RIP Les Murray, Australia's Typewriting Poet Laureate (1938-2019)

Les Murray, the Bush Bard of Bunyah and Australia's unofficial Poet Laureate, died today at a nursing home at Taree in New South Wales, aged 80. One of his peers said tonight that Murray was not just Australia's greatest poet, but its greatest writer in any literary genre. He had used a Brother portable typewriter for many years.

Leslie Allan Murray (1938-2019) was a poet, anthologist and critic. His career spanned more than 40 years and he published 30 volumes of poetry as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings. His poetry won many awards and he was rated by the National Trust of Australia as one of the 100 Australian Living Treasures. In 2007, Dan Chiasson wrote in The New Yorker that Murray was "now routinely mentioned among the three or four leading English-language poets". Murray was often talked of as a possible winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Latest QWERTY 'News' (sic) = Quite Wrong Error Riddled Twaddle Yada-Yada

Oh dear, how wrong can the overnight typewriter “experts” be? How many more times are we going to have to set the QWERTY record straight before some of them can start to grasp the truth?

Never before in one single week has some much rubbish been written and published about the origins of QWERTY.

OK, let’s start with Wednesday’s pile of nonsense headed “How did the qwerty keyboard become so popular?” by Tim Harford of the BBC World Service.

1. “The father of the qwerty keyboard was Christopher Latham Sholes, a printer from Wisconsin who sold his first typewriter in 1868 to Porter's Telegraph College, Chicago. That bit's important.”

WRONG: In the summer of 1868 James Densmore, Samuel Willard Soulé and Edward Payson Porter had machines made in Chicago which Porter tested with students at his school for telegraphers. None were "sold" and Sholes had no direct involvement in the exercise. The machines used bore only a passing resemblance to the typewriter we know today as the Sholes & Glidden, and were little more than early prototypes of the typewriter.

2. “The qwerty layout was designed for the convenience of telegraph operators transcribing Morse code …”

WRONG: The first machines employing the QWERTY configuration were sold to a variety of people, including Chicago detective Allan Pinkerton, Wisconsin attorneys the Dawes Brothers and stenographers Walter Jay Barron and James Ogilvie Clephane, the latter using them for his commercial typing service. They were not specifically designed to be used by telegraph operators, although some were.

3. “It wasn't the only typewriter around …”

WRONG: Discounting the still then little known Hansen Writing Ball, the Sholes & Glidden/Remington was on its own until 1881.

Now let’s look at the next heap of misguided codswallop, “The truth about the QWERTY keyboard” by Graham Lawton, which appeared yesterday in – of all places – the New Scientist!

1. “Why are we stuck with the QWERTY keyboard? The history of the most commonly used keyboard layout is a sometimes murky story of commercial opportunism, critics with ulterior motives and the stubborn persistence of an idea that's seen off hundreds of supposedly superior competitors.”

WRONG: There is absolutely nothing murky about the story of QWERTY, it’s a clear as crystal. There was no commercial opportunism involved (there were no rivals at the time). QWERTY has seen off just two semi-serious challengers, Blickensderfer’s Scientific and Dvorak - two, not hundreds.

2. “What happened next is a little murky … almost out of the blue, QWERTY (almost) appeared. In August 1872 Scientific American published a glowing article about the “‘Sholes’ Type Writer”, illustrated with an engraving of the machine showing a four-row keyboard with a second row starting QWE.TY [my italics].”

WRONG:  There is nothing murky about it. Sholes and Densmore settled on the QWERTY configuration on Thursday, November 7, 1872. Densmore was the first to test it, in the early hours of the next morning, writing two letters to his stepson Barron. Scientific American of August 10, 1872,  DID NOT show a keyboard layout, with QWE.TY or any other combination. QWE.TY is a configuration which appeared on a February 1873 "axle machine" prototype. As such is it irrelevant to the QWERTY story, as QWERTY had already been settled on four months earlier. Regardless, this "axle machine" was not patented until 1878. 

3. “Remington put its No 1 Type Writer on to the market in 1874 …”

WRONG: The Sholes & Glidden was marketed in 1874, the Remington No 1 came out the next year.

