Remington

Remington are known for two things today, hair-care products and guns. The two companies are quite separate these days but share a common ancestry which stretches all the way back to 1816 when a 22 year old blacksmith called Eliphalet Remington decided he could make a better gun by forging the barrel himself. The original family home built around 1810 and known as Remington House is on the US National Register of Historic Places.

The gun worked very well and other people in the Mohawk valley bought Remington's barrels, combining them with percussion locks and gun furniture to make the finished item. Remington had an expanding business and began supplying the percussion locks and and brass gun furniture themselves. To better meet demand the Remingtons moved production to a 100 acre site they had bought astride the newly built Erie Canal. Eliphalet was joined in the business by his oldest son, Philo Remington, then by his second son Samuel and his third son Eliphalet III. Remington got contracts to supply the US Army and Navy with rifles. Guns involve an intricate mechanism so Remington diversified and also began producing sewing machines.

By the end of the US Civil War in 1865 the Remington plant was one of the world's most advanced, valued at $1.5M - an enormous figure for those days.

For many years the name "Remington" was known all over the world for typewriters and later for computers. In 1986 Sperry, who had bought Remington-Rand marged with Burroughs to form Unisys. The Remington brand carried into the modern age, but curiously not on office equipment where it was once best known.

Sholes & Glidden

The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, also known as the Remington No 1, was marketed in 1874. It has several claims to fame.   In mechanical terms it is like the typewriters which most companies produced through to the 1980s. It uses type-bars, levers with a character embossed on the end. These are arranged in a circle around the point on the page where the type element will strike paper. The type-basket mechanism developed into that widely used in typewriters until the development of the golf-ball and daisy-wheel.  The peculiar "QWERTY" keyboard layout was used on typewriters, then on teletypes and is now used on almost all modern keyboards.

Prototype Typewriters

Christopher Latham Sholes was a printer, newspaper publisher and politician. He and Samuel W Soule had devised a machine to print page numbers on books and serial numbers on tickets. Carlos S Glidden suggested it might be adapted to print alphabetic characters as well. Together with Mathias Schwalbach, a German clockmaker, they developed a working prototype. The prototype looked like a piano (as did telegraph printers) and printed upwards to where paper passed across on a frame. The flying-key print mechanism is similar to a piano as well - Scholes modified a Morse key to show people how the flying key would work. In the original design the keys struck upwards through the paper to hit carbon paper on the other side. The limitation of this was that it could only use thin paper that would mould to the keys impact. People weren't going to want neat print on tissue paper so the idea was patented but not manufactured. A demonstration letter did attract James Densmore as a backer.

In the original machine the piano keys had numbers on the left keys and letters arranged in two rows of 13 on the right. The typebars meanwhile were arranged around a metal ring so that the keys flew up into the center, then gravity would bring it back down. However if two keys were pressed in quick succession they would fly to the middle together and jam. It is thought that to get around this a combination of letter frequency analysis and trial and error led to a design with four rows of keys with the top row of letters marked ‘QWE.TYIUOP’ whilst the "home row" retained the "FGH JKL" alphabet pattern. A later redesign moved the ‘R’ into the top row.

A redesigned machine used a cylindrical platen and feed roller to hold the paper. Soule and Glidden dropped out and sold their financial interest to Densmore and Yost.

In 1870 Densmore demonstrated the machine to the telegraph company. Western Union bought some machines but thought they could develop a better one for less than Densmore's asking price for the patent of $50,000. Sholes himself was eventually bought out for $12,000.

E.Remington

Densmore and Sholes then took the idea to E Remington & Sons. At this time Remington were primarily a gun manufacturer but were looking for ways to diversifying after the American Civil War. They took it up and started manufacturing but not before agreeing with Densmore a $1,000 fee for making it fit to manufacture and a $10,000 fee for the first 1,000 units with an option for 24,000 units to come. The Sholes and Glidden Typewriter, also known as the Remington No 1 sold a few thousand machines - serial numbers suggest about 5,000 between 1874 and 1878. It was a big machine and people didn't like the upper case only text. It was also overshadowed in exhibitions by Alexander Graham Bell's new Telephone (Western Union turned that idea down as well).

