubber typepiece is markedly different to the Remington. The Hammond machine might have been the first typewriter, the idea was contemporary with the Sholes & Glidden machine and inspired by the same Scientific American article of 1867. There were technical difficulties turning the machine into a practical device, but by 1884 they had been overcome and the machine was in production. What was unusual with the Hammond machine was that the hard rubber shuttle embossed with the characters could be lifted out and replaced with another carrying a different font or even the characters for a different language. This gave it a special niche. Hammond made a fortune which he left to the New York Metropolitan Art Gallery. Machines recognisably similar to the Hammond were still in production in the 1970s as the ‘ Varityper ’  Hammond .

The Blickensderfer used a novel wheel type element. First shown at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 it attracted crowds. It was cheap and light and the first to be offered in an electric version but the design didn't keep pace with what the market wanted, so that design faded in the 1920s.  Blick .

Smith Premier Typewriter Company was established in 1886 by the Smith brothers. Smiths were famous as a manufacturer of guns. Their machine was invented by Alexander T Brown, who had seen the Sholes & Glidden typewriter at the US Centennial Exposition in 1876 and thought he could do better. The resulting machine had both upper and lower case letters worked by a double keyboard - a key for every character - or as Smith's called it a complete keyboard. The key mechanisms were quite different and used long bearings, giving better better type alignment. Although it was a blind typing machine the platen could be tilted to see the type quite easily. Another innovation was a type cleaning brush worked by a hand-crank. Oden says: The Smith Premier proved a strong competitor for the Remington, both on account of its merit and the methods of the manufacturer in selling the machine, without regard to uniform price. On account of unusual activity and price cutting the Smith Premier soon secured a large following.  Smith

The Stenographer a magazine primarily for court recorders, suggested that there were forty-seven makes of typewriter on the US market by 1891. The number nearly doubled by 1910 before falling back to 5 in the 1930s. It seems to have been very like the microcomputer boom of the 1970s and 80s with dozens of competitors each with their own new take on what was needed.

Typewriter Database says there were more than 1000 brands - and some made hundreds of models. Apparently there were 89 manufacturers in the US alone by 1909.

Typewriters were big business, they sold in millions. A great deal of ingenuity went into producing machines. A stream of inventions and patents justified the introduction of new models. Early innovations often aimed to make typewriters smaller without sacrificing reliability

Union Typewriter

Extract from Oden "Evolution of the Typewriter" (1917)

The quality of the Smith Premier and other machines, together with the price cutting methods of the manufacturers, resulted in forcing the Remington, out of self-protection, into a combination known as the Union Typewriter Company ...

These companies continued separate organizations but received instructions from, and reported to, the Union Typewriter Company, which controlled the entire situation most effectually, both as to machine competition and employes. In other words, employes could not follow their conviction and go from one company to another without the permission of the company they were leaving, which was difficult to obtain, especially if the quality of their services was such as to justify any one of the companies belonging to the Union Typewriter Company in wanting to retain them. Salesmen and other employes were subject to discharge on account of the slightest error or misdemeanor, and they had no recourse except to quit the business, thereby sacrificing the experience of years. When a salesman was discharged, his name was placed on a black list, and only by special dispensation could he secure employment with any of the aforesaid companies.

...

Anti-Competition

From Smith Premier's introduction in 1886 typewriter salesmen were struggling with falling prices. In 1893 Remington. Caligraph (American Writing Machine / New Century), Smith Premier, Yost, Densmore, and Brooks joined together to form the Union Typewriter Company. This is what Americans call a Trust and Europeans call a cartel or monopoly; the idea was to eliminate competition and maintain the price  Union Typewriter .   The price for a typewriter was to be $100.

Each of the companies in the cartel continued, but acted as subsidiaries of Union Typewriter Company which was run by Clarence Seamans. Prices were fixed. This didn't entirely deaden competition, which was now on design. The Caligraph, Densmore and Yost machines didn't have enough features to sell against Smith Premier and Remington so they were at first placed under one marketing department and then production ended. The Yost design continued outside the US but Caligraph and Densmore ceased production.

A merger of half a dozen of the biggest companies did not entirely stifle competition. Curiously it may have benefited customers in some ways, it may have had the effect of helping unify keyboard design around the QWERTY standard. The manufacturers union didn't succeed for long in reducing competition.

What happened was that companies like Oliver and Underwood appeared, offering better typewriters and especially visible-type. Smith Brothers argued with others in Union Typewriter that they must introduce visible typing models and when they would not do so they pulled out. L.C. Smith commissioned a new design and a huge new factory to make it.

Disconcerted by the Smith Brothers departure the remaining participants in Union typewriter dug up various visible designs and decided on a visible machine called the Monarch. It seems uncertain whether the intention was to compete, or to have a model discrediting the idea of visible typing. In practice the Monarch was placed on the market in 1904 and proved popular. Union Typewriter then realised that blind typing was over and that they would have to re-model the Remington, Smith Premier and Yost typewriters. By 1914 blind typewriters had almost disappeared from the market.