A lot of this balderdash has been picked up and repeated from an article by Trevor English published last June. “The story of how the modern keyboard came to be involves Morse code, marketing, and a little bit of luck.”

“Back in the 1860s, a man named Christopher Latham Sholes was busy developing ways to make offices more efficient. Notably, he spent his time developing all different kinds of typewriters (!) and key layouts to improve how people wrote and communicated. Working with others in the field, he patented the first typewriter in 1867. Previous to this invention, there were other machines used for writing, but none were standard (?) … After working continuously to come up with new designs, in 1873 Sholes landed on one that had a similar layout to the modern QWERTY, but with a few keys switched. It would've been known as the QWE.TY …”

Where this idea of QWE.TY appearing in Scientific American in August 1872 comes from I have no idea. Even Scientific American more lately has mentioned it – maybe the magazine ought to check this out have a look at its own back issues? QWE.TY only ever appears on an 1873 prototype. How can anyone get so confused?

“Right after Sholes and his partner Carlos Glidden patented the QWERTY design …” Sholes alone took out the 1878 patent which showed the QWERTY configuration.  

It seems most of this poppycock started back in January 2012 with a “Today I Found Out’ article called “The Origin of the QWERTY keyboard” by someone called Samantha. “The first typewriter was introduced to the United States in 1868 by Christopher Latham Sholes ... In 1868, in collaboration with educator Amos Densmore, Sholes arranged the letters on the keyboard for better spacing between popular keys used in combination.”

Well, just how many times can I write WRONG? Amos Densmore could be described, at best, as a businessman, the educator was Alexander Davidson, and Davidson worked on the Caligraph, not the Sholes & Glidden. What’s more, QWERTY was FIRST settled on in November 1872. “The first typewriter machine found its way on the market in 1874 through Remington & Sons. The device was called the Remington No 1.” No it wasn’t. It was called the Sholes & Glidden.

No wonder there’s so much fake news around when people can’t even get a few simple facts right. Anyone wanting to find out the real story behind QWERTY, and the Sholes & Glidden itself, should take the time and make the effort to read Richard Nelson Current’s The Typewriter and The Men Who Made It (first published 1954, republished 1988). It’s all there, in plain black and white. Or is picking up a real, tangible book, reading it and taking in what it says just too much bother these days? And the Scientific American of August 10, 1872, is readily available online, if anyone cares to have a look:

Typewriters at Gallipoli: Did They Cover Glorious Sacrifice or Sheer Senseless Slaughter?

This incredibly detailed sculpture of a Corona 3 portable typewriter is the work of Jane Estelle Bailey and Mark Andrew Snell of the Lavaworx Art Studio in Coolum, Queensland. The sculpture represents the typewriter used by Australia's official war correspondent and war historian Charles Bean when he covered the Gallipoli landings in 1915. The sculpture is part of the Gallipoli to Armistice Memorial in Maryborough, Queensland.

Bailey and Snell.

At a time when senseless mass killings seem to be part of our weekly life, Anzac Day will yet again be marked by many tens of thousands of New Zealanders and Australians tomorrow. Anzac Day has become much more than the simple, muted show of respect for the war dead that it was in my younger days; now it's an annual ritual which almost appears to macabrely celebrate the slaughter that occurred on the beaches of Turkey in 1915. On its fringes, it's a touchstone for espousing the worst kinds of nationalism.
Indeed, the pilgrimage to Gallipoli has itself turned incendiary, with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan - in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque murders - saying, “Your grandfathers came and saw that we're here. Then some of them walked back, while others left in coffins. If you come with the same intention, we'll be waiting for you."

A 1916 recruiting poster.

Erdoğan later, allegedly, backed away from that veiled threat, and about 700 Australians and 500 New Zealanders will attend dawn commemorations at Gallipoli. But, for me at least, it's not a healthy sign that Erdoğan's Government has barred Turks from attending. "Nothing is left to chance and keeping every Turkish person out eliminates a lot of risk," said an official. The Turkish military has imposed the lockdown after a huge security sweep.

A 1915 recruitment poster.