Take-up of typewriters was slow at first. The machines were not easy to make, containing about 2,500 parts, so they were expensive, priced at $125, a fortune at the time.

Competition

A competitor called the American Writing Machine Company started business in 1881 producing a series of machines called the Caligraph. It was described as a ‘writing machine’ since Remington were describing their machine as a ‘type-writer’. American Writing Machine was started by George Yost, who had been one of the investors in and promoters of the Remington. Hammond typewriters came onto the market in 1884. Smith Premier Typewriter Company was established in 1886 by another gun maker and their machine had both upper and lower case. Remington lowered prices and negotiated an agreement with a marketing firm (scale manufacturer Fairbanks ?) to take all the machines produced.

By the late 1890s there were something like a thousand manufacturers involved in typewriting; the numbers and diversity of designs were something like the microcomputer boom nearly a century later.

Remington_Typewriter

E. Remington sold the typewriter company in 1886 to Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict Standard Typewriter Manufacturing Co, including a right to use the name.

E. Remington actually went into the hands of the receiver in 1886. The arms business was struggling, the expansion of the US Civil War was followed by a depression which hit gun-makers particualrly hard. In 1868 the works were bought by Hartley & Graham, gun dealers and became the Remington Arms Union Metallic Cartridge Company. Gun makers have rarely been down for long. In 1870 the Franco-Prussian war broke out and the Illion works wade 155,000 rifles for the French government in just 7 months, a feat unequalled by any previous manufacturer.

Remington Arms naturally expanded a great deal in World War 1. Afterwards one of their diversifications was into cash-registers. In 1930 this branch of the company was sold to NCR (but thats a minor point). Sporting goods and gun-maker Remington Arms is now the oldest company in the US still making it's original product line.

The new company Remington Standard Typewriter was actually formed by Harry H Benedict, a Remington director, William O Wyckoff, a Remington Sales Agent and Clarence W. Seamans who had worked for both Remington and Fairbanks. They seem to have used Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict as a company name and the name Remington as a brand. In 1903 the company corporate names became Remington Typewriter Company.

They went on developing the Remington Typewriter. The idea was catching on and the marketing pitch was beginning to work. Advertising claims suggested there were 40,000 Remington machines in use by 1888 and a total of 100,000 by 1891.

An improved version with lower case was introduced as the Remington No 2 in 1878. The design still had it's defects, for instance typists worked ‘blind’. The platen rollers were hinged over the type-bars which made an upstrike at the paper. Seeing the typing in progress meant lifting the lid to look under the platen roller.

In 1893 Remington Standard Typewriter and several other manufacturers including Smith's Premier formed Union Typewriter Company. Union was the worlds largest typewriter company for a while but Smith's pulled out a couple of years later. Standard changed its name to Remington Typewriter Co in 1902.

Speed & Legibility

Sales increased dramatically. Material could be prepared twice as quickly and far more legibly on a typewriter than it could by handwriting so as businesses became interested in efficiency the take-up increased. Remington's slogan in the early years of the 20th Century was To save time is to lengthen life

Although typing is often faster than handwriting it does imply a rather different thinking process. With a piece of paper it is possible to add drawings, arrows, balloons or even to just use different bits of the page to associate different ideas. Typewriters don't encourage than because spacing the platen and the carriage is quite a significant task. So the typewriter implies a straight-forward, linear, thought through task. For an author the typewriter might have a similar narrative drive to speech; you can't go back and correct a bit without an enormous amount of fiddling about with the machine. So a typewriter may also help to focus and clarify thoughts.

Women Clerks

Typewriting seems to have had a dramatic effect on the employment of women. Typing and stenography paid much more than factory work, and seemed more dignified. (Dignity then counted for more than cool). In 1874 less than 4% of the clerical workers in the United States were women; by 1900 75% were. Whether womens employment was simply an idea whose time had come is unknowable. It is certainly true that right through until the 1970s most typists were women. Women were also a large part of the labour force in telephone exchanges.