US Federal law had already moved against anti-competitive practices like this with the Sherman_Antitrust_Act of 1890. The idea of cartels was popular in larger businesses. AT&T argued that the telephone system was a natural monopoly and that the best hope of providing a large-scale service at a good price was to allow such practices. Charles Ranlett Flint who formed Computing Scale Corporation (later IBM) was known as father of trusts.

Remington Typewriter assumed control of Union Typewriter and went on producing the Remington, Remington Smith Premier and the Remington Monarch, a later introduction. Union Typewriter still existed in 1917 when Oden was writing.

Typewriter Manufacture

A typewriter in the Remington style used something like 2,500 parts. There would be between 32 and about 50 keys depending on whether the machine was a 3-bank with a double-shift or a 4 bank with upper and lower case. Each key was based around a couple of levers but with the keycaps, pivots, and the springs to give tactile feedback and a rapid action the complexity rapidly grows.

Typewriters and mechanical calculators are amongst the most complicated mechanical things ever manufactured. Clocks perhaps have more intricate mechanisms, but they typewriter keys repeat a pattern again and again in a small space.

Improvements aimed at increasing typing speed and print quality. Automatic carriage return with line feed, margin locks and tabulator mechanisms were introduced. The ribbon feed improved and a ribbon shift allowing black and red type introduced. Improvements in the linkages made the typing action lighter and reduced the number of parts, which cut manufacturing costs. But all these changes had to be made whilst improving the feel and therefore the possible typing speed.


Portability

Early Remington typewriters have the basic outline of the machines that became common in the 20th century but they were big.   By the 1920s technology had improved somewhat. Starting around 1913 with Frank Rose's Standard Corona   there was a new fashion for lightweight portable machines. A great many Coronas were ordered by journalists and the military in World War 1.   Major producer Smith Brothers merged with Corona in 1926.   Underwood produced their own portable from a design by Lee Burridge of Sun typewriter in 1919 .  Early portables cut weight and simplified the machine by using a 3 bank keyboard and a double shift. Remington introduced a portable in 1920 with a full 4-bank keyboard.

A distinction between heavy duty, ergonomically designed office machines and lightweight portable machines remained through to the end of the typewriter as a product. Companies like Smith Corona focused on portables for homes and small offices whilst by the 1960s IBM was dominating the business market with its Selectric models.


BLICKENSDERFER

Extract from Odin "Evolution of the Typewriter" (1917)

BLICK ELECTRIC The manufacturers of the "Blick" produced an electric machine, which promised to revolutionize the typewriter business, but the promise was not fulfilled. It had its advantages, but the disadvantages evidently were greater, because of the complications of the electric motor requirements. The carriage reverse and all other active parts of the machine were controlled by electricity, but the best evidence of its imperfection is that its manufacture was soon discontinued. The electric typewriter would eliminate to a great extent the human element, and for that reason it is not likely to become popular.

Electric Typewriters

Electric typewriters might seem an obvious invention since printing telegraphs were in use some 30 years before the first typewriter. However the printing telegraph wasn't very fast - perhaps 5 characters per second (about 12 words per minute) and output on paper tape - so it must have seemed more like a false lead than an inspiration. .

Manual typewriters can require strong fingers. Over time designers reduced the amount of physical effort needed to work the keys by improving the linkages. Generally the aim was to make typing faster.

The first company specifically organised to make electric typewriters was Cahill. They do seem to have made some machines between 1900 and 1905 - figures are unknown but thought to be very low, perhaps 50 machines with non known to survive.

Blickensderfer introduced an electric typewriter in 1902 but at that time the idea didn't succeed. There are thought to be 3 Blick electric typewriters in existence - and they sell for a great deal .

John Thomas Schaaff invented a series of electric typewriter mechanisms between 1910 and 1918. He initially worked for Underwood and then for Thomas Watson of CTR/IBM, to whom he seems have sold both the typewriter patents and that for an electic card-punch in 1918. The patents definitely exist, why Watson did not use them doesn't seem to be known. There does appear to be one Remington 10 typewriter modified by Schaaff in existence.

There seem to be a string of patents for electric typewriters from Cahill's first in 1893 through to the 1930s that had no practical outcome. Electricity distribution for lighting had become common in American cities in the 1890s but the voltages still weren't standardised, so that might be one explanation.

Most manufacturers introduced an electric typewriter sometime between the late 1920s and 1950s. Electric typewriters were usually aimed at office environments, where lighter keytouch meant faster typing and higher productivity. Until the late 1970s these were electro-mechanical machines - no electronics was involved.

James Fields Smathers seems to have invented the first power operated typewriter mechanism to go into production on any scale sometime around 1914. He was an accountant and credit manager for a company in Kansas City and realised that typing would be quicker if the key-presses were lighter. The first World War intervened and he was sent overseas on military service, so he only picked up the idea again in 1920.

