We've Been Talkin' 'Bout Jackson (Typewriters)

There’s more than one way of knowing for sure that a certain model of typewriter went into production, even a very rare one. Take, for example, the Jackson, about which there continues to be much conjecture. On the night of Wednesday, June 28, 1899, a piano finisher (and one time mechanical engineer) called Gardner J. Hawkes, from the Boston neighbourhood of Dorchester, was arrested by Inspector Michael C. Shields of the Boston Police Department and charged with the larceny of two typewriters, valued at $200, the property of the Jackson Typewriter Company. Gardner was also in possession of three stolen bicycles, and was still doing time in the Suffolk County House of Correction when the 1900 census was taken.

A large part of the confusion about the Jackson Typewriter Company is due to its having two separate lives, one in Boston in the late 19th Century and another, in the early 20th Century, in Hamilton, Ontario, during each of which slightly different typewriters were produced. Indeed, when Typewriter Topics brought out A Condensed History of the Writing Machine in 1923, a mere 20 years after a Jackson had last been made, it gave credit for the invention to Joseph Hassel Jackson of Ontario. Jackson was in fact a New Yorker by birth. And the earlier Boston-made machine was designed by the prolific Andrew Wilton Steiger (1856-1935) of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

The original Jackson Typewriter Company was established by Joe Jackson (1862-), who had set up shop in Roxbury, another Boston neighbourhood, by early June 1896, when his company took over a large factory at the junction of Clifton and Shirley streets previously occupied by the Globe Electric Light Company, and which was built in March 1895. In early April 1896 Steiger was granted five patents on the design, each assigned to the Jackson Typewriter Company. Joe Jackson had previously been involved with the Conde Typewriter Company, and before that had for many years had been connected with the Yost factory in Bridgeport. By January 1894 he was looking to manufacture a typewriter in his own name, and first approached the businessmen of New Haven, Connecticut, later hiring Steiger to design his machine.

In early 1900 the JTC was in major trouble. It first offered to move to Corry in northwestern Pennsylvania, and then there talks about moving the operation to Lyons, a town in Wayne County, New York. The company was represented at talks with the Lyons Board of Trade by Joe Jackson, who told the Lyons board his company could produce 300 typewriters a week and had a staff of 500. By early May 1900, however, the enterprise had collapsed and the Boston sheriff’s office was advertising “A bargin sale of typewriters”. The company’s stock and machinery was auctioned off at the JTC's factory on May 8, and representatives of many other typewriter companies and typewriter supply firms turned up to kick over the traces of the JTC. The bidding was fierce but the prices “exceedingly low”, according to the Boston Evening Transcript. Complete Jackson typewriters went for $8.50 to $17, but generally around $10.50 (exactly 120 years later, in May 2020, one at auction in Germany was expected to fetch $US19,000). In the 1900 Boston auction, a lot of 24 incomplete machines sold for $3 each, while complete frames and keyboards went for 40¢ each. A cabinet of 500 drills went for $12 and other parts fetched a mere 5¢ to 10¢. On June 26, 1900, the JTC was declared bankrupt.

Yet the company wasn’t completely dead. In April 1903 Joe Jackson managed to get boxes of typewriters moved to New Haven, where he leased a plant owned by the New Haven Wheel Company and even sold some machines labelled “made in New Haven”. The lease was broken and New Haven police seized the remaining boxed typewriters. In 1906, however, Joe Jackson, got financial support from Utica-born stove manufacturer John Henry Tilden (1843-1911) to set up a new typewriter company, called the Tilden-Jackson Typewriter Company, in Hamilton, Ontario. Tilden died, aged 68, on January 31, 1911. When his will was filed for probate the following March, it was found that the stock he paid $222,210 for – including the $152,000 he had put into the Tilden-Jackson typewriter concern - was worth a mere $5100. The second JTC venture had proved even less succcessul than the first. It's believed fewer than 300 Jackson typewriters were ever made, and only a small handful still exist.