James Densmore himself ultimately earned one and a half million dollars from royalty payments on typewriter manufacture.

Manufacturers of new typewriter designs sprang up through the early years of the 20th Century. Making a typewriter is a fairly complicated task, the core of the machine will often be a casting that the typebar and key levers sit in. The levers themselves will be made from sheet metal about a millimeter thick. The type itself needs to be a casting, it might be brazed to the typebar - the properties needed of the type are sharpness whereas what is wanted from the typebar is something light but tough. An idea of minimal scale might be gauged from Camillo Olivetti employing 20 people when he started his factory in Italy in 1908, he'd visited several US factories so he would have an idea what was needed.

By the 1920s the market was beginning to consolidate. Smith and Corona merged, so did Underwood and Elliot-Fischer.

Remington was the largest producer in most sectors, so it would have the best economies of scale. The next move was by a very ambitious and capable businessman.

Index Cards

Index cards and filing cabinets were at the core of office life; the hard-disk and database of the age. There were plain cards in various sizes. Then there were card indexes that used notches or holes to pop up a specific card.

There were ingenious systems that used a payroll form or purchasing record put positioned it on pegs over a ledger. When the form was written relevant fields carbon copied onto the ledger. There were several producers of special office forms: Paragon and Kalamazoo for instance.

James Rand Senior invented a system of dividers, file tabs and index cards and founded the Rand Ledger Company to manufacture the index system. His son James H. Rand Jr joined the company on leaving Harvard in 1908 and assumed control from 1910 to 1914 whilst his father was ill. When Rand Sr returned he proposed a $1M advertising campaign to boost sales and the two fell out. James H. Rand Jr borrowed $10,000 form his uncle and started his own index card supply company, American Kardex. Within 5 years it had grown to being one of the leading office supply companies in the US, equalling his father's company Rand Ledger. After a reconciliation between father and son they merged the companies.

Remington Rand

Remington is notable in computing. In 1927 they merged with Powers Accounting Machines (makers of tabulators) and Rand Kardex Company to form Remington Rand. The new business had the product range to match IBM.

The 1920s were an age of dramatic change in typewriters. Where there had been many hundreds of manufacturers (perhaps 300 in 1923) by 1929 the market had consolidated and there were only five makers.

ENIAC

In 1950 Remington Rand bought the Eckert & Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC). EMCC was founded by the builders of ENIAC, often claimed as the first computer. (Rival claims are Konrad Zuse, George Stibitz and the Colossus project. IBM were also designing the 604 multiplying punch to use valves.)

ENIAC was conceived and designed by John Mauchly and J Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering. The Moore School had a differential analyser, an analogue computer. The US army were using the differential analyzer to calculate artillery ballistics tables. Eckert and Mauchly proposed a much faster electronic machine to the army officer stationed there, Lieutenant Herman Goldstine. The army approved the idea and project PX was born.

The idea of an electronic computer was fairly new. George Stibitz had built a series of calculators based on electromechanical relays for AT&T and then for the war effort, and several other teams had made gun aiming or cypher and deciphering equipment. The idea to use fast arithmetic based on valves had been tried by John Atanasoff in a fast calculator now known as the ABC at Iowa State College during 1939–42. Mauchly had seen this machine.

Project PX built the machine which was completed in late 1945. The machine was secret, but due to a chance meeting John von Neumann found out about it and when the machine was workable it's first tasks were calculations for the Manhattan project. But with the end of the war the US government seem to have considered the ideas too big to be kept secret. It was declassified and made public at a press conference in February 1946. Described as an “ electronic brain ” it was a sensation.

The Moore School Lectures held in July and August 1946 was the first time the idea of computing had been taught and discussed amongst a large number of people so the team that developed the machine were highly influential.

Eckert & Mauchly had conceived the next machine called EDVAC before ENIAC was complete. However new university policies on the rights to inventions led them to resign. They made some moves to join IBM or John von Neumann's team in Princeton, but then started their own company.

