Alexander’s Raggedy Life as a Typewriter Inventor

Jesse Alexander's 1919 US Passport photo.

Jesse Alexander went to his grave in the Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles County, on August 19, 1929, leaving behind, unsettled, more typewriter trouble than he could handle. In July 1927 he had been found guilty of seven counts of voliations under the Californian Corporate Securities Act and six counts of obtaining $150,000 under false pretences – all related to his last typewriter manufacturing venture, a company he had incorporated in Nevada to avoid California corporation taxes. Alexander faced a long stretch of up to 35 years in San Quentin after he had sold stock in the company in California without a permit from the State Corporations Commissioner. Alexander was out on a pending appeal when he died at his home at 1937 Delta Street, Victor Heights, Los Angeles, on August 16, aged 60.

So ended a colourful typewriter-designing career of almost 30 years – one which, it seems, produced just two tangible typewriters, the Perfect and the Alexander (though typewriter historians appear to be unanimous in their opinion that the Gourland was no more than an updated version of the Alexander and was produced in Jesse Alexander’s lifetime). The long, sorry saga of Jesse Alexander and his efforts to produce a commercially successful typewriter was recalled on April Fool’s Day when Richard Polt posted a teaser about the Alexander on The Typewriter Revolution’s Facebook page (photo above).

It's going on for 10 years now since I last posted here on Alexander (On This Day in Typewriter History, Part 173: The Perfect Typewriter). But Richard’s post renewed my interest in Alexander and my research was to uncover what the entry on the Alexander Typewriter Company in A Condensed History of the Writing Machine (1923) was referring to when it mentioned that the company’s history was “marked by troubles”, and that Jesse Alexander had ran into constant court action over his designs. That, it turns out, was understating the facts by the length of a good country mile.

Jesse Alexander had heaps of troubles in his efforts to manufacture and market typewriters. Indeed, the charges he faced in California in 1927 marked the third time he had risked jail over his typewriter patents – and he had actually spend more than 18 months in the Auburn Correctional Facility in New York, from January 16, 1917, until June 11, 1918.  This followed his conviction on December 6, 1916, for grand larceny in the first degree over the selling of shares in his typewriter patents, a scandal referred to in Brooklyn newspapers as a “$500,000 stock swindle”. Described in court by prosecutors as “the cleverest of thieves” and as a “supposed inventor”, Alexander was charged with six indictments after selling typewriter patent shares at $1000 a pop to more than 180 “victims” (each promised a $6000 return). He had advertised for partners in a typewriter manufacturing enterprise. It took a jury just 15 minutes to find him guilty, and initally he was sentenced to two years to four years and eight months in the maximum security Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining.

It probably didn’t help his chances in court that Alexander had been acquitted in August 1913 of very similar offences. On that occasion, he was charged with attempted grand larceny, second degree, because his patent selling scheme was stopped after he’d taken $1000 from only two “victims”. 

After his release from the Auburn jail in 1918, Alexander, who himself had an artificial right leg, went to work for Archelaus Condell at Condell’s Improved Life-Like Artificial Limbs at 10 Union Square East. Alexander went to England in 1919 to make and sell artificial arms and legs, though A Condensed History claimed Alexander joined a “famous British munitions works who proposed the manufacture of another Alexander invention, a four-bank, single shift lightweight typewriter”. Alexander returned to the US in March 1923 and, leaving his family in the east, settled in California.

My own check of Jesse Alexander typewriter patents stretched from 1901-29 and I lost count way past 100.  His Perfect typewriter was said to have been produced in 1904. A Condensed History of the Writing Machine placed the Alexander Typewriter Company in Endicott, New York, in 1907 and said that it was resurrected as the United States Typewriter Company in East New York, Long Island, in January 1908. In 1914, “another or the former” Alexander company had a factory at 35 Ormond Place, Brooklyn. A Perfect was put up for auction by Uwe Breker in Cologne in 2009, when it was stated that only three complete models were known to exist. Michael Adler’s Antique Typewriters dated the Alexander typewriter to 1914.

The once commonly-available "mock Gourland", or "Govrland", made of tin.

Alexander was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on October 22, 1868, and began work as a telegraph operator. His inventing began in Chicago in 1894, mostly on bicycles and odometers and velocimeters. He had settled in Brooklyn by 1900 and soon after entered the typewriter business. By 1905 he was describing himself as a typewriter manufacturer, in 1910 as an inventor, in 1915 as a typewriter manufacturer again, and in 1920 as the owner of a manufacturing plant.