On This Day in Typewriter History (XXI)

JUNE 10

Yost: The Typewriter

That Talked to the Dead

The Yost is a marvellous typewriter. Magical, some might say. So wonderful that a Yost typewriter was once "successfully" used to communicate with the dead. Successful, that is, in the sense that a book emerged from these conversations across the great divide, from spirit to spirit to (physically) unmanned typewriter.

This story gets better. The person who operated – from his own grave - the said Yost typewriter during this remarkable occurrence was none other than the Yost’s co-inventor, George Washington Newton Yost himself.

It “happened” in 1895, four years after the famous American spiritualist Helene Petrova Blavatsky (above), the founder of Theosophy, had died, and just months after Yost’s own death.

Madame Blavatsky’s “text” (described as “furnishing strong, internal proofs of its apocryphal character”) was dictated by the long dead lady's spirit, and “obtained in independent typewriting on a Yost machine under the supervision of the spirit of its inventor, Mr G. W. N. Yost”.

Yost’s transcription of Blavatsky’s words from the grave led to Posthumous Memoirs … Dictated from the Spirit-World under the Supervision of G.W.N.Yost, published by Joseph Marshall Wade, of Boston, in 1896.

Apparently Yost couldn’t find anyone to work his typewriter to take down his own thoughts (or after-thoughts) from the beyond. Yost had died in New York on September 26, 1895, aged 64, and appears not to have made any further contact with the world from the hereafter thereafter.

Blavatsky, born Helena von Hahn, of German-Russian descent, in Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk) in the Ukraine, on August 12, 1831, died in London, aged 59, on May 8, 1891. She has been described as “one of the most extraordinary and controversial figures of the 19th century”.

“The influence of her life, writings and teachings on world thought has been significant” ... “[She] stands out as the fountainhead of modern occult thought, and was either the originator and/or populariser of many of the ideas and terms which have a century later been assembled within the New Age Movement. The Theosophical Society, which she co-founded, has been the major advocate of occult philosophy in the West and the single most important avenue of Eastern teaching to the West.”

Yost (above) was indeed a dedicated spiritualist. He built, at his own cost, a church in Corry, Pennsylvania, and employed a clergyman (nothing like taking safe bets). When Yost died, it was reported that he “Remained a firm spiritualist to the end”.

“Although a shrewd man of business, Mr Yost had a tendency in his nature which led him into abstract speculation and made of him a devoted Spiritualist. With a Chicago Spiritualist named Dr [Henry D.] Rogers, he formed a great friendship, believing that the doctor was able to communicate with the spirits of the dead and to record these conversations and interviews upon the typewriter.

“In spite of the conviction of his friends that Dr Rogers imposed upon him, Mr Yost maintained his intimacy with Dr Rogers in particular and his belief in Spiritualism in general to that last moment of his life.”

“Dr” Rogers apparently had some sort of fixation with typewriters and typewriter inventors. Fifteen months after Yost’s death, the swindler Rogers got into some strife with the family of Harriet E. Beach, the very wealthy (and very recent) widow of another famous typewriter inventor, Alfred Ely Beach.

Rogers had married Mrs Beach, 67, in Alexandria, Egypt, just 55 weeks after Beach had died. Mrs Beach said she had been guided by her dead husband, her dead parents and some dead other people in making her decision to marry Rogers and give him her money – presumably via a Beach typewriter!

But let’s get back to the remarkable Mr Yost. My excuse for mentioning him today is that it was on this day in 1890 that Yost was granted a patent for a guide, or “directrix”, for the type at the printing-point of his machine, improving the means of “hanging” the guide and providing a means of raising or lowering it “so that it may be used equally well with a platen containing one sheet or more than one”.

Yost, or someone working for him, found a better way of "hanging" the guide, and this is what it became:

Apart from the Yost, with its ability to type for the dead, George Washington Newton (NOT Napoleon, as sometimes is claimed) Yost was also the co-inventor (again with Franz Xaver Wagner) of the Caligraph, the first competitor for the Sholes and Glidden.

