The Halda portable typewriter: Linking Swedish Antiquity with the Space Age.

Having looked at the Facit TP1 last week, it’s appropriate we should also pay tribute to its immediate predecessor, the Halda portable typewriter.

As many may be aware, at one time in the later stages of his writing career, Ernest Hemingway apparently broke away from American-made typewriters (Royals in particular) to use the Swedish Halda.

There was, and perhaps still is, a Hemingway Halda on display in Havana (my understanding was that it was in a hotel foyer there; not a bedroom, which is a different hotel “exhibit” featuring a Henry Dreyfuss-designed Royal Quiet De Luxe and/or a Corona 3).
Maybe Hemingway owned more than one Halda (he did, after all, own at least five Royals, and the Halda is quite similar to the Royal Quite De Luxe).

Attempts have been made to sell a Hemingway Halda for at least 10 years now, dating back to an eBay auction on this day, November 4, in 2001.

As of today, 2011, it was still available for purchase, from University Archives, of Westport, Connecticut, at http://www.universityarchives.com/Find-an-Item/Results-List/Item-Detail.aspx?ItemID=25673

See it being "demonstrated" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NVi0C4pHRM

The asking price remains $100,000.
The claim made by University Archives is that the Hemingway Halda it has for sale came “through” A.E.Hotchner, writer, friend of Hemingway, and Hemingway biographer. The sellers claim Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer was written on it. “The typewriter [came] from the heirs of well-known Hemingway friend Bill Davis …”

Hotchner (above, right) and Davis were certainly close to Hemingway at the time The Dangerous Summer was written, in 1959. It should be borne in mind, however, that The Dangerous Summer was written in the main in Spain, where Hemingway was on assignment to Time-Life.

The original concept was for Hemingway to write a 2000-word bullfighting piece for Sports Illustrated, at something like $150 a word (a world record rate for the time), but it grew to more than six times that length. Life copy editors chopped it back to something closer to the desired length (30,000 words, published in three installments), and this and another 45,000 words of what was left subsequently found their way into one of those posthumous Hemingway books (1985)over which Hem had no control.

The Hemingway Halda University Archives has for sale comes in a case with American Export Line and French Line shipping stickers, which carry parts of the handwritten name “E. Hemingway”. In University Archives’ research into this machine, however, it appears the sellers may not realise the Halda was not made before 1948 (for one thing, it says, “It is certainly quite possible that the works that would later become A Movable Feast were also typed on this very machine).

Calling the Halda “One of the most important literary relics of the 20th century, Ernest Hemingway's fully documented typewriter, on which he typed his last great work”, the seller compares the Halda with Babe Ruth's 60th home run bat, Sitting Bull's bow and arrow, Jack Kerouac's manuscript (above) for On the Road, Marilyn Monroe's Happy Birthday Mr President dress or the Maltese Falcon - "the stuff that dreams are made of".

Anyway, enough of the Hemingway Halda. Here is mine, on which the incomplete The So Far Very Placid, Even Dull, Summer has been started:

My Halda has the serial number P63929, which suggests it was made in 1955. It has a QZERTY keyboard, and while it was made in Sweden, it was marketed through the Italian-French company Lagomarsino.

We know that in 1935 the British Oliver Typewriter Company made a standard typewriter which emerged from a merger of the Danish Norden company with Halda. The Halda-Norden was designed by the legendary Danish architect and typographer Knud Valdemar Engelhardt.

But to the best of my knowledge, this is the first sign Haldas were also build for distribution by an Italian and/or French company.
Back on March 20, I posted on Lagomarsino typewriters at http://oztypewriter.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-old-typewriters-lagomarsino-alba.html

This looked at a "French" portable, an LP44 distributed by Lagomarsino-France S.A., of the Rue Chaptal, Levellois-Perret, Paris. The LP44 is, however, Italian-made and is a relabelled Antares Compact. Lagomarsino was headquartered in Antares’ hometown of Milan.