EMCC got contracts from the US Census Bureau, the Army, Navy and Air-force to build EDVAC-2 computers, soon renamed UNIVAC (UNIversal Automatic Computer). However the project took a long time, they didn't have adequate backing and they were temporarily saved by Harry L. Straus before he was killed in an air crash. There were then accusations from McCarthy sympathisers that the company was hiring people with Communistic leanings and Mauchly himself was banned from government work and company property. The company was put up for sale in 1950 with NCR and Remington Rand as potential buyers. Remington made the first offer and got the UNIVAC team.

Sixty years earlier Remington had diversified after a war into typewriters, this time they diversified into computers. Despite its internal troubles UNIVAC was then the biggest name in the computer industry and with business interest increasing it could have a bright future.

ERA

In 1952 Remington-Rand bought Engineering Research Associates (ERA), another computing pioneer. ERA had been the US Navy's code-breaking team known as CSAW and centered around William Norris, Joseph Wenger and Howard Engstrom. In the early years they were basically financed by Navy contracts to make code-breaking machines, increasingly based around drum-drive memories. The problem with code-breaking was that the codes kept changing, so the idea of using a computer that could be quickly reconfigured became increasingly attractive. The Navy awarded them contract ‘ task 13 ’ to develop a machine. The drum-drive ‘ Atlas ’ machine they built was then sold commercially as the ‘ Era 1101 ’ (binary 13).

ERA fell foul of political shenanigans as well. There were claims that Norris and others were using their war-time connections to enrich themselves and the company got into a legal fight which diverted attention from the work. Purchase by Remington-Rand solved these issues. At first Norris and his team focused on military work, whilst Univac dealt with business customers.

To the military top-brass in Washington accustomed to the name Remington on their guns the company must have seemed like a safe home for some of the most important development work.

James H. Rand Jr was a man of some vision. He had pushed the company to buy Eckert-Mauchly. The Remington-Rand plant in Elmira, New York, became the worlds largest business machine manufacturing plant. In 1927 Sales had been $5 million whilst in 1954 they were $500 million. To base an industrial empire which became one of the key players in the 20th Century computer industry on card-indexes and typewriters is impressive.

Under Sperry he was vice chairman but he was 68 and retired a couple of years later. He had run-ins with the Unions, with the US Attorney and after his retirement in 1958 with the US Internal Revenue Service who sued him for back taxes. He retired to the Bahamas and lived until 1968.

Sperry-Rand

In 1955 Remington-Rand were in turn were bought by instrument maker Sperry, rich with aerospace contracts. Sperry-Rand continued the UNIVAC name and inherited the ENIAC patents.

Sperry Gyroscope was founded by Elmer Ambrose Sperry in 1910 to make marine navigation equipment, particularly his own inventions, the gyro-compass and gyro-stabilizer. His son Lawrence joined him in the business but split in 1918 wanting to focus on the autopilot which they had invented in 1912. However Lawrence was killed in an aircraft crash in 1923 and the companies merged. Sperry then supported the development of the klystron, which found many uses in radar, broadcasting and microwave communication.

During the Depression years of the early 1930s the Fisher Brothers had principle control of Sperry.   Fisher are yet another grand old American family of inventor-entrepreneurs. In the 1910s Fisher Body Corporation built car bodies for almost all the emerging US auto manufacturers (Ford, Cadillac, Chevrolet etc) and in 1919 General motors bought 60% - although Fisher Body remained a separate entity until 1984. Harry Vickers, inventor of various hydraulic systems including power steering approached them for help during the depression and they agreed to invest with Harry Vickers becoming president of Sperry Vickers. Both Sperry's communication and navigation equipment and Vickers hydraulics proved vital in World War 2. Harry Vickers was a close friend of Douglas MacArthur, Chairman of Remington Rand and one of the US's most distinguished military commanders when the companies agreed to merge.