As well, he took upon himself much if not all of the credit for the Remington No 2 (above),tending, at least in his own mind, to put the combined efforts of Byron Alden Brooks and William McKendree Jenne into a lesser light (calling Brooks’ ideas “crude”). But, then, Yost gave no credit to Wagner for the Caligraph and Yost, either, claiming it all for himself.

Apparently the Caligraph was not as financially successful as Yost made out (allegedly because of a costly patents dispute with Remington). Edward Mead Johnson and James Wood Johnson, co-founders of Johnson and Johnson, got their fingers badly burned (and needed some of their own company’s sterile surgical dressings) after being persuaded by Yost to invest in his ventures. Here is a Johnson and Johnson office worker in 1895, using something other than a Caligraph!

But Yost was a man of many and varied parts, of which his role in the early development in the typewriter was only one. We have tended to look at Yost merely within the context of typewriters, but his primary interest was actually in the land, particularly in harvesters and mowers.

George Washington Newton Yost was the third child and second son of farmer John DeWitt Yost and his wife Patty Ann (nee Newton). George was born at Starkey, New York, on April 15, 1831. He attended Starkey seminary, but had to give up lessons because of inflammation in the eyes. The family moved to Cameron (now Thurston), where George worked on his father’s farm. He married Sophia Church Hayden at New Castle, Pennsylvania, on January 28, 1858.

In his younger years, George moved about the country with some regularity. In 1856 he was in Pittsburgh and between 1858 and 1860 in Richard Polt's home town of Cincinnati and Yellow Springs, Ohio. Then in 1863 he was briefly in Nashville, Tennessee, before settling in Corry, Pennsylvania, and finally in New York.

His first inventing and business interests were in ploughing and harvesting. He invented a plough in 1855 (aged 24) and a traction wheel in 1856, a ploughing steam engine in 1858, a cotton cultivator, a chain link and a soap in 1860, steam land propellers in 1866, and a harvester in 1868.

Conventional wisdom has had it that Yost and James Densmore (above) first came in contact with each other through the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, when Densmore was trying to get the machine into production in the early 1870s. But our "conventional wisdom" is based purely on our knowledge of and interest in typewriters. In fact, Densmore and Yost had formed a partnership in 1866, a year before Sholes had even started working on his typewriter, and nine years before Yost and Densmore formed a partnership on Broadway in New York to promote the typewriter (in June 1875). The signatures below are from the Acme mower patent of 1873.

Yost and Densmore spent five years working together in the oil business and co-patented a car to transport petrol in 1866. Yost set up the Corry Machine Company on January 21, 1868, and subsequently the interest of Yost and Densmore switched back to the land. In 1873 they co-designed a harvester for their Acme Mower and Reaper Company. This was just after Yost became involved with Sholes. Yost also invented the Climax Reaper and Mower, and the two machines (seen in images above) were manufactured in Corry, Syracuse, Wellsburg and Chicago.

The Corry Machine Company was founded to build Yost’s reapers and wagons. A capital stock of $500,000 was authorised, but was shortly increased to $1 million. On March 18, 1870, the company was reorganised as the Climax Mower and Reaper Company. It was sold to one of Yost’s partners, Franklin William Andrews, on June 27, 1873, and Andrews sold it to the Titusville Novelty Iron Works of Titusville, Pennsylvania.

Yost had previously got plenty of outside backing for this venture. In 1870 he had applied for an international patent for his mower and reaper, naming in his project a group of Pennsylvania supporters, including Andrews and Lyman Stewart, who would later find fame and fortune as the co-founder of Union Oil, and who shared with Yost an interest in Christian fundamentalism.