For all that, the Halda is Swedish to its very boots (or lack of them; the natty undertray, seen above, was replicated on the later Facits).

It was designed by Carl Malmsten (above), the great Swedish interior and furniture designer, architect and, at the king's behest and by his decree, a professor.

Though always known as “Carl”, Malmsten was born Charley Per Henrik Malmsten, in Klarakvarteren, a part of lower Norrmalm in the central part of Stockholm, on December 7, 1888.
He was the child of a well-placed family. His father, Karl Adam Stahmer-Malmsten, was a prominent GP and a medical writer, and his grandfather, Per Henrik Malmsten, was a professor of medicine, a chief surgeon and a royal physician. Malmsten's mother, “Inez” Isabella Erika Viktorina Cadier, was the daughter of the founder of the Grand Hôtel in Stockholm, Regis Cadier.

Carl Malmsten took his first steps in the art world while recovering in Egypt from health problems suffered during military training. Rebelling against his privileged upbringing, Malmsten returned to Stockholm in 1909 to start an apprenticeship as a humble carpenter. For five years from 1911 he studied in an architect's office. In 1916, with two chairs, the first furniture he designed, Malmsten won both first and second prizes in a contest to design the interiors of the Stockholm City Hall. On the strength of this, Malmsten opened his own furniture store.

Malmsten became a leading figure in Swedish “klassicism”, also called “Swedish Grace”. Influenced by Gustavian-period country manorial and rustic “rococo” furniture, and by folk art, while inspired by the artist Carl Larsson, Malmsten called for a revival of Swedish craftsmanship to produce work of simplicity and high technical quality. He urged a return to arts and crafts based on nature and tradition and reflecting a national identity. Malmsten rejected the Bauhaus school and railed against “functionalism”, complaining that the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition reflected “dull, imported anti-traditional style, mechanically dry and based on false objectivity".

That same year Malmsten decorated the Waldorf Astoria in New York, and in 1939 he was involved in the World's Fair in New York.
Malmsten produced beautiful yet highly functional and eternal pieces which created a unified and harmonious feeling, a pleasant sense of warmth.

The Halda portable typewriter must be considered a classic example. It came at the height of Malmsten’s “golden age”. Here, as much as anywhere else in his work, is the true reflection of a designer who “fought for the right of humans to experience beauty”.
Malmsten died in Malmstens Hus, Solna, Stockholm on August 13, 1972, aged 83, and was buried the Vickleby cemetery on Southern Öland.

The Halda company takes its name from its founder. It was established in Svängsta by Mörrumsån in Blekinge in the south of Sweden in 1887 by watchmaker Henning Hammarlund, an 1880 graduate from the Geneva Academy of Horology. Hammarlund (below) was born in Varalöv on December 30, 1857.

Like Camillo and Adriano Olivetti, Hammarlund took a paternal interest in the welfare of his workers, through their housing and social life outside the workplace. But Hammarlund was struck down by bad health in 1918 and by 1920 his company was in liquidation. Hammarlund died in Bastad on April 25, 1922.

Halda had started making typewriters (similar to the Bar-Lock) in 1896 and in 1914 introduced an Underwood-type Model 8.

After Hammarlund’s company went into liquidation, AB Halda Fabriker was formed to maintain typewriter production, but this company went bankrupt in 1927.

Halda AB was established, merged with Norden of Denmark in 1935, and three years later was taken over by AB Åtvidabergs Förenede Industrier and converted to a subsidiary under the name Facit-Halda AB. Halda remained the typewriter brand in the Åtvidaberg Group until 1957, when it switched to Facit.

In 2009, the Halda name was resurrected and given a space age look by watch entrepreneur and engineer Mikael Sandström, who developed a new watch with a time-platform and two interchangeable time-modules. It is based on the same drive that Hammarlund used and was tested by Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang on one of his space missions.