Smathers idea was a power base that could be used with a number of typewriters. In 1923 he took the idea to Northeast Electric Company, a US power company trying to develop the market for motors. This machine was designed to work from a power-driven line shaft. Northeast arranged with Remington to make the machines, they would produce the power bases whilst Remington attached them to No 12 typewriters. Northeast electric built 2500 of these units. Although the power unit attached to ordinary typewriters worked it seemed they would work better with purpose designed mechanisms, Northeast Electric was taken over by the Delco division of General Electric in 1928, The departments making the new electric typewriter didn't transfer to GE but with Rochester capital became a new company called Electromatic Typewriters.

Electromatic completed it's new design in 1930. In 1933 IBM bought the company .

IBM Electromatic

IBM was not a computer company in those days, that started with the ASCC in 1944 or perhaps the 701 in 1952. IBM had no history in typewriters - but it was deeply imbued with ideas of automatic machinery.

In 1911 Charles R. Flint merged International Time Recording Company, Computing Scale Company, and the Tabulating Machine Company to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R). Several of these companies themselves were mergers of others in time recording, weighing and card recording. A key element in this odd assembly was Dr Herman Holleriths's Tabulating Machine Company. Hollerith's doctorate (nominally as an Engineer of Mines) and his business was founded on analysing census data using punch-cards. The first use of the cards had been in 1886 for Baltimore Department of Health and the big demonstration was the 1890s US Census for which figures had been produced in record time thanks to Hollerith's inventions.

Flint's unification of several data recording an processing companies was an impressive act of foresight. So was his choice of general manager, in 1914 he appointed Thomas J Watson Senior, who had left a similar post at NCR under a cloud. Watson proceeded to grow the company by using a highly professional sales force and a commitment to new products. In 1914 CTC made $4M turnover and $1M profit. By 1924 turnover was $11M and profit $2M, and Watson changed the name to International Business Machines - IBM. The company went on growing despite the stock market crash and the recession.

By the 1930s IBM was making adding and subtracting accounting machines, electric key punches, automatic gang punches, printing tabulators, counting printing sorters, ticketing machines, accounting machines as well as chain store and public utility billing machines. Other products included many different kinds of timekeeping clock and scale and it was running Carroll Rotary Card Presses to produce cards at very high speed. The new 400 series alphabetic accounting machines and a Filene-Finlay translation installation at the United Nations suggest IBM was becoming interested in text. The purchase of Electromatic is nevertheless surprising, IBM under Watson goes into typewriting during an economic depression when other typewriter manufacturers are struggling to survive.

IBM invested a million dollars in redesigning the electric typewriter and came up with the IBM Electromatic typewriter - a piece of office machinery that was to last another 30 years and about 5 revisions and make IBM one of the most significant presences in typewriters as well as their traditional speciality of punch-card machinery.

Electric typewriters not only reduce the effort needed to trigger a key, making typing a lighter and faster action. They also make the action of key-presses even, making the text look more as though it were printed.

James Fields Smathers joined IBM's Rochester staff in 1938 as a consultant and worked there until his retirement in 1953. In 1938-9 he invented a proportional space mechanism for typewriters. Fitted to the Electromatic it made it good enough to be used for photographic typesetting.

Automatic Typewriters

Extract from Oden "Evolution of the Typewriter" (1917)

SPECIAL MACHINES

The story of the evolution of the typewriter, so far as it relates to correspondence and general office work, has been told. But when the value of the typewriter as a general office assistant became fully appreciated by typists and business men, they began to cooperate with manufacturers to enlarge the scope of its usefulness. Inventors responded to this universal desire for the further development of the typewriter, until today there is a machine built for every purpose for which the pen was formerly used, except the actual signature, which individualizes and establishes responsibility for the work.

For example: The Underwood provides a machine for general accounting, such as ledger posting and statement work, railroad waybilling, statistical and form work of all kinds. In fact, it might truly be said that the great future of the typewriter industry lies in this direction.

more

Automatic Typewriters

The 1920s were an age of automation. Coin-op player pianos and pianolins (piano with accompanying violin and flute pipes) were common in bars and restaurants. Wurlitzer switched to phonographs. Capitol's Rock-Ola Sweet-16 coin operated phonograph provided the sound-track to an age.

Electromatic had developed a pianorola recording version of their typewriter before they were taken over by IBM. In the late 1930s IBM developed the Electromatic to work with teleprinter tape. By this time IBM were so dominant in punch-cards that they feared anti-trust action against dominance of punch-tape as well. To avoid this several IBM Rochester people bought out the punch-tape operation as Commercial Controls Corporation. CCC was taken over in 1957 by Friden, primarily a calculator maker.

The Electromatic mechanism underlay a whole series of typewriters - Remington electrics, IBM Electromatics and the Friden machines. Friden machines were widely used as computer input output terminals, and equipped with the proportional spacing mechanism they were good enough for computer driven correspondence and photo-typesetting. With correspondence stored on paper tape and a control panel Friden Flexowriters were often used for automatic replies to correspondence in the Whitehouse and Congress.