It's exceedingly sad that this has become a necessity. When, 104 years ago, Australian invaders on Turkish sovereign soil exchanged deadly gunfire with Turkish defenders, there was, oddly enough, still a small spark of humanity left. There was a truce on May 24 to collect and bury the bodies which carpeted no man's land, and as this image shows, Australian Diggers came to the aid of wounded Turks in the foothills of Achi Baba, the height dominating the Gallipoli Peninsula.

A 1915 H.J. Watson recruiting poster.

Many of these acts of compassion were written about by the typewriter-wielding journalists who covered the Gallipoli campaign, notably Charles Bean, his fellow Australian Phillip Schuler (who also used a Corona 3), and the Englishman Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett (Empire lightweight). But it was, in the main, these three men with their portable typewriters who created the enduring Anzac legend, a story of "glorious sacrifice" in the cause of British imperialism. As that same Britain now heads toward the self-imposed catastrophe of Brexit - rendering the nation a friendless orphan rather than a "mother" land - marking Anzac Day should perhaps be seen more and more as outdated, irrelevant and inconsequential. Or just plain silly. Strangely enough, however, quite the opposite is the case. Has our growing fascination with killing fields become so great we can't let go of Gallipoli? Are we now so imbued with mass murder that we need to continue to "celebrate" atrocities from more than a century ago? It would seem so. Certainly Anzac Day is being marked with increased passion as each year goes by.

Schuler at Mena Camp, Egypt, Christmas Eve 1914, with his Corona 3 in its case.

Charles Bean's photo of Schuler aboard the army transport the Orvieto

on his way to Egypt in October 1914.

One of my former editors at The Canberra Times, Mark Baker, now in charge of the Melbourne Press Club, in 2016 published a biography of Schuler, Phillip Schuler: The Remarkable Life of one of Australia's Greater War Correspondents. Unfortunately, it is laced with typographical errors (why do writers waste space thanking editors who have so badly let them down?), but the book is nonetheless an interesting read, including as it does intimate details of Schuler’s two love affairs – and the child about which he knew nothing. His lovers were Mrs Nelly Rossi (above left) in Cairo and Mrs Polly Howard (above, right) in Victoria, Australia. Canberra writer and historian Kristen Alexander, in her Honest History review of Baker's book, felt that given this purported to be a biography of one man, far too much space was devoted to Schuler's fellow war correspondents. She said the book showed an "apparent bias against Keith Murdoch ... Murdoch and his Gallipoli letter [typed on a Corona 3] are savaged. The prejudice continues throughout, on occasion verging on the vindictive." Personally, I felt Baker's rancour toward Murdoch (father of Rupert Murdoch) was more than justified, but Alexander's review remains fair. Still, Murdoch's unreliable "Gallipoli letter" embellishments of Ashmead-Bartlett's criticism of the Gallipoli campaign merely fueled the notion that the Anzacs gave their homelands nationhood, at the cost of oceans of young Antipodean blood. Was it all worth it? In the long run, as Brexit nears, the answer is a most definite no. But history is what it must be, irreversible. 

The Machiavellian and manipulating Keith Murdoch, right - a true inspiration for his son Rupert - with the then Australian Prime Minister, Welshman Billy Hughes, in France in World War I. Both used Corona 3 portable typewriters.

A letter from British Prime Minister Asquith shows what he thought of Murdoch. Nevertheless British military leader Ian Hamilton (below) was removed from the Gallipoli campaign.

Schuler, whose father Frederick (below) was editor of The Age newspaper in Melbourne, returned to Australia from Gallipoli but in 1916 enlisted as a solder and returned to the battlefield, serving on the Western Front. He was killed at the Battle of Messines in 1917, aged 28. 

 Schuler at a Cairo hotel.

Schuler in 1914, far right, with Charles Bean, second from left, Bean's father the Reverend Edwin Bean, far left, and Archie Whyte of The Sydney Morning Herald.

Spooky Typewriter Thoughts: I'm A Daydream Believer!

Last evening I was watching an episode of the BBC's Antiques Roadshow on ABC TV, and started daydreaming about finding typewriter treasures. The first one that always comes to mind is a Sphinx for Richard Polt (these fantasies are fairly common for me, I should add). Maybe a Sphinx was sent to Australia, to try to tempt one of the major typewriter importers into marketing the model here. I first thought of the Chartres family and then I thought, no, the Stotts would be my best chance. A descendant of the Stotts would get in touch with me and offer me a typewriter. Some chance!