The Alpina: Great portable typewriter now packs 500 horsepower and goes from standing to 60mph in 4.5sec

Yes, the Alpina, perhaps the finest typewriter I have ever used, lives on – at least in name. While production of this magnificent “small office machine” semi-portable stopped in 1963, Dr Otto Rudolf Bovensiepen’s Bavarian typewriter factory gave birth to one of the world’s great modern cars: the 2011 BMW Alpina B7 Sedan, the latest model Alpina auto built by Dr Rudolf's son Burkard Bovensiepen.

Otto Rudolf Bovensiepen was born in Mettmann, a Rhenish town in North Rhine-Westphalia, on November 11, 1907, the son of Rudolf Bovensiepen, a doctor in law and philosophy, and Elisabeth Emma von der Goltz Bovensiepen.

Otto Rudolf Bovensiepen was born into a family which, in 1892, had taken control of the extant worldwide precision machine maker Peter Wolters, established in Mettmann in 1804 by Johann Peter Wolters (1777-1850).

Otto Rudolf’s great-grandfather Friedrich Bovensiepen, a master turner, married Wolters’ daughter Ida, and in 1881 their son Gustav Bovensiepen (1867-1951) joined the company. Gustav took over the organisation in 1892 and in 1927 established the Eisengießerei Hardenberg iron foundry in Neviges, which Otto Rudolf Bovensiepen in later life would manage.

In 1928 Gusta’s sons Hans-Friedrich and Peter Robert Bovensiepen joined the business and in 1934 they became partners with Gustav in running it. When Gustav died in 1951, Hans-Friedrich and Peter Robert took control.

Meanwhile, Otto Rudolf Bovensiepen had graduated as a doctor in law and had written books on Latin legal proverbs and divorce law reform. But machine manufacturing was in his blood and he became a partner in the small arms and ammunition manufacturing company of Kupfer und Messingwerke KG Becker & Co, Langenberg, Rheinland, specialising in brass and copper works.

As the Peter Wolters-Bovensiepen organisation rebuilt itself after World War II, Otto Rudolf found his true vocation.

In 1949, Otto Rudolf Bovensiepen established Alpina Buromaschinenwerke-Vertrieb Bovensiepen AG (below) in Kaufbeuren, a city in the Regierungsbezirk of Schwaben, southern Bavaria, enclosed in the district of Ostallgäu.

He started making typewriters in 1951 and the rounded semi-portables he produced between 1952-1961 have more than admirably stood the test of time. Today Alpinas are one of the most prized possessions of typewriter collectors worldwide.

When Bovensiepen’s son Burkard started to use Dr Rudolf’s typewriter factory to pursue his own interests, in building motor engines, Rudolf Bovensiepen in 1962 sold the rights to his typewriter, as well as the Alpina calculator, to Standard Electrik Lorenz (now Alcatel-Lucent Germany AG), a part of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation.

The Alpina typewriter continued to be made in Kaufbeuren for two more years, then its remaining assets were sold to household appliances conglomerate Vorwerk in Wuppertal.

Eventually, in 1969, the rights fell into the hands of engineer Oskar Mildner, who in 1958 had hand-made the prototype of the miniature Alpina calculating machine (above and below). Mildner was only interested in the calculator-related assets of Alpina and sold the typewriter rights and the Kaufbeuren factory to Olympia Wilhelmshaven.

Burkard Bovensiepen moved the Alpina car company from Kaufbeuren to Buchloe the next year and Mildner restored the calculator machinery (which had sat idle for nine years) and produced a further 1600 machines to the 4000 calculators previously made.

The last Alpina calculator was made in 1971 and the company was dissolved the next year. The factory was sold to the city of Kaufbeuren in 1981 and then on to the former workers.

As for Otto Rudolf Bovensiepen, he remained in Kaufbeuren but moved on to making hydrometric precision measuring instruments, for which he became even more world renowned. In the early 1970s he was a partner with metal importers W. & O. Bergmann in Dusseldorf and a partner and manager of the Bovensiepen family iron foundry Eisengießerei Hardenberg in Neviges.

It’s a shame Mildner didn’t bother himself with the Alpina typewriter as well as the calculator, for any further production would no doubt be greatly appreciated by collectors today.