English dramatist Sir Terence Mervyn Rattigan was born in South Kensington, London, on this day in 1911. He died in Hamilton, Bermuda, on November 30, 1977, aged 66. He is known for such works as The Winslow Boy (1946), The Browning Version (1948)and Separate Tables (1954). He was also a screenwriter, including for The Prince and the Showgirl, Goodbye Mr Chips, The Yellow Rolls Royce and Brighton Rock.

This is Rattigan’s Royal portable. In January, the BBC reported that Rattigan gave the typewriter to friend and partner Adrian Brown in the 1950s, and that it had become a stage prop in a play performed in London this year. It is believed the Royal was used to type the play Less Than Kind in 1944. Brown directed the play in this year’s London production. He had previously donated it to Trinity College in Oxford, where Rattigan studied in the 1930s.

Cast members Sara Crowe and Michael Simkins are seen here with Rattigan’s typewriter. Crowe said having the typewriter on stage gave the play a “special atmosphere”.

Canadian-born American writer Saul Bellow was born Soloman Bellow in Lachine, Quebec, on this day in 1915. He died in Brookline, Massachusetts, on April 5, 2005, my 57th birthday. Bellow won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize.

On This Day in Typewriter History (XX)

JUNE 9

(Two weeks to Typewriter Day)

George Boardman Webb and

his 1888 portable typewriter

It seems our “On This Day” series is starting to make a regular habit of bringing to light hitherto unheralded yet brilliant typewriter inventors. In this way we are able to give these pioneering typewriter design engineers the credit they truly deserve – in some cases, such as this one, where credit has been due for almost a century, and yet strangely withheld. It’s this sort of thing which makes the work which goes into “On This Day” all the more worthwhile.

The latest inventor we’ve uncovered is George Boardman Webb, who on this day in 1891 – exactly 120 years ago today – was granted a patent for which he had applied in March 1888. In the description of his design, Webb indicates he has in mind a much lighter, more portable typewriter than the standard-sized machines of the day.

Sadly, it would appear that Webb’s portable typewriter, like so many other wonderful ideas from would-be if they could-be typewriter inventors of the period, was never made.

Yet George B. Webb was no ordinary nor frustrated typewriter inventor. He is the man who designed one of the most successful typewriters of the era, the Remington No 6. Amazingly, he has been given no recognition for that achievement these past 96 years, since he died on Staten Island in late October 1914. When Webb died, he was described as Remington's "head designer for many years" and its "mechanical expert". But when the first post-Mares typewriter histories came to be written (in 1917 and 1923), Webb's name had already been forgotten. Was he omitted or erased from Remington's story - not to mention the stories of Densmore and the Union cartel, both of which had also used his designs?

What is most striking about the Webb portable design is that he applied for it at about the same time George Canfield Blickensderfer was starting to work on what would ultimately become the Blickensderfer 5, of 1893 (patented, above, 10 months after Webb’s design; compare with the Webb drawing at top). Both the Webb and Blickensderfer machines were to employ a typewheel, leaning forward at an identical angle, and a non-QWERTY keyboard (or in Webb’s case is it some sort of indicator plate?). There seem to be other marked similarities, including the significant reduction in working parts and a targeted simplicity in construction.

Blickensderfer was not actually working on the concept of a portable at the time Webb submitted his patent (above), and it is interesting to speculate whether Webb might have beaten Blickensderfer (below) to the honour of building the first recognised portable if his machine had been made.

When Webb applied for his portable patent, he was living in Newark, New Jersey, and was an independent agent as far as typewriter designs were concerned. His engineering background had been in clock-making  - his first patent, in 1883, was for an electric clock. But – perhaps as a result of his portable typewriter patent, the first of at least eight Webb typewriter designs we know of – his talents quickly came to the attention of Remington, more specifically of the company of Wyckoff, Seamans and Benedict.

It is interesting that in the preamble to his specifications for the portable, Webb should state that his description would “enable others skilled in the art to which it appertains to make and use the same.” In other words, I designed it, you (anyone out here) build it.