A Flexowriter with a couple of tapes could do things like mail-merge and composing documents from multiple source tapes. Attached to one of Friden's calculators the tape could type a bill and the calculator fill in the total.

Large applications automation were starting to emerge in the 1930s and 1950s. For instance IBM won a contract for tabulators to handle the new US Social Security system in 1936, the government scheme would not have been feasible without tabulators. A later example is the 1948 plan 55-A store and forward message system used by Western Union and by the US Department of Defense. In retrospect we can see the beginnings of word-processing and office automation. The problem might have been that modified typewriter equipment was too expensive for normal office use, but of course that becomes circular logic. The price could have been lower had manufacturers expected a demand as Densmore had predicted for the typewriter using the argument that it had worked for sewing machines.

In 1965 Friden were taken over by Singer, best known for sewing machines. Singer were then building what was to become a rather successful if short-lived computer empire. Singer management are sometimes blamed for lack of vision on both calculators and word processing but more realistically things have a time and word-processing would only take off as an idea at the end on the 1960s.

In the photo-typesetting role Friden and Electromatic machines competed with the VariTyper, a version of Hammond's typewriter modified for cold-typesetting. Like the Friden machines the Varityper had a long life, being made possibly as late as 1980. There are VariTypers in use in 2011, for instance US Anarchist magazine “The Match!” want nothing to do with computers or websites, so the material is typeset on a VariTyper and a JustoWriter.

Computers

Typewriter manufacturers seem to have realized the potential importance of computers in the early 1950s. Smith-Corona merged with Marchant Calculators. Underwood bought ECC of Brooklyn. Remington-Rand bought Eckert & Mauchly to get UNIVAC, then ERA.

IBM was developing machines like the SSEC (Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator). More importantly IBM developed the 603 Multiplying Card Punch, an electronic calculator. Only about 100 of the 603's were sold but Northrop Aircraft hooked one up to a memory unit and got the Card Programmed Calculator (CPC). A similar configuration using the quickly launched 604 could do 1000 arithmetic operations per second. IBM sold 700 CPCs in the years to 1955 whilst Remington-Rand sold only 14 UNIVAC 1 computers. About 5,600 IBM 604 punches were sold during the 1950s. At that time the big money was not in computers but in clever tabulating machines. !

(Putting the numbers in perspective; there are 479 cities with populations of over 1 million people in 2010. Computers were mainly in the US, so on average there were just a few computer-like machines per city, mostly used by governments or very large businesses.)

There was money in computers in the 1950s, but in a narrow range of projects. The US government was in a race with the Soviet Union for nuclear weapons, bombers to deliver them and both radar and fighter aircraft to intercept the bombers. The bombers and fighters got faster so old tracking methods like an ops-room with a map were too slow. MIT's George E. Valley and Jay Forrester devised SAGE, the SEMI-Automatic Ground Environment, a system of radar stations to direct fighters  .

Learning about the project in 1952 IBM's Tom Watson Jr decided participation was essential to the company's future. He decided on Pulling out the stops to win the initial contract to work with MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) on the prototype computers. "I worked harder to win that contract than I worked for any other sale in my life," Watson recalled.

The AN/FSQ-7 computers were big, 55,000 vacuum tubes weighing 250 tonnes. There were 22 Sector Direction Centers and three Combat Centers each with a pair of machines. Total project costs are unknown, thought to be $8Bn to $12Bn in 1964 dollars, equivalent to $55Bn at year 2000 prices. It is thought the SAGE computers alone provided 10% of IBMs income in the later 1950s. This was just one of many defense projects, but particularly large and critical.

IBM won the main contract to build the systems over Remington-Rand.

IBM's rise to pre-eminence in computers during the 1960s and through into the 90's is sometimes said to be a result of the SAGE contract. However IBM had lots of revenue streams, there were all those multiplying punches and CPCs. In 1962 they began the System 360 project, which is also sometimes said to have been the making of the company. And there was a growing power in office equipment such as typewriters.

Computers were not common in the 1950s, but they were increasingly setting the context for the ways offices would work.

IBM Selectric

The big success in electric typewriters was the IBM Selectric. Selectric typewriters had three-quarters of the US office market by the 1970s  Selectric .

The Selectric was a breakthrough machine when it was introduced in 1961. The keyboard was highly ergonomic and very responsive. Excellent type quality was complemented by the neatness of the design. In the Selectric the carriage is inside the machine - not the great big moving carriage of type-bar typewriters which doubled the space needed. Eliot Noyes had been commissioned in 1956 to create a house-style for IBM and designed the look of the Selectric.

Selectric Typewriters are often called "golf ball" typewriters. The printhead is about the size of a golf-ball but instead of dimples it has letters embossed at regular intervals over the surface. The ball tilts and swivels so that the correct character face is perpendicular to the platen, paper and ribbon and then strikes across at them, leaving an imprint of the letter.

Obviously the internal mechanism was unlike most of what had gone before. The ball-shaped print-element sits on a carriage that moves on rails inside the machine. This is now the familiar arrangement, inkjets and dot matrix printers do the same thing, but older typewriters mainly had a carriage holding the paper and sliding back and forth outside the machine. (Teletypes had a small carriage inside carrying their cylindrical typepiece).