Nonetheless, Dr Rudolf Bovensiepen had definitely left his mark with his typewriter. Will Davis, on the Portable Typewriter Reference Site, gives these machines a glowing tribute. Will says that “In addition to being distinctively shaped [the Alpinas] are in fact magnificently constructed … Every possible point of design was made superlative in these machines, which were certainly expensive to manufacture.”

Alpinas were imported into the US as Avonas by Jordan Marsh Department Stores, a chain which received goods from the Associated Merchandising Corporation (AMC). Alpinas were marketed as both Avonas and AMCs.

Dr Rudolf Bovensiepen was still running his office equipment company when the Alpina began its transformation from four boots to four wheels.

The change from typewriter to car production started in 1961, when Bovensiepen’s son Burkard Bovensiepen (below, born September 1, 1936) used his father’s precision components factory to make a Weber dual carburetor for the new BMW 1500.

Buoyed by the success of his investments on the stock market, Burkard took over an outbuilding at the original Alpina typewriter factory to develop his BMW tuning business, working on the carburetors and revised cylinder heads. Three years later, in 1964, the then 28-year-old business and engineering graduate came to the attention of BMW sales boss, Paul G. Hahnemann. BMW awarded the Alpina system a full factory guarantee.

Alpina Burkard Bovensiepen KG was incorporated in Kaufbeuren in 1965 and a distinctive company logo was added two years later. In 1968 Alpina ventured into touring car racing, and among the world famous drivers on its roster were Derek Bell, James Hunt, Jacky Ickx and Niki Lauda. In 1970 Alpina’s team won the European Touring Car Championship and the prestigious Spa 24 Hours. It has now returned to racing.

Alpina Burkard Bovensiepen GmbH is now based in Buchloe, in the Ostallgäu district of Bavaria, where it moved in 1970. It is run by Burkard (above) and his sons, Andreas and Florian, and among other things also incorporates a wine business.
Alpina sells its own cars, based on BMWs. Its processes are integrated into BMW's production lines, thus Alpina has from the late 1970s been recognised as an automobile manufacturer. The Alpina B7 is produced at the assembly line in Dingolfing along with BMW's own 7-Series. The engine for this year’s model, a twin-turbo 4.4-liter BMW V8, is assembled by hand at Alpina's facility in Buchloe, shipped to BMW for installation, then sent back to Alpina for finishing touches.

Although they both graduated with doctorates in law, the typewriter-making Otto Rudolf Bovensiepen is not to be confused with the notorious Nazi war criminal Otto Bovensiepen (above), who was born in Duisburg on July 8, 1905 (died February 18, 1979, in Zusmarshausen). Towards the end of World War II, this SS colonel was head of security in Denmark and was sentenced to death by the Copenhagen district court in September 1948. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in March 1950. Bovensiepen was released in December 1953. He then worked as a manager of an insurance company in Mülheim an der Ruhr . He was tried again for war crimes in a Berlin regional court in December 1969, but after a heart attack was declared incapable of standing trial.

I have been fortunate enough to acquire two Alpinas. The first, serial number 63089 (made in 1956) came from New Zealand, where I bought it on TradeMe. After reading Will Davis’s tribute to the Alpina, I determined I had to have one, just to experience typing with it, if nothing else. I was delighted with the purchase.
But I then hankered after a later model Alpina, one with what Will described as “the milky-white solid nylon carriage return lever”. Patience paid off and one turned up on eBay Australia earlier this year.

It has the serial number 249121, but Will says “Official records end with serial number 242,000 at the end of 1960; with production about 40,000 units per year”, so I guess this must one of the last Alpinas ever made (although AMC Alpinas with serial numbers in the 300,000s are owned by Will and Richard Polt). Anyway, again, this one was in fantastic condition, but it really was the typing action which most impressed me. I don’t think I’ve ever typed on a better machine. So for that alone, thank you, Dr Otto Rudolf Bovensiepen …