Remington Typewriters in Australia

These Remington typewriter posters were drawn by an Australian artist, John Bainbridge (born 1918, Mosman, New South Wales; died London, 1978). Bainbridge was educated at the Swinbourne Art School and the  National Gallery School in Melbourne. He exhibited widely in Australia while working as the art director at the National Theatre in Melbourne. He moved to England in 1945, where he worked as an exhibition, theatre set and costume designer, a poster artist and documentary filmmaker. In 1959 he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Industrial Artists.

Remington typewriters were first imported by an agency into Australia by Stott and Hoare at the turn of the 20th century. In Sydney, the company was based in Martin Place, and in Melbourne at 428 Collins Street.

However, Underwood bought into Stott and Hoare, the company became Stott and Underwood, and Remington had to find another agency. Stott and Underwood imported and sold the Corona 3 portable, as well as Smith typewriters, but given Underwood's relationship with Remington was of a different nature, it declined to promote the sales of its great US rival.

From 1910 until 1945, Remington's distributor was Chartres. The dealings between these companies were so cordial that Remington gave Chartres one of its original Sholes & Glidden typewriters, later donated by Chartres to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Chartres profited in many ways, being allowed to add its own name to the Remington label and marketing its own typewriter ribbons. Here is the Chartres-Remington Building at 375 Collins Street, Melbourne.

Chartres and Remington also established headquarters in Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth to sell typewriters and run business colleges. In most cases, these buildings were known as “Remington House”.

Remington were based on Liverpool Street (above) then later on the corner of Moore and Pitt Streets in Sydney and on Currie Street and later Grenfell Street in Adelaide(below).

Remington pushed further north in Queensland, as far as Townsville. Here it is in 1913 at Clayton's Apothecaries Hall on Flinders Street, Townsville.

Amazing Amaya: Latest Typewriter on my Wish List

Swissa image courtesy of Georg Sommeregger

As I was hunting for my missing Swissa Piccola namebadge a week or so ago, Richard Polt and I got into a conversation - yet again - about his little shiny black 1930s Patria.
The subject this time was the stylish, eye-catching winged logo Patria once used, as Richard pointed out on this gorgeous example:

Of course, the whole Patria family was beautifully presented in the March 2010 issue of ETCetera, with an article on Spanish typewriters by Richard, Alfredo Sirvent and Fransa Marin. There are many images of Patria and Amaya typewriters in it.
This also includes a fabulous family tree chart based on Will Davis's research into the Japy-Patria-Swissa-Oliver-Byron-Amaya-Voss-Pulsatta group, sweeping across Spain, France, Switzerland, Britain and Germany.

Obtaining a 1930s Patria like the one Richard has is becoming something of an obsession with me. So much so I put an image of Richard's Patria as the desktop background on my laptop when I went to Spain the year before last, to remind me to keep an eye out for one. I saw Yosts, Rems and Royals, but no luck with a Patria.

Anyway, having taken note of the winged logo on the image of a later model Patria Richard sent me, I was surprised to see it crop again today on an image of an Amaya portable typewriter I happened to glance at.

I hadn't taken much notice of the typewriter in the image before, and it took me a while to work out the brand name. Once I had, the ETCetera article, which included the Amaya, came back to me.

And when I went searching on the net, and found one for sale for $180 on Etsy, a new typewriter suddenly went on to my wish list.

It's been a while since I added to the list. I never seem able to make any inroads into it, so it just keeps growing, and I try to keep it out of sight and out of mind. But then something like this happens, and I just can't help myself. Gotta have it ...
The list, by the way, would include (in no particular order):
Optima P1 (like the one Alan Seaver owns)
1930s Patria (like Richard's)
Mody Blick (like Herman's)
Pastel coloured Rooy (like Adwoa's)
White Corona 3
Gold-plated presentation Royalite (like the one in the Powerhouse Museum)
Sterling silver Corona Sterling (like Alan's)
Sphinx (to give to Richard on his 100th birthday, when I'll be 116)
Sholes & Glidden (in my dreams)
Crandall (like Martin Howard's. Ha!)
Caligraph (here's hoping!)
Pink Cole Steel
Bright yellow Montgomery-Ward (like Alan's, again)
"New" Featherweight with silver-ringed keytops (Florian put me up to that!)
Original Webster-Brother portable in excellent condition
Calanda
Red Barr
Green Bar-Let (like Herman's, again)
Underwood 5 in nice condition
Royal 10 in nice condition
Royal Standard in nice, working condition
Olivetti M1
Halberg
and on and on it goes ...

In Bed With John & Yoko, and a Splendid Olympia Typewriter

Yoko Ono in a hospital. John Lennon sits on a bedroll on the floor beside her, 1968.

Here come old flat top

He got Ono sideboard
He got hair down to his knees
Got to be a joker
He just do what he please
Come together, right now
Over me

When the words Atomic and Funky and the colour Orange increases the value of a typewriter 300 times

It has been another interesting month for typewriter sales on Australian eBay, with prices fairly consistently high, but again some utterly unfathomable sales.
Perhaps the most astonishing of these was the sale of two orange Adler Contessas, one for a staggering $355 on January 17 and the other for $204.49 four days later.

