Events in 1919 flattered to
deceive the portable typewriter marketplace of 1920. On December 10, 1919, The Wall Street Journal said Remington
had started making its “unusually good model” and would “put it out in the next
few weeks”. At that point Remington directors and stockholders were no doubt
rubbing their hands in glee. With Underwood finding it couldn’t produce enough
typewriters to meet early demand at its Hartford, Connecticut, plant, Remington
seemed certain to steal a march on its major rival – and to be the first of the
major manufacturers to truly challenge Corona’s stranglehold on the portable
market.
In the event, the champagne stayed on ice at 374 Broadway a very
long time. Just as Underwood had been forced to do in August 1920, in moving
portables production to another plant, Remington moved the manufacturing of its
portables to one of its former Union Trust stable factories – the Smith Premier
plant in Syracuse, where production of the Smith Premier standard was
discontinued to allow for the making of the new portable (a Monarch standard
continued to be made). It wasn’t until September 27 that the Journal was able to report the 7½lb
Remington portable (“with all the features of the standard Remington’) was “now
in quantity production”. The machine was due on the market in 60 days (that is,
November).
But only one shift key
As it turned out, the Journal
reported the market launch on October 25, highlighting such landmark features
as typebars being actuated by meshing bevel-gears and a one-shift keyboard. The
$60 Remington portable made its public debut at the National Business
Show at the Grand Central Palace in New York from October 25-30. Typewriter Topics reported, “The new
Remington portable typewriter was put on display for the first time. Take it
from one who saw, the Remington portable was the centre of mobs at all times.”
Announced in April 1920
Topics’ coverage of
the show pointed out, however, that not far from the Remington fuss was another
one surrounding yet another portable. This was the Gourland – the difference
being the directors of the Gourland Typewriter Corporation had something
already well and truly on the market to show for their efforts. “Gourland luminaries were
having the time of their lives,” wrote Topics
editor Ernest Merton Best. And well might they. They were “listening to the
unusual compliments passed about regarding their product.” One of the Gourland
team was Walter Wilbur Ramer, head of the Typewriter Factory Sales Corporation
and previously of the Wholesale Typewriter Company, Montclair. Another
“luminary” at the show was Neal D. Becker, president of Hammond. While Hammond
in 1920 continued to strenuously push its 11lb “lightweight” version as a
portable, guess what Becker took when he went to Europe: a National portable!
Typewriter Topics
got to review the Remington portable for its November issue, saying its “advent has been long expected by the
typewriter trade.” In terms of full market flow, in the end there was really
only a few weeks between the arrival of the Underwood and the Remington
portables, making the advent of a four-bank portable an even more crippling
blow for Underwood’s huge hopes for its machine - and after five years of planning to boot! What should have been a full
year start for Underwood turned out to be just a matter of a month or so.
Admittedly, Remington portable production didn’t hit its straps until 1921.
Topics added, “The
great and growing demand for a small, compact, practical, portable writing
machine has long been recognised in typewriter circles. To fill this need the
Remingtons began their exceptional work
on a portable machine long ago. With the usual Remington thoroughness, one
by one the usual objections to small machines were overcome. The fact that new portables were being
marketed one after another did not hasten the Remingtons. They were
determined to build a machine which would supply all of the exacting
requirements of the people for whom a typewriter of this type is intended. And the portable Remington is distinctive
among portable machines, chiefly because of its standard keyboard” ...
Remington thoroughness is maintained throughout the entire construction of the
new addition to the Remington family. Strength and reliability have not been
sacrificed in the effort to achieve lightness. The lightness of the machine is
due to the design itself.” (My italic emphasis, not TT’s).
Typewriter Topics
pointed out that as long ago as 1876, William
Ozmun Wyckoff (of Wyckoff,
Seamans and Benedict fame) had written to later Remington president John Walter
Earle predicting that “the ultimate future of the typewriter would be in the
home”. Topics believed the Remington
portable had brought that prophecy to fulfilment. “The advent of the portable
machine … marks the definite advance into the other and wider field [beyond
business] …”
Quite why it took Remington 11 months to finally launch the
machine remains uncertain. Topics
suggested it was because of the “insistent demands of the business world” and from
salesmen to make standards a priority, causing congestion at plants such as
Ilion and Syracuse. Was it only because a post-Revolution Russian order for
Smith Premiers fell through, allowing space to make the Remington portables at
Syracuse? Was it because, as Topics
also claimed, Remington was in no haste and wanted to take their time in
perfecting the machine before putting it on the market. This last notion, of
prolonged finickiness, makes little economic sense, since a large gap pretty
much remained in the portable market from the end of 1919, factoring in the slow
and unsteady drip of Underwood three-banks. Perhaps Remington simply wanted to
first let the Gourland enterprise come to its inevitable demise?
Remington’s
planning for a real portable
certainly took at least four years. It was primarily designed by John Henry
Barr, who, meeting the challenge of the Corona 3 head-on, first applied for a
patent on the machine on August 12, 1915 (US1267356A). Barr said in his
application, “One of the main objects of the invention is to produce a machine …
in which a contraction of the [standard, four-bank] keyboard may be readily
effected at will, in order to reduce the compass of the machine and thus
facilitate packing and transporting or carrying the machine. A further object
of my invention is to provide a comparatively small, cheap and light yet highly
efficient typewriting machine.” A patent for the final design was applied for
on May 21, 1918, and issued on October 28, 1919 (US1320034A).