In the early 1950s Sperry had itself become interested in computers and built the SPEEDAC in 1953. So Sperry itself was a company commercialising products based on research

One of the decisions Sperry-Rand management made was to merge the UNIVAC and ERA teams, keeping mainly the UNIVAC work and using the drum technology from ERA. Norris and several others including Seymour Cray apparently found the bureaucracy within Sperry stifling and left to form Control Data Corporation. The remainder of ERA were eventually recognised as a separate Military Division, later renamed the Aerospace Division. In the late 1970s they bought the ERA name and started a government contracting firm, which is now part or Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems - still primarily involved in government work .

Conglomerate

Sperry had become an almost definitive conglomerate

• avionics (Sperry Vickers/Sperry Flight Systems)
• marine navigation (Sperry Marine)
• consumer products and shavers (Sperry Remington)
• Sperry Systems Management (government defense contracting)
• typewriters (Sperry Remington)
• farm equipment (Sperry New Holland)

As a conglomerate Sperry was in line with the fashions of it's time. In-house expertise in computing would be invaluable in the farm equipment and avionics markets leading to innovative products and exciting new synergies. Typewriters, which had been Remington-Rands core business, were rather overshadowed.

In the early 1950s Remington-Rand had a technological lead over IBM. But where IBM was one company with a reputation for strong leadership the UNIVAC product line was subject to a series of mergers and acquisitions. The problem was that they never caught up with IBMs emerging monopoly of computers that lasted into the 1990s. The position used to be referred to as IBM and the 7 dwarfs (Burroughs, CDC, GE, Honeywell, NCR, RCA, Sperry).

A critical factor in IBM's success seems to have been the US department of Defence contract for SAGE (Semi-automatic Ground environment) a system for tracking and intercepting cold-war enemy bombers. SAGE was operated by NORAD from the 1950s into the 1980s and although it was innadequate as a protection against the Soviet missile threat it was one the most technically advanced systems built at the time. It accounted for 10% of IBM's income in the late 1950s - a significant boost. Despite their military connections Sperry-Rand were losing out in contracts.

In the 1960s Sperry launched the 1100 series including the 1108, the first multi-processor computer (equivalent to the cores on modern microprocessor based systems).

A problem with computers is that to retain the customer the command set they have invested thousands of programmer hours in has to be kept going. Sperry had a rather diverse set of antecedents. IBM was less of a conglomerate but they also had a rather diverse set of architectures, but in a bet-the-company move in 1964 they launched the IBM-360 series - a range of computers all with the same commands. Sperry didn't do this, in fact in addition Sperry bought the RCA computer division and continued it's designs - which included an IBM 360 equivalent. In settlement of a lawsuit over Remington-Rands core memory patents Sperry had the right to clone the IBM-360 as well.

Patent Problems

Sperry-Rand had a patent cross-licensing agreement with IBM as early as 1955. This seems to be one of the early shots in the patent war than big companies still conduct.

Then in 1967 Sperry-Rand tried to sue Honeywell for infringing the patents on ENIAC. Honeywell was the complainant because they got their retaliation in first, and sued Sperry for fraudulently claiming a patent to be valid. If the patents had held, then all computer makers except IBM would have had to license their technology from Sperry. After 6 years the court judgement went against them and invalidated the ENIAC patents. the argument was largely that there was prior art - John Mauchly said his knowledge of the Atanasoff's ABC was not a major influence.

Loss of the legal battle may have been a setback for Sperry-Rand. The distraction of the court case probably cost them dear.

Focus on Computers

In 1978 Sperry decided to focus on computing, they dropped "Rand" from the name and sold off the division making shavers. Sperry Flight Systems went to Honeywell and Sperry Defence Products to Martin Marietta. Vickers was sold to Libbey Owens Ford and is now part of Eaton Corporation. New Holland was sold to Ford in 1986 and then to Fiat since 1991.

The 1980s was the age of the microcomputer. IBM still dominated in mainframes and had developed the most successful PC, creating what was to become Microsoft's fortune. Digital Equipment Corporation shot ahead of competitors with it's very successful PDP-11 and VAX minicomputers. Wang rose to some prominence with a line of word-processors. Apple went from garage startup to industry giant. Great numbers of microcomputer hardware and software companies sprang up. Firms like Sperry were basically surviving on support and maintenance of their historic contracts but in terms of the emergent market they were neither one thing or another.