The keys activated levers which through a series of linkages communicated the tilt and rotation to the ball via thin steel bands across the carriage space. Like electric typewriters before it there was not a single bit of electronics inside, everything was done by mechanical logic driven by a single motor.

At least one IBM old-timer recalls trying to interest those designing the machine in making it computer compatible, but they couldn't see that being needed  bobbemer.com .

In practice it was only three years later in 1964 that IBM released the MT/ST, a Selectric Typewriter combined with a 25 kilobyte cassette tape drive allowing documents to be prepared and stored for re-use. With two tape drives the MT/ST was capable of mail-merge. With an extra tape drive attached to an IBM 360 Mainframe the Selectric could be used for off-line data preparation.

A later version of the same machine used magnetic cards for data storage. The computer industry had a brief love-affair with the idea of cards in the late 1960s and early 1970s until the idea of the floppy disk caught on.

In 1971 the Selectric II was introduced. Improvements included a dual-pitch selector allowing 10 characters per inch or 12 cpi and the option to have a correcting ribbon. The correcting ribbon would backspace and then use lift-off sticky tape to lift a character off the page or cover-up tape to print white over the mistake.

For a period of 20 years the Selectric seemed pretty much invincible in the business typewriter market. It's mechanism was capable of delivering almost fifteen characters per second, so only the fastest touch-typists could outpace it. The type was good enough that IBM sold a proportional spacing model the Selectric Composer

IBM introduced a Selectric III model around 1980 but the technology was already being outpaced. Daisywheel printers were first introduced in 1972 by Diablo  Diablo . Like most ideas the daisywheel took a few years to catch on, but with print quality pretty much equalling the Selectric, simpler and less expensive innards and a print speed and mechanism that suited computer connection the daisywheel printer was an inevitable replacement  daisywheel .

There are still Selectric typewriters around, often kept to do a few specific tasks that a computer printer isn't good at, like filling in paper forms or addressing envelopes. Some writers prefer a typewriter to a word processor. The feel of a Selectric keyboard is unequalled by anything today.

Wheelwriter

IBM introduced the Wheelwriter in 1984  Wheelwriter . The Wheelwriter was a daisy-wheel -the technology was apparently from Qume  Qume .   By this point Diablo, Qume, Brother, Canon, Smith-Corona, Olivetti were all producing daisy-wheel typewriters and printers or variants on the theme. NEC had a slightly different take on the mechanism with the SpinWriter. IBM had lost it's significant edge in the market.

Quietwriter

IBM still thought they had a significant ace-   a thermal printer called the Quietwriter. Thermal printers looked like a good idea at the time.

The Quietwriter is essentially a thermal transfer printer but instead of the ceramic printhead full of tiny heater elements normal in such a machine the printhead contains nothing but a set of electrical contacts. The ribbon has an aluminised rear, so current through the contacts locally heats the wax coat which transfers to the paper.

The thermal transfer process sounds wasteful but it is widely used for its simplicity. Several typewriter manufacturers tried it. Brother turned it into the popular P-touch labelling idea. IBM's Quietwriter takes the idea to it's logical conclusion - effectively there is no printhead because it is built into the ribbon, just electrical contacts.

Unfortunately for IBM users proved resistant to the price of the ribbons. Users were beginning to prefer word-processors over typewriters. Laser, dot matrix and inkjet machines were beginning to catch on - all of them outpacing the Wheelwriter and Quietwriter when attached to a computer.

IBM seems to have shared a problem with other typewriter manufacturers; they couldn't believe that the very concept of a typewriter was losing currency.

IBM's typewriter and printer division was sold to Clayton & Dubilier in 1991 becoming printer maker Lexmark. Perhaps because they have a history inside a computer maker Lexmark are one of the few typewriter makers to have managed the transition to making printers.


Coda on IBM

IBM's technological innovation with the Selectric typewriter lead to their pre-eminence in the business typewriter market from the 1960s to the 1980s.

IBM is usually credited with inventing the term word-processing in the 1960s and making the first practical machines with the MT/ST. They were one of the biggest typewriter manufacturers and unbeatable in office typewriters until the 1980s when the Selectric was overtaken by the daisywheel. They weren't the first to market PCs on a large scale, but their design became a best seller and the prototype for things to come. They had some of the first inkjet printers, and were amongst the first with laser printers. So Why did the word-processing industry belong to WordStar, WordPerfect and eventually Microsoft ?   How did HP come to be the dominant printer brand ?

IBM mainframes typically ran IBM supplied software, customised in-house by the companies that ran it. IBM were known for the PC, but neglected to develop or sell most of the package software it was typically used with. They were also terribly late to market with a small laser printer - waiting until 1989, four or five years after HP hit the maket with the LaserJet.