While that was going on, a lovely plain white Adler Junior 12 was passed in once at 99 cents on the 16th and is well on the way to doing the same thing again later today.

Having used both models, I can vouchsafe that the semi-portable is a vastly superior typer. Indeed, those orange Contessas are the sort of machine I used to give away, if any happened to be bespoiling my shed.
It would seem the major difference here is the colour – so orange somehow makes it a better buy? You know, you could easily slip the front off the Junior and repaint it orange; it'd be a far better deal all-round.
As for the key words in the item description: "Atomic" and "Funky" ...
I have a fair idea what is meant by “Funky” in terms of a typewriter – but “Atomic”? Please explain, in the words of Pauline Hanson. I am befuddled and confused. An “atomic” typewriter? If there were such a thing, Will Davis would be all over it like a rash! He'd have dissected it inside and out ...
Please forward any funny exclamations for "atomic typewriter" - I'd love to see them.

“Funky” might have helped this lovely little Olympia Splendid with burgundy keys, which was passed in for a very low $20. Five days earlier, a green Olympia Traveller deLuxe sold for $134.60!

But “Funky” somehow did get a run with a Maritsa 11, relabelled for Australian consumption as a Pacific. It sold for a very healthy $95.

And bright colours served Olivettis well, with a red Dora selling for an amazing $122.50, a salmon Lettera 22 for $152.50 (I have quite a few of these, maybe I should start selling some?) and a Valentine going for a “bargain” buy-it-now price of $250.

An orange Japanese Royal sold for a hugely inflated $152.50 – I hope my own family didn’t pay anything like that for my Christmas gift!

Old typewriters in very questionable condition fetched good prices, with an Erika 5 speckled with rust going for $124.60, and these three Remingtons selling for $139, $104 and $51 respectively (the bottom one, arguably the best looking of the three, went for the lowest price!). The prices differed markedly, but I can’t see that much difference between these machines in such ordinary condition:

For me, the “one that got away” was this Royal Standard, which sold for a reasonable $120 and came with these old ribbons.

A Royal 10 sold for $128.

But Derrick Brown, who always presents his machines so well, sold this Royal portable for $306. Presentation does pay! (Though so does funky, atomic and orange.) If Derrick was to paint these machines orange (sacrilege!) and call them funky or atomic, he’d probably get $1000! Spurn the thought ...

Now here's a real tester: Can anyone out there tell me what this was-for-sale (though not in Australia, I hasten to add) typewriter is called (and the answer's not a Blick!):

PS: I once gave away one of those orange Contessa to a young lady who wanted to write her wedding invitations with it. A few days later she asked me to tell her where the "return button" was.

Bessie Friedman: World's Fastest Woman Typist

Bessie Friedman was, under full championship conditions, arguably the fastest female manual typewriter operator of all time. In 1923 she reached net speeds of 143 words a minute over one hour of typing.
It was not enough, however, for Bessie to claim the world open professional title, which by that time had come to be dominated by two men: George Hossfeld and Albert Tangora.
Thus Bessie Friedman has not come to be as well remembered among world typing champions as those two giants of speed typing history. Yet, at just 15, she had the typing world at her very fingertips.
When the like of Hossfeld and Tangora began to dominate world speed typing championships from 1918 until well into the 1930s, a separate women’s world championship had to be established. Things had definitely changed. Women had won nine of the first 12 official world championships, but then Hossfeld and Tangora brought a whole new dimension to the competition.
When Tangora took the open world title in 1923 with a remarkable score of 147 words a minute, Bessie Friedman won the women’s crown, just four words a minute behind Tangora.

But it was a far cry from Friedman’s heady days of a decade earlier. In 1913, champion female typists were feted like film stars and beauty queens, their celebrity status enhanced by large picture story spreads in the major newspapers. And Bessie Friedman back then was the toppermost of the tippermost.

After graduating from grammar school at 12 and entering Bronx Normal College, Bessie began in September 1909 to study stenography and typing under the Isaac Pittman system. She graduated still aged 14, and after approaching Underwood was almost immediately recruited into the Underwood speed typing team.

The Underwood team was coached by Charles E. Smith at Vesey Street, New York. At first Smith put weights on the back of little Bessie’s hands, to keep them in the correct typing position, and then blinkered her, to force her to concentrate on her work.
Smith’s “practical touch typing” relied on the “balanced hand method” – which meant going from the outside keys toward the centre.

Smith turned Bessie into a champion, but it would seem the demands of competition would take their toll. By 1913, Bessie had already entered nine world, national or state championships and won six of them (she was second twice and third once), setting new world records along the way.
A year later, Bessie had doubled her exposure to this red-hot competition, having taken part in 18 major events for 15 wins. Her speeds had reached 135 words a minute.
She was still 19, and already a national celebrity. She had won the world amateur title, and was looking ahead, declaring her ambition to take out the world professional crown during the big exhibition in San Francisco in 1915.
It was not be ...