In 1983 Sperry dropped the name UNIVAC, its nostalgic branding was no longer something they valued. (Presumably the names Remington and Rand were equally burdensome)

Sperry discussed a merger with ITT, an IT based conglomerate that made their own look modest. ITT was based in telecommunications but owned Sheraton Hotels, Continental Baking, Hartford Insurance and Avis Rent-a-Car as well as Educational Services Inc - an operator of for-profit schools. However growth was fueled by leveraged buyouts and in the 1960s higher interest rates began to eat their profits. That idea didn't develop.

Sperry developed a new series, the 2200 in the early 1980s and launched it in 1985.

Unisys

In 1986 Burroughs launched a hostile takeover bid for Sperry. Sperry used poison-pill tactics to hike their share price, but Burroughs just borrowed more to secure them. Sperry cost Burroughs a total of $4.8 billion and they borrowed $2.5 to finance the deal.

After the takeover the company renamed itself Unisys; the name means United Systems but also reminds people a little of the companies UNIVAC heritage.

Burroughs

Burroughs had it's own long history. In 1885, William Seward Burroughs invented the Arithmometer, which was the first printing adding machine. Burroughs had some trouble making the machine fully workable and died before making much profit from it. However the company grew, took over several others in a similar line of business and was well known for data-processing machines in the 1920s and '30s. Accountants and banks formed the core customer base. Burroughs were slow to enter the computer market. At the end of the 1950s a Time magazine correspondent called them a stodgy old-line adding machine maker .

Nevertheless Burroughs acquired ElectroData Corporation, then a leading maker of high speed computers. In 1961 they introduced the B5000 computer, which was less expensive and simpler to operate than many competitors. The B6500 was less successful, Management changes and cost cutting meant the designs weren't adequately tested. The B8500 project was scrapped when the engineers realised they could not deliver reliability at the cost-point wanted.

From the mid 1960s there was a re-emphasis on simpler accounting machines. This strategy worked through the 1970s but left the company with a weakening product line in the late 1970s. Sales were still good although orders were cancelled as competitors developed better products. Maintenance suffered as well, in 1981 129 Burroughs users sued the company over the issue.

Most of the traditional calculator makers collapsed in the mid 1970s as a new wave of hand-held calculators from Sinclair, Casio, Rockwell and others displaced comptometers and arithmometers. Burroughs looked vulnerable compared to CDC, Honeywell, NCR, and Sperry. However Burroughs relationship with what was then the equally conservative business of banking.

Burroughs financial situation was good, they had saved money on product development and maintenance. The product development problem might be rectified by acquisition. Software development company System Development Corporation were bought for for $9.6 million. Memorex a maker of disc drives and other data-storage equipment, for $85.2 million. the two companies added a billion a year of annual sales for a comparatively small outlay.

Sperry were a very different target, a mainframe maker with a longer heritage than Burroughs and not happy with a $65-per-share bid. second largest computer firm in the nation, leapfrogging over Digital Equipment Corporation.

In 1996 Unisys launched its ClearPath server line, which is one of the main hardware products today. The target is high -end mission critical systems.

Unisys is basically a service provider for government and financial services. Consulting and systems integration are the main thrust of the business.

The Remington name is no longer used for typewriters or computers. As precision engineering specialists Remington Rand had long made a few products that didn't entirely seem to fit with a computer and defence company, one was the division making electric shavers. In 1979 Sperry Rand sold the shaver division to Victor Kayam, whose advertising campaign I like it so much I bought the company made the Remington Products brand newly famous. That branch of the company now belongs to Spectrum Brands, formerly Rayovac. Remington products are nowhair-care related or guns.

You might ask What happened to the typewriters. Old Remington typewriters are collectors items.

A few dedicated word-processors were produced with the Remington or Rand brand name. They seem to have been in the Panasonic / Olivetti stable and not very noteworthy.