Almost all of the mainframe makers were wrong-footed by word-processing. Their idea of a word-processing program was truly dreadful (try inflicting vi on the average computer user). They and the community of IT managers they dealt with wanted information to be structured. The greater part of information is semi-structured, it has a narrative but it doesn't have neat sub-structures that can be unplugged and used elsewhere. So word-processing was developed by a new community using personal computers and software developed outside of the computer mainstream.


Other Manufacturers

IBM's typewriters were one of the great successes of the economic boom between 1945 and the 1980s so that story is outlined in one piece above. But what of the other typewriter manufacturers? By the 1930s their numbers in the US had been cut from something like 89 in 1909 to just a few in 1930 - Royal, Underwood, Smith-Corona and Remington Rand. Most of the others had either gone under like Blickensderfer (Remington came to own the tools) or been bought by others like Hammond. Some were bought by companies outside the US - so Oliver became British Oliver.

Remington-Rand

Remington Rand Rand was a very different company from IBM.   There are all sorts of parallels in the paths they took. Both became computer companies, Remington Rand had the early advantage but was overtaken by IBM in the late 1950s.

Rand Ledger Company was built on business record keeping. At the time this meant systems of dividers, file tabs, index cards, cabinets, shelves and carousels. This may sound like small-scale stuff but often it was not. Insurance offices, law firms, engineering businesses, hospitals and government departments accumulated mountains of paper that must be kept and retrieved. Paper retrieval systems are still big business today .

Rand Ledger was built by James H Rand, Sr. Rand's family were bankers. He became a telegraph clerk and then a bank cashier. Rand sr invented the idea of "visible records" and "visible indexes and files". He set up a factory making products in North Tonawanda.

A typical arrangement is to have records organised so that each of several dozen has a tab protruding a little further than the last. Index information is written on this tab.

Rand were amongst several companies making systems of forms and index cards and they also owned odd things like a musical automata businesses until 1925. The sort of things a firm interested in office procedures might own at the time.

Rand Sr fell ill in 1910 and his son took over the business through to 1915. Legend has it that on his father's return they quarrelled over a planned million dollar advertising campaign to boost the business. Father is reported to have said Get out and make a living and don't ask me for a dollar!

James Rand Jr had been dissatisfied with the product range anyway, wanting to focus more on cards in steel cabinets. He borrowed $10,000 from his uncle and formed American Kardex. Within five years he had more than a million dollars in gross sales , equal to his fathers business empire. Rand Jr had a factory making the steel cabinets in Tonawanda.

Rand Jr was a keen advertiser. Slogans were facts at a glance and Send for the Kardex Man. Rand had possibly the most unsuccessful sports sponsorships of all time. The Tonawanda Kardex team were ignominiously defeated in their first game and never played again.

James Rand Jr was very successful, even today ‘ Kardex ’ is often synonymous with medical records  kardex  Randex .

The family feud was settled by Mary Rand brokering a reconciliation, Father and Son agreed that American Kardex would buy Rand Ledger, and become Rand Kardex, the largest office supply company in the US. James Rand Sr became company chairman, James Rand Jr its president. The merger took place on April 1st 1925.

They started buying other companies that would fit into the theme of record-keeping:

  • Index Visible Inc. founded by economist Irving Fisher
  • Safe-Cabinet Co. which had invented the fire-proof safe. Safe Cabinet Company was the first firm to receive Underwriter Laboratories labels.
  • Library Bureau, Inc also which had a claim to have invented the filing cabinet and had clearly demonstrated the advantages of cards for record keeping.
  • Dalton Adding Machine
  • Baker-Vawter Ledger
  • They also bought Library Bureau's rivals Globe Wernicke Co but this proved a move too far. Rand was forced to divest that business after anti-trust action.

The big merger was in 1927 with Remington Typewriter and Powers Accounting Machine Company to form Remington Rand. James Rand Jr headed the company from its formation through to 1958, growing sales from $5M in 1927 to $500M in 1954 and creating one of the biggest corporations in the US.

Rand revolutionized industry perhaps even more than IBM did at the time. Remington Rand was one of the first conglomerates, with interests ranging across the whole of industry. In 1939 James invented a razor (US patent 2,315,274 March 30th 1943) and a factory to make it, General Shaver Corporation. In the UK and Europe the Remington name is primarily known today for hair-care products.

Remington's involvement in James Fields Smathers electric typewriter was mentioned above .  The Remington - Rand merger did get in the way of the idea of the joint project on an electric typewriter with Northeast Electric. (So Rand may have lost what turned out to be a historic opportunity). The first electric typewriters made on any scale were Remington 12's but only a couple of thousand of them were made before Northeast spun the division making the power bases off as Electromatic, which was then bought by IBM. Remington-Rand therefore had competition for electric typewriters coming from a brand-new entry to the market. That probably did not matter much because the economic depression of the early 1930s and the War in the 1940s meant electric typewriters did not take off as a product until the 1950s.

Typewriter products don't seem to have changed all that much. Typewriters mainly continue with the word Remington emblazoned on them through the 1930s. The 1930s were a troubled time for Remington-Rand, with income cut significantly.

