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Thursday 6 February 2014

Some Early Typewriters

John Jones' Mechanical Typographer (1852)
John Pratt's Pterotype (1866)
This looks to me like an early prototype of the Sholes & Glidden (1871?)
Sholes & Glidden (No 1512 - 1875?)
Sholes & Glidden (1876?)
Described as a 'Remington' of 1878
(Note QWERTV keyboard)
Caligraph (1880)
Hall (1886), sold by Witherly & Co
Crandall (1886) with directions
Merritt (1891)
Hammond No 2 (1893?)
Williams (1893?)
Remington No 7 (1898?)
Smith Premier No 2 (1900?)
Dactyle (Blickensderfer) (1905)
(Note WZY keyboard)




4 comments:

Bill M said...

Those are some really interesting looking old machines.

Richard P said...

Those photos of the S&G and Pterotype against newspaper are interesting! Looks like someone unwrapped them to take a snapshot and then put them back into storage. The Smithsonian??

Robert Messenger said...

Thank you Bill and Richard for your comments.
Richard, those two photographs were taken in June 1923. My gut feeling was that they were taken in London, but that may only be because they were part of the Hutton Archive, and I thought that was British? They may well be from the Smithsonian. Does the Smithsonian have a Pterotype I wonder? I can't recall if any were actually made in the US.

Robert Messenger said...

Further to the above: It is British, but it is "Hulton", not "Hutton".
In 1945, Sir Edward Hulton set up the Hulton Press Library as a semi-independent operation. He commissioned Charles Gibbs-Smith of the Victoria and Albert Museum to catalogue the entire archive using a system of keywords and classifications. The Gibbs-Smith system was the world’s first indexing system for pictures, and it was eventually adopted by the Victoria and Albert and parts of the British Museum collections. When Picture Post folded, Sir Edward Hulton sold the archive collection to the BBC in 1957. It was incorporated into the Radio Times photo archive, and the BBC expanded the collection further with the purchase of the photo archives of the Daily Express and Evening Standard newspapers. Eventually, the BBC disposed of its photo archive and the BBC Hulton Picture Library was sold on once more, this time to Brian Deutsch, in 1988. In 1996, the Hulton Picture Collection was bought by Getty Images for £8.6 million. Getty now owns the rights to some 15 million photographs from the British press archives dating back to the 19th century.
In 2000, Getty embarked on a large project to digitise the photo archive, and launched the website www.hultonarchive.com in 2001. A data migration programme began in 2003 and the Hulton Archive was transferred to the main Getty Images website; the Hulton Archive is still available today as a featured resource within the vast Getty holdings