Bessie Friedman continued on into the 1920s, still demonstrating speed typing for Underwood at schools and in newspapers around the country. But her days as a serious challenger for the world open title were over. Hossfeld and Tangora had seen to that.

In March 1922, the Huntingdon Daily News wrote of a demonstration Bessie gave in its offices: “Miss Friedman writes two hours a day. But in those two hours she does more work than the average typist could do in two days. She didn’t powder her nose once during the demonstration, nor does she chew gum. The lines of type flow across the paper from her typewriter about as rapidly as you could draw a line with a pencil. The office boy spent an hour reading what Miss Friedman wrote in five minutes. He was looking for mistakes, but he found none.”

Bessie Friedman had been a world novice champion at 15 and went on to take out the world amateur title in 1914 (To qualify as a novice or amateur, typists had to have been learning to type for less than 30 months. Novices typed over 15 minutes, amateurs 30 minutes and professionals one hour). But the really grand prize continued to elude her.

Bessie was born, possibly in Russia, in 1895. In 1913 she was living with her parents (her father was Morris Friedman) at 431 East 140th Street in The Bronx.
She first made her mark on the world championships stage at Madison Square Garden, New York, on October 25, 1910, competing as a “novice” – that is, as someone who had not started typewriting before September 1, 1909.
Bessie won the world title in that division with 81 words per minute over 15 minutes. But the result placed her second in the “schools” championship behind her future nemesis, Margaret B. Owen (below, 83 words a minute).

On April 22, 1911, Bessie, then aged just 15 and still a student at Wood’s Bronx School, dominated the New York City championships at Browne's Brooklyn Business College, taking out both the amateur and open divisions, just 20 months after taking up the typewriter. The championships were staged by the Isaac Pitman Shorthand Teachers' Association.
That year’s world amateur champion, Gus Trefzger, had been expected to easily beat Bessie, but she out-typed him by three words a minute.
Bessie scored a net 101 words a minute for 15 minutes, a new amateur record, to become regarded as “The Fastest Typist of Her Age in the World”. “Miss Friedman is beyond all doubt the fastest operator of her age and experience in the world,” newspapers of the day declared.
At the world championship at Madison Square Garden in October that year, Bessie finished third behind Gus Trefzger and Margaret Owen – Owen was to become world professional champion for the first of four times in 1913. Trefzger, brother of Emil Trefzger (below), who won the 1914 world professional title, set a new world amateur record of 98 words a minute to win on a countback from Owen, while Bessie scored 90 words a minute.

On July 19, 1912, in Spokane, Washington, Bessie won the United States amateur title by typing 3208 words in 30 minutes. Her average of 107 words a minute beat Gus Trefzger’s record. In this contest she beat Owen into second place. But in the open event Bessie, with 105 words a minute, was third behind Owen and the winner, Florence E. Wilson, who was to become world professional champion in New York later that year. Bessie was ninth in the world championship with 104 words a minute.
On April 31, 1913, in the international championships at Massey Hall, Toronto, Bessie won the amateur title with 3468 words in 30 minutes. After accounting for 33 errors, her net score was 110 words a minute. On September 9, at The Coliseum in Chicago, she retained the US title by scoring 118 words a minute, typing 3664 words in 30 minutes, a rate of two words a second.

The next year, 1914, was to be Bessie’s year. In six contests, she wrote for 30 minutes at the rate of 122 or more net words a minute. In the world amateur championship in New York on October 26, Bessie wrote at the rate of 129 net words a minute for 30 minutes to take the title and break the existing world record.
After this triumph, Bessie had to step up to the professional ranks. Emil Trefzger won the world open title in 1914, and Owen took the next three championships. Then, in 1918, Hossfeld won the first of his 10 professional championships. Only William Oswald, in 1919, would break the stranglehold of Hossfeld and Tangora on the title over the ensuing 20 years.

Bessie Friedman toured the country with Tangora (above) in the 1920s, and her typing rate improved until she had reached 143 words a minute over 60 minutes in championship conditions. She was the world women's champion. But her dream of winning the world open title, on which she had set her heart in 1915, was not to come true.
We have, in a previous posts, looked at Hossfeld, Tangora, Emil Trefzger, Rose Fritz, Margaret Owen, Florence Wilson and Owen Blaisdell. Now, finally, Gustav Robert Trefzger, a Chicago Business School graduate who moved to New York. He was born in Peoria, Illinois, on 30 March, 1891, and died in Pasadena, California, on March 2, 1966.

Gus (above) competed in national and world speed typing competitions as an amateur from 1908 to 1911 and then as a professional until 1916. He won the world amateur championship at Madison Square in 1911. His 98 net words a minute for an hour won him a cash prize of $200. As a professional he achieved 111 words.
Gus worked for the Underwood speed demonstration team and continued to work for Underwood after he stopped competing.
The family moved to Pasadena, where Gus and an Underwood mechanic started their own business, Crown City Typewriter Co.