The First Royal Portable Typewriter: 90 Years Ago Today

It was on this day in 1922 that Edward Bernard Hess and Lewis Cary Myers were issued with the patent for what would become the first Royal portable typewriter.

That fact alone is extraordinarily interesting – because the typewriter itself did not appear on the market until late September 1926, more than four years later.

What happened in the interim? Well, Remington’s first portable happened, that’s what happened, Remington produced the first four-bank portable at the end of 1920, just a month or so before Hess and Myers applied the patent for their Royal portable.

Ed B.Hess

Lewis C.Myers

Massive sales of the Corona 3 immediately after World War I – 81,000 in 1919 and another 91,000 in 1920 – had finally made all the other major US typewriter makers sit up and take notice. A vast and flourishing market for portables was opening up before their very eyes. And Corona was not just dominating it – Corona was really the only player in it.

First Underwood responded, in late January 1919, digging out Lee Spear Burridge’s brilliant design dating from the year of his death, 1915, and making its own three-bank, but one which didn’t rely on a folding carriage for its compactness.

Remington, meanwhile, had a team led by John Henry Barr and including Arthur J. Briggs working feverishly on what would emerge as a portable with a folding device of its own - of sorts: a typebasket which lifted into position for typing.

Until now, we’ve all assumed Royal just sat back and followed these developments. Indeed, it has been suggested that Hess and Myers, smarting from what is perceived to have been a market failure with the Royal flatbed, had decided to concentrate their efforts on standard-sized machines (the Model 10 was launched in 1914).

Not so, it transpires. Hess and Myers were far from content to let Corona, Underwood and Remington have the portable market to themselves. They, too, were working on a portable.

Trouble is, Royal’s four-bank concept, a portable with all the features of a standard-sized machine, was just a little too close for comfort to what Remington had produced in 1920. Remington simply got in ahead of Hess and Myers.

Still, when the Royal portable did reach the market in late 1926, it was, in shape and size, significantly different again from the Remington. Importantly, it had no folding devices, yet was much bigger than the Underwood 3. But small, flat, compact portables had remained in vogue in the early 1920s.

Hess and Myers obviously decided to bide their time. This gave them breathing space to work on their portable. But the basics for it had been laid down in 1921. In their specifications, Hess and Myers had written:

“The object of this invention is to provide  a small, compact, light and portable typewriting machine containing a complement of the essential parts of a standard, full-sized machine for ordinary writing, in which the writing is always visible, and which shall be at the same time strong, durable and easy to operate and in other respects efficient.

“In carrying out our invention, we obtain these objects by embodying in the new machine as many as possible of the valuable and thoroughly tested features of the Royal typewriting machine, making such alterations as to adapt them to a portable machine of the kind above referred to.

“We employ sheet metal and drawn stock to a very large extent in the construction of the machine, in order to make the mechanism both strong and durable as well as light and compact. We use the full number of keys in the keyboard, arranged in four banks, as in most standard machines; efficient mechanism is provided for shifting and locking the platen for upper and lower case printing; devices are used for "back-spacing" when desired; efficient line lock devices are used; the margin stops are adjustable as heretofore, and means is provided for releasing the margin stops at any desired point in the travel of the carriage; the ribbon is automatically vibrated and fed from one spool to another, and means is used to shift the ribbon- winding mechanism from one spool to the other.

“When a bicrome ribbon is employed, it may be shifted to print in either colour or the ribbon may be entirely disconnected from the winding mechanism. The most approved mechanism for feeding the paper to the platen is used, and novel mechanism is employed for controlling the feed of the paper so that the printing may be done with either single or double spaces,

“The new machine also embodies other desirable features common to the best machines in use as well as others which contribute to the ease of operation arid the performance of the best quality of work.”

Amazingly intricate detail is contained in the 34 pages of the Hess and Myers

Royal portable patent of 1922

It can be seen from the original patent drawings that Hess and Myers made minor modifications to their portable over the ensuing five years. The carriage lever became longer and was positioned further back beside the platen, the top section retained the sloped edges but became a different shape, and the shift keys moved back from being down either side the spacebar. The margin release also moved to the left side. It appears the paper plate was to be one piece going under the platen, and to have a gauge set into it. There were no doubt many other obscure technical changes, but this is essentially the portable that Royal produced in 1926.