Remington-Rand planned to cut the number of plants it had in the 1930s; building a big new plant at Elmira. Times were troubled and workers joined the AFL Union. The company began to use scare tactics, putting for-sale notices on plants and spreading rumours that a new owner would not tolerate unions. In 1934 6,500 workers went on strike. The company used all sorts of provocations and harassment against union leaders and strikers, hired security guards as strike breakers and intimidated local officials to side with them. The company ignored government offers of arbitration and court orders. Troubles continued through to 1940 and beyond. .

Computers

In 1950 Remington-Rand bought the Eckert & Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC). John Mauchly and J Presper Eckert were leaders of a team at the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering which had built the ENIAC, a secret digital computer intended to calculate artillery ballistics tables. ENIAC immediately demonstrated the versatility of the idea of a digital computer, it was initially used to run simulate the behaviour of atomic weapons. The idea was de-classified in 1946 and became a sensation as the first "electronic brain".

Eckert & Mauchly set up a company to build a line of computers coming up with the name UNIVAC for them. Within a couple of years the new company was foundering. A prototype machine delivered to Northrop aviation couldn't be assembled properly because EMCC people couldn't get clearance to go on the site. Mauchly was accused of being a communist sympathiser and couldn't enter his own factory. There were contracts to build machines for the Army, Navy and Air-force and the US Census Bureau but the company lacked the capital necessary to develop it's ideas. The company was put up for sale in 1950. NCR and Remington Rand were seen as potential buyers. Remington made the first offer and got the UNIVAC team.

James Rand Jr apparently had to push his board to buy EMCC. Rand was one of the people who saw the potential of computers; he wasn't satisfied. A couple of years later in 1952 he bought Engineering Research Associates (ERA), based on the US Navy's code-breaking team. However it was not going to be easy to merge two entirely separate teams with very different ideas. For instance ERA favoured drum memories - large capacity at comparatively low cost. EMCC favoured mercury delay lines.

Remington Rand's Elmira plant was, for a while, the largest business machines factory in the world.

Remington-Rand, IBM and SAGE

As was said above many computer historians trace IBM's rise to pre-eminence in computers during the 1960s and through into the 90's to the award of the SAGE contract starting in 1952.

SAGE (the Semi Automatic Ground Environment) was a system of radars and command centers displaying the airspace in a sector and giving the operator much better information on trajectory or identification than could be achieved any other way. The SAGE system was conceived by Dr George E Valley, an MIT physics professor who had developed the HX2 radar system for the US Air Force.

The SAGE project became essential when the USSR tested its first atomic bomb in 1949. The USA was now vulnerable to attack in a way that had not been possible before. A large scale attack by low flying fast bombers would not be seen by ground based radar until minutes before the planes were over coastal cities. the destruction would be calamitous. One possibility would be constant fighter aircraft patrols but that would be phenomenally expensive, and there would still be a problem coordinating priorities between the radar operators and intercepting aircraft. The idea of SAGE was to take radar signals from several stations, and coordinate them on sector displays together with support information.

One problem was that a computer fast enough to process radar information for display on a bank of screens had not yet been built. MIT's Jay Forrester was developing a fast computer called Whirlwind, originally intended to provide the real-time calculations for a flight simulator. An experimental setup called the Cape Cod system had demonstrated the feasibility of using the machine to coordinate radar information. By the summer of 1952 the Air-Force were looking for contractors to build a military grade, scaled up system.

SAGE was to be a big system, with 22 sector control centers each containing two AN/FSQ-7 computers, one live and the other normally on hot standby. There would also be three combat centers. Initial contracts covered scaling the Whirlwind design up to the power required, which was beyond MITs own resources at the time although with Air Force help they had established the Lincoln Laboratory at Hanscom Air Force Base, a few miles West of Boston.

There would be 52 large systems; large is perhaps an understatement. Each computer contained 55,000 vacuum tubes and weighed 250 tons, physically they were the largest machines ever built. By today's standards their computing power was not all that impressive - 32 bit with 75,000 instructions per second and dual 4 kilo-word memories (16 kilobyte). Using machine-code programming these machines were adequate to the job, they supported up to 150 Sector-Display VDU operator stations.

IBM had just launched their first computer product but their tabulating machinery was well known and they had sponsored several academic projects and built the SSEC .

Ratheon were also in the running as a major supplier of radar systems.

Remington RAND were naturally in the running to get the SAGE contact. As the parent company of EMCC and ERA they had the UNIVAC name, then the most famous in computing and two of the military's top computing teams. Rand had also recruited two of America's top brass to his board.

Rand was very keen to get the SAGE contract. Emerson.W.Pugh says (Building IBM)

Jim Rand's methods were different from Tom Watson's, but he was just as eager to win the contract. He personally hosted the MIT evaluation team on the corporate yacht. Also present on the yacht was the new chairman of the Remington Rand board, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, one of the more popular military leaders of World War II. Knowing little about computers, MacArthur entertained the guests with his observations on political military matters. Leslie R. Groves, who had managed the Manhattan Project in which the first atomic bomb was developed, hosted the group during the days. Recently hired as a Remington Rand vice president and director of advanced research, Groves was an impressive salesman for the company's technical capabilities.

