Corona Typewriter in a Shower

It's still supposed to be summer in Australia, but with La Niña giving large parts of the country an almost unrelenting drenching, it feels like we won't see much sunshine until September (and only then if we're lucky). The wet weather has reminded me of this rather strange photograph in the United States Library of Congress collection. It was taken 100 years ago, but I don't know that anyone out there in the wide, wide typewriter world has yet been able to work what it's all about. If someone has, please let me know. There doesn't appear to any caption with it, other than to state it is a Harris & Ewing photo. This Washington studio was a diversified photographic service founded in 1905 by George W. Harris and Martha Ewing to give the US capital a world-class organisation for producing civic portraiture and photojournalism. Welsh-born Harris was the principal photographer from its founding until his retirement in 1955. Californian Ewing, a fine artist and photographer with entrepreneurial instincts, great social skills, some money and an interest in color process photography, arranged the financial backing and managed the concern.

Given that in 1922, the year the Corona typewriter in the shower photo was taken, the Corona Typewriter Company ran in Typewriter Topics two full-page adverts relating to Corona portables being dropped in water but later found to be still workable, maybe the shower scene was someone's idea of a Corona publicity shot. A "typing on a Corona underwater" sort of thing. The second Topics ad, above, was run in September and told the tale of US Marine Talmadge Taylor's Corona being dropped overboard from a transport ship. The earlier ad, below, published in the May edition of Topics, relates a story fleshed out on this blog some time ago, about George Russell's canoe trip from Seattle to Alaska. Could these two examples of the Corona's durability and "waterproofness" have inspired a test in a Washington DC shower room? Just a thought ...