At that very moment I picked up my iPhone and saw a message. It read:

"Hi Robert, My husband is the grandson of Sydney Alexander Stott. We have a portable Underwood from Canada, circa 1930-40s which needs to find a new home. Any suggestions? Karen."

I swear, every word of this is true. Spooky? You betcha it is! Looks like all the posts about the Stotts on this blog might be starting to pay off.  Now I'm waiting on a message about a Sphinx.

The page below is from Typewriter Topics in 1919, exactly 100 years ago:

THE PROFESSIONAL SPORT OF TYPEWRITERS: Scouting and Scoring of Speed Typists

Speed typing tests in the personnel office of the

Remington Typewriter Company at 327 Broadway, New York City, in 1900.

The Buffalo World’s Fair of 1901 is primarily remembered for the assassination of President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition’s Temple of Music. Leon Czolgosz got 5100 volts on the electric chair in Auburn Prison six weeks later, but his act of anarchy had already blighted the legacy of a $7 million electrified extravaganza, established to show all that was prosperous and praiseworthy in American commerce and society. The day before he died, McKinley had said, “Expositions are the timekeepers of progress. They record the world's advancement. They stimulate the energy, enterprise and intellect of the people; and quicken human genius … They broaden and brighten the daily life of the people. They open mighty storehouses of information to the student.”

Alice Mary Schreiner

        Were two young Massachusetts ladies – the misses Mary Esther “Mae” Carrington of Springfield and Alice Mary Schreiner of Boston - there to type with Underwood standards to enhance the impression of energy, enterprise and intellect? To quicken human genius? To broaden and brighten daily life? To open storehouses of information? Not one bit of it - though a lack of loyalty to their former employers, Remington, might suggest a degree of enterprise on their part. They had been “scouted” by Underwood and were at the World’s Fair to earn their keep, pure and simple. Their occupation was professional speed typing. And as professionals in a sport of sorts, fidelity meant nothing. It was exactly the kind of perfidious behaviour that traditionalists in sport, guardians of the amateur ethos, had been warning against for more than 30 years. Chester, Massachusetts-born Mae Carrington (1878-1944) and Brooklyn-born Alice Schreiner (1878-1961) switched sides, as it were, for money, for cash inducements. In October 1906 it was estimated by the Detroit Free Press that Carrington earned up to $100 a week (equivalent to $2800 a week today). Earlier in 1901, Schreiner and Carrington had been enticed away from Remington with the lure of such rewards from the Wagner Typewriter Company, then makers of the Underwood. If they’d been accused of selling their (Remington developed) skills to the highest bidder, they might well have shrugged their shoulders and pointed to the examples in other forms of popular entertainment. 

        The Ivy League gave America its beloved variation of football. Under the unfettered guidance of Yale’s Walter Chauncey Camp (1859-1925), in the 1870s the private universities stripped away the time-honoured traditions of “English rugby” and turned the game into American mayhem. The appeal of this “set ’em up and knock ’em down” version quickly spread beyond the elite students of the Ivies, and with its adoption by the working classes inevitably came professionalism, introduced in the industrial Pennsylvanian city of Allegheny in 1892.

        The American experience closely followed a pattern set in England. As rugby moved from public (that is, private) school pupils - who had resurrected it from original “mob football” in the 1820s -  to the masses in the northern counties in late 1860s, the upholders of the old Rugby code decried the inexorableness of professionalism. Out of rugby first emerged the Football Association, which preferred the non-handling code and allowed pay-for-play, and in the 1890s professional rugby.

        1937 World Typewriting Championships at the Coliseum in Toronto

Typewriting as a “sport”, conversely, was always professional. Yes, amateurs sometimes sat beside the pros in typing competitions, but they had next to no hope of keeping pace. They were largely destined to remain anonymous, apart from the few who were “scouted” by Remington, Underwood, Royal or Smith-Corona, and offered the lonely jobs of on-the-road nationwide exhibitors, with the occasional thrill of a speed test against peers. Leading speed typists were employed by typewriter manufacturers and, like the modern day rally car drivers, they were paid to exhibit the qualities of the machine (souped up in most cases, to give the public an inflated idea of the machine’s capabilities).

