On November 30, 1875, 29 days after Locke, Yost & Bates - then sole sales agents for the Sholes & Glidden typewriter - had entered into a new agreement with E. Remington & Sons, David Ross Locke used a Sholes & Glidden to write to Chicago Daily Tribune journalist William Harrison Busbey on behalf of the writer and columnist “Shirley Dare” (Susan Ann Dunning Power). There was a dispute, Locke said, over payment to Mrs Power for her contribution to James Fred Waggoner’s The Home Cook Book of Chicago: Compiled from Recipes Contributed by Ladies of Chicago and Other Cities and Towns.
Locke, above, ended his letter: “Everything is well with me. How do you like the writing of this letter. My firm controls the machine that writes it, and it is the prettiest thing for your purposes in the world.”
The letter was enclosed in an envelope headed “The Type-Writer. A Machine to Supersede the Pen.” James Densmore’s name is crossed out and replaced with that of Locke, with the name of advertising agent James Hale Bates added as one of the three “general agents”. Also on the envelope is an engraving, the well-known image of a man – believed to be Lucien Stephen Crandall – using a Sholes & Glidden. Printed above Busbey’s (misspelled) name is: “The following address is a sample of its work”.
The design is similar to the first typewriter advertisement ever published, which appeared in The New York Times on December 4, 1875, just five days after Locke wrote his letter to Busbey. The advert was placed by Locke, Yost and Bates and the advertising copy was written by Crandall (1844-1919).
Twain and Locke in 1869
Locke had been interested in the typewriter since he and Mark Twain, on a speaking tour in late 1874, had seen the Sholes & Glidden demonstrated in Boston. The machine had been on the market just five months at that time. Locke was so taken with the machine that, when the humorist, lecturer and journalist Melville De Lancey Landon wrote to him asking for his autograph, Locke sent it, typed! In the closing months of 1875 Locke joined with George Yost and Bates (1845-1901) to take up the selling agency after Densmore had withdrawn from it.
Locke (1833-1888), also known as the bigoted humorist Petroleum Vesuvius
Nasby, was born in Vestal, Broome County, New York. He became a journalist and
early political commentator during and after the American Civil War. His career
started when he was apprenticed at age 12 to The Democrat newspaper in
Cortland County, New York. He later worked for the Pittsburgh Chronicle and
in 1855 helped start the Plymouth Herald in Ohio. The next year he became
editor of the Bucyrus Journal and in 1861 he purchased the
Jeffersonian in Findlay, Ohio. In 1865 he edited the Toledo Blade, which
he bought in 1867.
William Harrison Busbey (above, 1839-1906) was born in Vienna, Clark County, Ohio. He fought in the Civil War with Company C, First Kentucky Volunteer Infantry, while also serving as a war correspondent. He became city editor of the Ohio State Journal at Columbus and from 1867 was private secretary for two Ohio state governors, including later US President Rutherford B. Hayes. Busbey returned to the Journal as editor in 1868 and in 1873 moved to Chicago to join the Tribune and later the Inter Ocean, where he continued to work until he died.
“Shirley Dale”, the subject of Locke’s letter, was born Susan Ann Dunning in New Washington, Indiana, in late 1844. She began writing articles for the Chicago Tribune at the age of 11, and she later joined the staff of the newspaper, using the byline “Shirley Dare”. She went on to edit the women’s section of the New York Tribune and worked for other New York newspapers. By 1880, five years after her tiff with Waggoner, she was herself a well-known author and syndicated columnist. She married Andrew Felipe Power of the Smithsonian Institute and moved to Boston in 1902, after a nasty falling out with her publisher son in New York in 1894. She died, aged 77, in February 1922 after suffering burns in a house fire.
J. Fred Waggoner (1848-1926) was a well-known publisher of cook
books and other works.
Below, a letter to Densmore's stepson Walter Barron typed by Latham Sholes in June 1872:
To be absolutely clear, Locke was not bigoted: he was an anti-slavery satirical humorist who wrote in the character of a contemptible bigot, and understood as such by fans such as Abraham Lincoln.
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