Webb stated his machine would have a “much fewer number of parts than machines of a like nature [yet] capable of doing the same kind of work, and by thus reducing the number of parts to lessen the cost of construction thereof, to secure a machine more quiet in its action, and which by reason of its construction is lighter and consequently more portable than machines of more complicated construction, one the manipulation of which is easily learned, which is rapid in use, and which works easily and positively”.

Webb was born in Ballston, New York, on August 9, 1846. He died on October 26, 1914. Above is his brief obituary, which appeared in the New York Tribune on October 28.

In a tribute, it was said of Webb, “G.B.W. is a genius, and his friends all recognize that fact. A man of fine mind and a thinking mind, not alone a retentive. He has inherited the mechanical ability of that early John Webb who designed the machinery for weaving in the 14th century; [G.B.W. is a] designer of many intricate machines, for many years mechanical expert with Wyckoff, Seamans and Benedict. He designed the famous No 6; and has patents on every machine they ever bought; also designer of a cannon [True! It was patented in 1889]. Well-informed and especially well-versed in science and history.”

Before joining Remington, Webb had worked for the clock-making firm established in 1881 by George E. Hart and D. S. Plumb, which first produced “small carriage, or hand travelling-clocks”. After Hart joined the Waterbury Watch Company, he was replaced first by George E. Marcus, later of jewellers Jacques and Marcus, and then by Webb, who was to be described as “the well known mechanical expert, now with Messrs Wyckoff, Seamans and Benedict, manufacturers of the Remington Standard Type-writer.”

Most typewriter histories agree that Webb’s Remington No 6, which entered the market in mid-1894, was the pick of the pre-frontstroke machines from that manufacturer. A Condensed History of the Writing Machine (1923) said, “This enjoyed wonderful popularity for more than 15 years …” It described Webb’s improvements on previous Remingtons as “The adjustment of the cylinder, securing greater permanence for the original alignment of the machine; improved spacing mechanism; lighter and much improved paper carriage; improved ribbon movement; adjustable paper guides”.

Paul Lippman in American Typewriters (1992) wrote, “The big success of the Remington understroke line was the Standard No 6, introduced in 1894 and sold until 1914.” Darryl Rehr in Antique Typewriters (1997) said, “The Remington 6 and 7 represented the height of upstrike technology and were extremely popular machines.”

The questions beg to be asked, therefore: Why wasn’t its designer subsequently given the credit for his work, not just on the Remington 6 but on his other typewriters as well? Why was he written out of history?

On this day in 1928, the great Australian aviator Charles Kingsford Smith (above) completed the first trans-Pacific flight, from Oakland in California, where Richard Polt grew up, to Brisbane, Queensland. Though Kingsford Smith was not a noted typist, he is mentioned here because he was related to the first (and probably only) Blickensderfer typewriter agent in Australia, John Stephen Southerden, of Brisbane (below). Southerden’s father and Kingsford Smith’s grandmother were siblings.

Talking of great aviators, our celebrity typist today is the godson of Orville Wright, actor Robert Cummings, who was born Charles Clarence Robert Orville Cummings in Joplin, Missouri, (site of last month’s devastating tornado) on this day in 1910. Cummings died, aged 80, at Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, on December 2, 1990.

Cummings’ photograph here with a Smith-Corona Skyriter portable appeared on the front page of the September 1955 issue of the Smith-Corona News.

And before we finish with the name Webb in this post, Cummings’ father founded the Jasper County Tuberculosis Hospital in Webb City, Missouri. (His mother was an ordained minister of the Science of Mind.) Also born on this day were British actor George Webb (1911) and American novelist Charles Webb (1939).
Well, Alan and Richard, how's that for six degrees of separation?

On This Day in Typewriter History (XIX)

JUNE 8

Ettore Sottsass and the Nippo P-100

OK, I’ve had a bit to say about Ettore Sottsass, especially in relation to the Olivetti Valentine. And I’ve also poked a bit of gentle fun at the Nippo typewriters, the so-called “rhismical” machines that many typewriter fanciers rate as one of the poorest, if not THE poorest, typing machines ever devised.