Scouters and scorers, as The New Yorker sees them

        As for listing speed typing as a sport, it had all the right attributes. It did not necessarily need an arena, nor large crowds. But it had popular sport’s most essential ingredients – sustained physical exertion, wins and losses, scores, a breakdown of statistics, and the long lines of numeric tables. Louis Menand, in reviewing Christopher Phillips’ book Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball (published by Princeton last month) in last week’s The New Yorker, points out that it is “an effort to help us understand one of the oldest problems in modern societies, which is how to evaluate human beings. “Do we scout or do we score?”

Speed typing had both its scouts and its scorers. The only possible difference is that it was essentially a test of machines rather than a test of human capability. Yet it was the individual typist who was invariably vaunted – though the publicity surrounding that individual was, in the main, generated by the company which had built the machine. For example, The History of Touch Typewriting, published by Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict (that is, Remington) in 1900 (the year of Remington’s speed typing tests in the image at the top of this post), uses the stories of Remington’s individual speed typists to illustrate the development of touch typing.

        When the photograph was taken, Alice Schreiner was making her first visit to Buffalo, but this time under the employ of the Remington Typewriter Company. She was a stenographer in Remington’s Boston office when on October 23, 1900, she gave two exhibitions of touch typing on a Remington No 6 with a blank keyboard, at the Bryant & Stratton Business College and Remington’s Buffalo office. It was claimed at the time that she was fastest operator in the world using this method, typing from unfamiliar copy 97 words a minute, and memorised sentences at 144 words a minute, on one occasion while blindfolded. Schreiner was still with Remington when The History of Touch Typewriting was published, otherwise she wouldn’t have been mentioned in it. She had typed at 108 words a minute to beat fellow Remington user Edith Paulsen at the December 26, 1900, fifth annual convention of the National Shorthand Teachers Association in Detroit.

        Of the visit by Schreiner and Mae Carrington to the World’s Fair, “Lady Betty” wrote in the Buffalo Evening Times Women’s Realm page on May 18, 1901, that they were, “the two most rapid type-writer operators in the world … They have been engaged by the Wagner Typewriter Company (manufacturers of the Underwood typewriter) for the Underwood booth … where they will give daily exhibitions of their marvellous skill in ‘touch’ operation of that machine. The exhibit of American typewriters at the Exposition will be the most elaborate and comprehensive ever attempted at any exposition, and that, augmented by the presence of these two wizard-like operators, will prove an exceptionally interesting and instructive feature … The Misses Carrington and Schreiner are, in my opinion, undoubtedly the best known and unquestionably the most expert exponents of the typewriter profession in the United States today.”

        “Lady Betty” went on to hint at the change of stable, saying that for Schreiner and Carrington the Buffalo World’s Fair was their first demonstration of touch typing on a “visible writing” machine. “The Wagner Typewriter Company have certainly shown excellent judgement in selecting these two young women to demonstrate the possibilities of the Underwood …”

On August 3, 1901, The Buffalo Enquirer reported, “A most wonderful exhibition of expert typewriting is continually going on within the [Wagner Typewriter Company booth in the Manufacturing and Liberal Arts Building], which is the cynosure of the eyes of all visitors.” It added that the typing of Schreiner and Carrington was “actually startling, and possible only on the speedy Underwood.”

Carrington was joined at the Buffalo World’s Fair by another graduate from the Springfield Business School – where they were both coached in the touch typing technique by Barte Joseph Griffin (1863-1928). Gertrude Lillian Greeley (1880-1953) demonstrated a Cahill electric typewriter, with which she reached 200 words a minute. Ms Greeley didn’t waste time waiting on a professional typing contract – she married her boss, millionaire paper maker Samuel Raynor Whiting, the son of a congressman, in February 1906. Carrington wanted her back on the speed typing circuit, but Mrs Whiting wasn’t biting.

