From 12-Year-Old ‘Violin Genius’ to Typewriter History Pathfinder: The Michael Adler Story

Typewriter historian Michael Adler as a 12-year-old

"violin genius", in Sydney in 1947.

When The Sydney Morning Herald reviewed Michael Adler’s first typewriter history, it said The Writing Machine was “an authoritative book on a subject on which surprisingly little information is available”. This was in February 1974, a time when manual typebasket machines were already well on the way toward being phased out, and the Herald was right to say Adler had filled many gaps in our knowledge of the machines which had once held such a dominant place in business and newspaper offices. Indeed. there had not been the general release of a serious, English-language typewriter history in 50 years, since the 1923 publication of A Condensed History of the Writing Machine: The Romance of Earlier Effort and the Realities of Present Day Accomplishment, put out by the trade magazine Typewriter Topics to mark the 50th anniversary of the US typewriter industry.

Little did the Herald know, however, that the same author, Michael Hugo Adler, had graced its pages many times before. From 1947 until 1951, Adler’s name appeared frequently in print, in notices and reviews, notably as part of the New South Wales Junior Symphony Orchestra under its founder and conductor, Carl Sauer, giving performances in the Sydney Town Hall. In these Adler was referred to as a “violin genius”.

In 1947 the Sydney Sun, a Herald stablemate, said Adler “has attracted considerable attention though he is only 12. This Parramatta boy will play de Beriot’s Concerto No 9 First Movement, with full orchestral accompaniments”. The Bulletin magazine said, “Young Michael Adler [is] a confident soloist who evoked quite a good tone, especially in the lower register, with some facile bowing.” A few months later Adler won an Australian Broadcasting Commission (as it was called then) radio eisteddfod Listeners’ Prize. A 1948 review, which appeared when Adler was still 13, said he “played with confidence in Beethoven’s Romance for Violin and Orchestra”. The Bulletin reported that Adler had played this piece with “considerable promise and poise”. Adler also won prizes as a viola soloist. Professor Sauer was an eminent violinist himself, as well as a composer, researcher and author on the history and philosophy of music. He was also a noted Hebrew Scholar.

Adler with his mother Bedriska in Sydney in the early 1950s.

In 1952-53 Adler spent a year in Israel on a Jewish Agency scholarship scheme, representing the Sydney Habonim youth organisation. Upon his return to Australia he became an active member of the Zionist Youth Movement and was an outspoken advocate for the policies of the Israeli Government and the Israel Defence Force. After a visit to his father in Brazil in 1954, Adler flew back to Australia from California to enrol at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the music school of the University of Sydney. He also studied English and history before permanently leaving Australia in 1956.

Adler was already very well travelled by the age of 22. In later life he claimed to have been conceived at Christmas 1933 and born in Prague after the “shotgun marriage” of his Czech parents, father Gerhard Hans “Jan” Adler (1907-1973) and Bedriska Koppová (1905-1969), also known as Frederica or Fritzi. Jan was a lawyer who in 1937 counted among his clients Leon Trotsky. The couple soon divorced and after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in October 1938, both moved to London - separately. Michael’s father went to Brazil in 1940 and remained in South America for the rest of his life. Bedriska had already re-married, to a much older man, a wealthy widower called Pavel (‘Paul’) Israel Kraus, in late March 1939.

Bedriska and Paul Kraus arrived in Australia with a five-year-old Michael Adler and Kraus’s 11-year-old son Werner aboard the Stratheden on October 1, 1939. Bedriska had left London on the P & O ship SS Maloja on August 19 and, on September 3, 1939, while they were at sea between Aden and Bombay, World War II was declared.  On September 11 the Maloja was requisitioned by the British Admiralty in Bombay and converted to an armed merchant cruiser. Adler was given a balloon as a fifth birthday present, in Bombay on September 20. Bedriska was reunited with Paul in Bombay and the family managed to get a passage to Sydney on the Stratheden.

For much of a decade from 1956, Adler backpacked around South America before settling in Caracas, Venezuela, and from 1963 in Panama. He worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent and, among other events, covered the golpes de estado of Venezuelan dictator Marcos Evangelista Pérez Jiménez, who was deposed in a coup d'état on January 23, 1958.

By 1967 Adler was living in Rome. He recalled for a family historian: “One day I found a fascinating old machine in a flea market from which an all-engulfing passion for early typewriters developed. I'm talking about machines that in no way looked like typewriters. No one was in the least interested in industrial archology in those days, so these old machines were being sold off virtually for their weight in scrap metal. That’s a slight exaggeration, but you get the drift.

“Within a few years I had literally hundreds and hundreds of different machines, all of which I restored to pristine condition, and researched through patent records and libraries. My first book kind of launched the passion for collecting old typewriters, until sure enough Sotheby’s and Christie’s in London (and elsewhere of course) were including them in appropriate sales.”

Adler wrote The Writing Machine: A History of the Typewriter (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1973) and Antique Typewriters: From Creed to QWERTY (Schiffer Publishing, Atglen, Pennsylvania, 1997). Given his own background in classical music, it was no surprise that the title of the second book referred to Adler’s discovery of Reverend William Creed, who, Adler suggested, made the first working typewriter in 1747. It was called the Melograph, an apparatus to be attached to a harpsichord or clavichord “whereby every note played was committed to paper”. Adler quoted from a letter written by John Freke and published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London, “so that Creed’s invention should not be ‘lost to Mankind’”.

It was no mere coincidence that following the publication of Adler’s second book, a worldwide interest in vintage typewriters grew enormously. Most notably, this included the collecting and restoring of early machines, and further research into the history of writing machines. Yet Adler gave no indication of being in any way interested or involved in these developments. Nonetheless, in November 2012 he used social media to comment on an index machine in the Haaretz Museum of Typewriters in Israel, saying, “Origins of the Ivriya are not at all unclear. The machine is a Hebrew version of a popular German machine manufactured by Gundka-Werk GmbH from 1924 which was called Gundka, marketed later under a multitude of names worldwide (G&K, Write Easy, Frolio, etc, etc.) See either of my books The Writing Machine or Typewriters from Creed to QWERTY.”  Ironically, it was finding in 1967 a Frolio at the Porta Portese flea market in Rome - for which he paid a princely 100 lira - that started Adler’s passion for typewriters in the first place.

Adler and his second wife, Linda Lee Adler, moved to Britain in 1976 and in 1991 they started an antiques store called Fernfold. Adler later settled in East Sussex. He died on July 4, 2025, aged 90, on the Greek Island of Mykonos.