Barr
wasn’t a full-time Remington employee, but a professor of machine design and
mechanical engineering at Cornell University. And before his portable reached
the market, he had had plenty of staff help from experienced Remington
engineers like English-born Arthur William Smith and Arthur J. Briggs. A superb
outcome was always a very strong possibility.
With
that in mind, Topics, reporting in
November 1919 on Remington’s soaring, portable anticipatory stock value,
referred to “Wall Street dope” about “a public announcement of discontinuance
of selling by the Remington company of a side-line – ‘a well-known make of
portable typewriter’ – the inference being that this either has been
unprofitable or that more money would be made from the sale of an entirely new
portable typewriter of Remington make.”
October 1919
The
“portable” to be discontinued was the Syracuse-made Remington Junior, which was
taken off the market and replaced by a rehashed Junior, the Century No 10, in June
1919. Launched to great fanfare and very heavy nationwide advertising in July
1914, the $50 Junior was no match for the same-priced but genuinely portable
Corona 3. The Century had an even shorter career, being discontinued in 1921.
But as Richard Polt points out on his The Classic Typewriter Page Present Remington Portables, “The situation is complicated by a few Century typewriters
that are essentially just Remington Juniors with a Century name decal.” Barr also chiefly designed the Junior.
While
clearing the decks in its former Union Trust range of factories, Remington was
quite probably blindsided by a Lithuanian-born arms dealer for the Russian
Revolution, and general international wheeler-dealer, Michael Jacob Gourland.
In
hindsight it seems to have been most opportunistic of Gourland to set up the
Gourland Typewriter Corporation in February 1919 (capitalised at $2 million) and
to make a widely-advertised public offering for $250,000 cumulative preferred
stock in the company in mid-February 1920. The corporation said it had already contracted
to manufacture 50,000 of its machines, labelled the “Baby Grand”, by the end of
1920 alone, and that production would subsequently increase.
Underwood’s problems in making machines in Hartford,
Connecticut, to meet the early demand for its new three-bank portable - while at the
same time maintaining the rate of production of its standards - was common
knowledge. The slow rate of portable manufacturing wasn’t overcome until
Underwood bought the Bullard Machine Tool Company plant in Bridgeport on August
17, 1920. In the meantime, Remington’s breakthrough four-bank portable,
promised for the first few weeks of 1920, had failed to appear and didn’t do so
until the end of October. So no doubt Gourland saw a tantalising opening,
evident in his spruiking the 9½lb “Baby Grand” as being “said to be the only single-shift, standard and universal
keyboard portable typewriter.” Unlike a Corona it didn’t fold and unlike a Fox (and the Remington, if Gourland knew in advance what Remington was planning) it didn’t
collapse. In the absence of the Remington – and faced with real competition
from only the three-bank Coronas and a relatively few Underwoods - that much
could at least be said to be true.
The Gourland prospectus said the typewriter “will come on the
market at a time when experts advise that the present demand for typewriters is
far greater than the supply and they predict that the proposed output of 50,000
machines the first year could be largely oversold. Contracts for exports
already entered into and the domestic demand indicate this result.” Gourland
forecast a first year profit of $1 million. This was based on projected sales,
but Michael Gourland planned to keep the overheads low by employing young
Brooklyn girls to assemble his machines.
Of
course, the first year of business brought nothing like that sort of profit. Indeed,
in June Gourland was still looking for draftsmen and mechanics and by August it
was in debt. On May 24, 1921, Gourland called a stockholders meeting to
consider refinancing and reorganisation. The corporation changed its name to GT
in February 1922. Undaunted, Gourland increased capital to $5 million in 1922,
but under a new Wilmington-based board, led by stenographer Telesphore Leon Crouteau
and without Michael Gourland. In truth, the Gourland typewriter-making
enterprise had lasted less than two years.
The Gourland prospectus emphasised that Charles Spiro, who it
called the “dean of typewriter art”, was the consulting engineer in the design
of the typewriter. “The parts number
625, which is 50 parts less than those in other small machines … It is a
standard typewriter in all but its size.” The latter sentence was in turn
picked by Remington. It’s most likely the Gourland was actually designed by
Jesse Alexander, was a cut down version of Alexander’s Perfect and was almost
certainly made in Alexander’s factory at 35 Ormond Place, Brooklyn, premises
he’d acquired from furniture manufacturers the Langrock Brothers.
Michael Gourland was unquestionably an opportunist. Born in
Vilnius on November 24, 1879, he spent time in Britain in 1912-13 negotiating
on behalf of the pre-revolution Russian Government (as well as Austria, Romania
and Holland) for the rights to mechanical parts. Gourland was sent from St
Petersburg to New York through Liverpool in August 1916 to buy munitions for
Russian revolutionaries. He and his twin brother George, a broker, set up the
Russian-American Commercial and Industrial Company to cover for their
activities. Its branches were in New York, St Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa and
Rybinsk. When the February Bourgeois Democratic Revolution ended after Tsar
Nicholas II’s abdication, on March 16, Gourland was in Boston making absolutely
certain everyone knew which side he had been on all along.
After the collapse of his typewriter venture, Gourland quickly
got into movies and then cosmetics. He died in New York on October 5, 1951.