Alice Schreiner married Charles Morehouse Hatcher in 1908, by which time she’d bowed out of competitive speed typing. Mae Carrington, however, remained unmarried (“Romance interferes with one’s plans,” she said in 1906) and continued to compete. At the Howard Street Armoury in Springfield, on February 23, 1906, Carrington set a new world record of 2344 words in 30 minutes of typing blindfold from dictation (averaging 78 words a minute). The previous record of 2099 had been set by Remington’s Paul Munter at the Madison Square Garden on November 2, 1905. Alabama-born Munter (1880-1950), a Brooklyn-based court reporter, later followed the example set by Schreiner and Carrington by changing allegiance to Underwood in 1907.

Carrington’s crowning glory came at the National Business Show at the Madison Square Garden in New York on October 31, 1905, when she beat Rose Fritz in a one hour dictation test, typing blindfold. Carrington typed 3752 words with 20 errors in an hour (Fritz typed more words but made more than three times as many errors). In March 1906 Carrington extended her world record by typing 5221 words blindfold, exclusive of errors, for an average of 87. By October that year, however, she had been overtaken by Fritz, as well as Lillian V. Bruorton (1880-1965) and W. May Matthews in the Underwood speed team. Fritz took the first world title with an average of 82 words a minute, and remained world champion for four years. Fritz matched Carrington’s 87 words per minute to win both the 1907 and 1908 world titles. In 1924, when she travelled to Europe at the age of 45, Carrington described herself as a “typewriter expert” in her passport application.

 Mae Carrington in 1924

Pioneering Photojournalists and their Typewriters

Charles Rollin Brainerd at his typewriter

and Henry Hamilton Bennett with his camera in 1889.

Photojournalism is said to have started in the middle of the 19th Century, more than 20 years before the Sholes & Glidden typewriter went into production. But back then the “news photographs” which appeared in newspapers and magazines were engraved from original prints, taken by pioneer photographers who were not, strictly speaking, also journalists, or indeed who were not working alongside journalists. One photograph, even perhaps one which appears in print in engraved form, might tell 1000 words, but it still needs words to describe where and why it was taken. The earliest example of a photographer and journalist working in tandem is probably the monthly magazine Street Life in London produced in 1876-77, after the advent of the typewriter, by photographer John Thomson (1837-1921) and radical journalist Adolphe Smith (1846-1925), a major influence on Upton Sinclair. Interestingly, though he was born in Headingley in Yorkshire, Smith’s only Wikipedia entry is an inaccurate one in French. 

Adolphe Smith

Another pioneering team was Henry Hamilton Bennett (1843-1908) and the wayward writer Charles Rollin Brainerd (1840-98). There are many references to the latter’s surname as Brainard, but the family name was actually Brainerd. The image at the top of this post is one part of a stereoview of Bennett working on his camera in a private rail car in October 1889, and Brainerd writing the captions on his typewriter. The pair were on a commission from the Wisconsin Central Railway Company to photograph the landscape along the company's track in Wisconsin. Bennett and Brainerd provided their own equipment, including a rifle and knife. Bennett made this exposure by pulling a string attached to the camera.

The anaglyph of the same image. An anaglyph is a stereoscopic photograph with the two images superimposed and printed in different colours, usually red and green, producing a stereo effect when viewed with appropriate filters over each eye.

Brainerd’s article, published in a guidebook after the trip, explained they had been hired to portray the beauty along the line. It described Bennett's “double-barreled” stereo camera and noted the persuasive power of images. Brainerd’s stories from the journey also appeared in pamphlets and newspapers and he later became the company’s local attorney in Waupaca.

Henry Hamilton Bennett

While Brainerd has been forgotten by historians, Bennett remains famous for his pictures of the Dells of the Wisconsin River and surrounding area taken between 1865 and 1908. They turned Wisconsin Dells into a major tourist destination. Bennett was born in Farnham, Quebec, but raised in Brattleboro, Vermont. At 14 he settled with his family in Kilbourn City, later known as Wisconsin Dells. Accidentally self-wounded in the Civil War, Bennett bought the Kilbourn City photography studio in 1865. Having set his sights on landscape photography, Bennett built himself a portable darkroom and towed it across the countryside. Dry plates enabled him to abandon the portable darkroom in 1886. Bennett made his first stereoscopic photo in 1868 and invented a stop action shutter. Bennett also built a revolving solar printing house.