So where is the connection? Well, believe it not, when Sottsass, on this day in 1970, was granted a US patent for his design for the outer casing of the Olivetti Lettera 36 electric portable (as portable as an electric typewriter can be), he used as one of his references the Nippo P-100 of 1966. (Maybe, after all, that's what Sottsass had in mind with his original concept for the Valentine.)

Now it was a very brief and to-the-point patent description, for a design assigned to Olivetti in Ivrea and already filed in Italy the previous year. Sottsass didn’t flesh out his use of his references. But apart from the Nippo P-100, he also referred to the Aztec 700 of 1965 (which we all know as an East German Erika) and the Remington Envoy of 1964.

And if anyone is able to tell me where the connections lie between the Nippo P-100, the Aztec 700/Erika and the Remington Envoy (also called several other model names, but the same machine) and the Olivetti Lettera 36, I’d like to hear from them. I can’t see it for the life of me.

Anyway, here are some photographs of my own Lettera 36, Remington Envoy (in this case a Reporter) and Nippo P-100 side-by-side, as well as an Aztec 700.  At least the Olivetti and the Remington have the same colour combination.

Also on this day, in 1937, Ronald D.Dodge, of Rochester, New York, was granted a patent, assigned to IBM, for a typewriter which wrote on a tape (above). Dodge explained, “It is customary for radio and cable operators to use typewriters for transcribing radio and cable messages by typewriting the letters as fast as the code signals are received. When ordinary page printing typewriters are used, much time is lost in the insertion of sheets of paper and the returning of the carriage … Naturally this slows reception of messages an appreciable amount, particularly at times when the radio or cable traffic is heavy.

"It has been proposed to use standard typewriters equipped with tape feeding mechanism whereby the messages may be typed continuously on a narrow tape like the ones now used on tape printing automatic telegraph receivers. With such a machine a radio or cable operator can type the messages continuously and allow the tape to accumulate in a basket ... [the] tape can be pasted on suitable forms in the usual way.”

On this day in 1953, John W. Ehemann, of Chicago, filed a design, assigned to the Dial-Rite company of Battle Creek, Michigan, for improvements to the toy electric typewriter (above). Ehemann's explanation is interesting" “Toy typewriters, in the past, have universally been made of the mechanically operated type ... Those machines which have come on to the market during the past few years have used keyboards wherein bad typing habits, such as the one finger ‘hunt and punch’ system, acquired by the child or adult using them, have been harmful when he later started learning to properly use a standard typewriter. Such machines were also undependable, short lived in most cases, and commonly lacked means for uniformly spacing the letters appearing in a typed line, so that a crude typing job was the best that could be expected.”
I have seen ads for such a thing, but have never seen one for sale.

On this day in 1906, Theodore Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act into law, authorising the President to restrict the use of certain parcels of public land with historical or conservation value. Mr Obama should consider a law protecting typewriters from keycutters. Above, for starters, is Roosevelt’s typewriter:

On this day in 1949, Helen Keller, Dorothy Parker, Danny Kaye, Fredric March, John Garfield, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson were named in an FBI report as Communist Party members. Keller (above, with a Hammond) and Parker (below)are seen using typewriters here. (By the by, I now own the Hermes 2000 once used by the Communist Party of Australia – a red-link typecast is on its way,)

Perhaps somewhat appropriately, given the above, also on this 1949 George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published by Secker and Warburg in London.

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Nineteen Eighty-Four 13th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Here is Orwell at his Remington Model 1 portable:

Belgian-born French-American author, essayist and poet Marguerite Yourcenar was born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour in Brussels on this day in 1903. She died in Northeast Harbor, Maine, on December 17, 1987, aged 84. She was the first woman elected to the Académie française, in 1980.

Typospherians and Typewriter Lovers: I Thank You