Forrester and his team had already decided a way to quantify the capabilities they were looking for in a manufacturing contractor.

Jay Forrester said In the IBM organization we observed a much higher degree of purposefulness, integration, and esprit de corps than we found in the Remington Rand organization. Also, of considerable interest to us, was the evidence of much closer ties between reaerch, factory, and field maintenance in IBM." By contrast he noted that the Eckert-Mauchly and ERA organizations "had not yet worked with each other or with a Remington Rand factory.

Forrester's teams evaluations seem right in historical context. Within a couple of years the ERA people would have gone to found their own company. James Rand retired in 1958, hounded by the tax-man to the Bahamas.

Having more or less invented the bit-parallel computer and core-store memory Jay Forrester quite computer engineering work in 1956, feeling that the pioneering days were over. He moved to the MIT Sloan School of Management, where his application of systems thinking to management problems and human interaction broke new ground. He is credited with founding the field of System Dynamics and the modern idea of supply chain management.

Sperry-Rand

In 1955 Remington-Rand were bought in their turn by aircraft instrument maker Sperry. Sperry was rich with aerospace contracts. There was a boom in civil aviation of course, but the backbone of the business was defense contracts. Sperry had built it's own SPEEDAC computer, so there was a third design team as part of a reorganisation. The ERA people seem to have found the bureaucracy within Sperry stifling and left, forming CDC (Control Data Corporation) which became one of Sperry-Rands significant competitors in the 1960s.

Typewriter development seems to have been rather neglected in all this excitement.

There are some new products, like the Unityper. Remington's Unityper series were modified mechanical Remington electric typewriters with a magnetic tape recorder built into the rear. The tape is then used as input for a UNIVAC computer  Unityper    Unityper .

In 1961 the Remington-Rand division of Sperry-Rand were still the world's largest manufacturer of standard typewriters (ie not electric or portable). However the typewriter division had changed. Many of the US plants were still working (printing at North Tonawanda finally closed in 1976, Elmira in 1972 ) however they had smaller workforces. Typewriters were still being made in the USA but Sperry's Remington-Rand division now had 28 factories in 18 countries. The American workforce found it had out-dated equipment and worried that jobs were being exported to low-wage countries such as Scotland. (see The Machinist, February 2, 1961 online at www.library.gsu.edu)

The Elmira workers didn't need to worry about low-wage competition from Europe.

In 1962 the French plant closed suddenly; all the workers were unemployed overnight. The French government, which had invested in the plant was outraged and the action was one of several which made French governments rather hostile to American business in the latter 20th century.

In February 1963 1,100 workers were made redundant at the Millington plant in Glasgow.

In March 1968 the Thornliebank factory in Scotland closed

Sperry-Rand came out with some interesting computer products during the 1960s but essentially they were trounced. IBM took 80% of the world market for computers. The situation was sometimes refered to as Snow White and the seven dwarfs with IBM in the role of Snow White whislt Sperry Rand, CDC, NCR, Burroughs, GE, RCA and Honeywell fought for the remainder.

IBMs position in military air control meant is was well placed to supply civilian air traffic control systems. Running real-time systems gave it an advantage in airline booking systems and so forth. Perhaps IBM simply became good at working with government. The SAGE contract was the first for a very large system.

IBM had other strengths. That ability to keep up research and development created the Selectric typewriter which took about 75% of the US office typewriter market. Remington Rand workers, like others in the typewriter industry, tended to blame loss of market and plant closures on foreign competition, but it was actually IBMs success in innovation that was their main problem.


The 1960s should have been a good time for typewriter manufacturers. Lightweight portable and office electric models were well established. Several of them had electric portables. Never before had there been such a range of machines, from the student's Smith-Corona to the corporate office IBM Selectric.

Household disposable incomes reached record levels - by some measures disposable incomes have shrunk from the mid-'70s on with a succession of oil shocks and concentration of wealth in fewer hands. So the 60s were a great decade to sell a typewriter to budding authors, journalists, students and schoolteachers. A typed manuscript would add value to their work and typing was a valued skill.

Machine tools to produce complicated assemblies were improving. Robot assembly was still more hope than reality but a possibility.

Coloured plastic cases gave machines a contemporary styling. Metal and glass keycaps and various internal components could be replaced with plastic components - not as long-lasting perhaps.

Sears were selling Remington-made potables in the 1930s

Nearly all of the early typewriter designs were from the US, mostly based in New York State or Connecticut. Before Silicon valley the North Eastern United States was the hotbed of technology. Remington, Royal, Smith-Corona, Underwood. IBM's main bases were in New York although the typewriter division base was Lexington, Kentucky.

In the

By the mid 1980s many of the typewriter firms were celebrating a century in business. They were nearly all surprised over the next few years as they found their core businesses had gone. Some of today's computer printer businesses were based on old established typewriter firms.