Brainerd was a bit of an oddball. Born in Ravenna, Portage, Ohio on August 5, 1840, at age six he learned to set type for The Sheboygan Times before his family moved in 1849 to Green Bay, where, still a child, he spent most of his time at The Green Bay Advocate.  By 11 he could speak three languages, French, German and English, as well as the Menominee and Oneida Native American tongues. With those skills he was offered work as a clerk on a man’s wage. The family moved to Waupaca in 1853, and Brainerd joined The Wisconsin Pinery. He then worked for the Waupaca Register and at 20 entered Racine College. Brainerd graduated in 1864, studied theology at Nashotah, was ordinated to the Episcopalian ministry in 1867, and served in Milwaukee and Quincy, Massachusetts. In 1873 he switched to Catholicism and became a lawyer, being admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1876 and the US bar in 1878. He practised law in Boston until 1888.

One of three patents Brainerd took out to assist newspaper compositing.

But then Brainerd made another right turn and took up writing. The next 20 years were largely devoted to newspaper, magazine and syndicated work and the second volume of Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography, contributing 400 entries. Brainerd wrote regularly for The North American Review and The Chicago Times and travelled to Canada and Mexico. He died in Waupaca on February 2, 1898, aged 57. His local newspaper put it mildly by saying he had had “a varied career” and a “very eccentric disposition”. He had “denounced, harassed and tormented his mother” to the point at which in 1887 he was declared insane and committed to an asylum for indulging “in some very queer freaks and antics”. His obituary said that “He must have, early in life, become addicted to stimulants, which habit in the end gained the mastery over one of the brightest minds, and at middle age he died without a dollar or a friend.”

Jessie Tarbox Beals

It would very much have surprised Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870-1942) to suspect that, in death, she would be related through marriage to Brainerd. But that’s what happened in 1943, when Beals’ daughter Nanette (1911-94) married Henry Bowen Brainerd, a distant cousin of Charles Rollin Brainerd, 18 months after her mother’s death. Jessie Tarbox Beals was the first published female photojournalist in the United States and the first female night photographer. She is best known for her freelance news photographs, particularly of the 1904 St Louis World's Fair, and portraits of places such as Bohemian Greenwich Village.

Beals prepares to take a high shot from a 20ft ladder in St Louis in 1904.

Beals was born Jessie Richmond Tarbox on December 23, 1870, in Hamilton, Ontario. At 14 she was admitted to the Collegiate Institute of Ontario, and at 17 received her teaching certificate. Beals began teaching at a one-room schoolhouse in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, and in 1888, Beals won a subscription prize camera through the Youth's Companion magazine. She soon bought a higher quality Kodak camera and set up Williamsburg's first photography studio in front of her house. In 1893 Beals took a new teaching position in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and visited the World's Fair Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In 1899 she received her first professional assignment when she was asked by the Boston Post to photograph the Massachusetts state prison. The next year Beals received her first credit line in a publication, the Windham County Reformer.

Beals in 1904.

In 1901 Beals was hired as a staff photographer by the Buffalo Inquirer and the Buffalo Courier. Beals could be seen carrying out assignments in her ankle-length dresses and large hats, with her 8 x 10-inch glass plate camera and 50lb of equipment in tow. She had a different style than most news photographers of the day, focusing on series of pictures that would later be used to write stories, rather than vice versa. In 1905 Beals opened her own studio on Sixth Avenue in New York City. She moved to Greenwich Village and opened a new photography studio and gallery in 1920. She died on May 30, 1942, at Bellevue Hospital, aged 71.

THE WOMAN WHO LOVED

PHOTOGRAPHING WRITERS

AT THEIR TYPEWRITERS

Beals at her Oliver typewriter in 1906.

Beals' photograph of her one-year-old daughter Nanette

 in a wooden box by Beals' studio window, April 10, 1912.

Beals' photo of Norwegian-born author Henry Oyen (1883-1921) in 1913.

He died suddenly in his studio of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged just 37.

Beals' photo of Emily Post in 1927.

Beals' photo of a model at a typewriter,  1911