The big question in 1926, of course, was how Royal, having given Corona, Underwood and Remington such a big start in the portable market, was going to be competitive. It was a slow start in 1927, but the next year Royal sold 50,000 of the Model 0s, in 1929 58,000 and in 1930 136,000. By 1947, close to 1.4 million Royal portables had been sold, making Royal the market leader going into the 1950s. Royal had certainly caught up fast.

More significantly for typewriter collectors and historians, however, was that the Hess-Myers Royal design was enormously influential. Almost immediately after its release, Corona brought out its four-bank, something it had been working on for nine years. Underwood quickly followed suit, then Remington, too, went larger and boxier. By the mid-1930s, US portable typewriters were out on their own in design; they had left the small, flat, compact lightweights well behind them.

But how did Royal make up so much lost ground so quickly? The answer to that question is contained in one name: George Edmund Smith.

George Ed Smith’s marketing strategies are entertainingly outlined in Bruce Bliven Jr’s 1954 The Wonderful Writing Machine, commissioned by Royal to mark its 50^th anniversary.

Smith, born on January 1, 1879, in Tainter, Dunn County, Wisconsin, went from a Chicago typewriter salesman in 1900 to a Royal company accountant in 1910 to being the company’s vice-president in 1914, aged just 35. By 1920, he was also first vice-president of the Bankers’ Union for Foreign Commerce and Finance, a New York director of the Asia Banking Corporation and a director and past president of the American Manufacturing Export Association. At age 41, he was already a very rich man. By March 1929, the newspapers were calling him a multi-millionaire.

But after masterminding the launch of the Royal portable on the market in 1926, Smith’s fall from grace was even quicker than his rise to fame and fortune had been.

In 1924 Smith started having an affair with tall, slim blond called Helen C. Meade. Smith’s wife found out about it and in March 1929 counter-sued the couple, seeking $500,000 from Meade for “stealing” her husband.

The adverse publicity of Mrs Mary E. Smith’s alienation suit resulted in Smith being immediately fired by Royal from his $50,000-a-year job as company president. Within a year he was divorced, out of work and being looked after by a nurse, Mary E.Burky, and two young German servants, Kent and Dorothy Horstmann, in Hempstead, Nassau, New York. Smith did marry Helen, leaving all he had left to her when he died at 28 Wildwood Drive, Kennilworth, Great Neck, Nassau, on March 3, 1936, aged just 57. He’d gained a new wife but presumably lost a very large slice of the fortune he’d amassed from annual earnings, including royalties, of $200,000, and his Royal company stock holdings worth $1.25 million, not to mention his mansion on Cedar Drive, Great Neck.

Hess and Myers outlived him. Hess died, aged 83, in 1941 and Myers, aged 84, 10 years later.

Smith had not only lived the high life while he could: his marketing genius in launching the Royal portable led to him becoming regarded in the US as something of a master salesman, a guru. One publication wrote, “The author [Smith] does not base his judgment on theories alone, either, for he has come right up through selling from a road salesman’s job to the presidency of the Royal Typewriter Company, and he is a former president of the Salesmanship Club of New York City.”

It no doubt helped Smith’s success that in the Royal portable typewriter, he had one excellent product to sell. Will Davis describes it as “a well engineered product from the start … High quality from the outset ensured that the Royal portables would be held in high esteem for many years.”

As British typewriter historian Richard Milton points out, it was also so tough it could withstand almost anything – as proved by Smith’s airdrops. Richard writes, “Perhaps being late to market assisted the Royal design team for, with its 1926 portable,  the designers had learned from their competitors to arrive at the basic format and design that would stay with portable typewriters  for the next 50 years. Almost every one of the designers' decisions was confirmed by the Underwood four-bank portable launched in the same year and looking uncannily similar.” 

It has been especially pleasing for me to track down the original patents for Burridge’s Underwood 3, Barr’s Remington portable and now the Hess and Myers Royal portable.

I remain intrigued by what I call the “14-year cycle” of advances in portable typewriter design. First the Blickensderfer 5 of 1893, then 14 years later, in 1907, the Standard Folding (which tuned into the Corona 3). Then 14 years after that, in 1921, the Remington and, as it now turns out, the Royal portables. Another 14 years down the track (1935) and the Hermes Featherweight emerged. Finally, after another 14 years (1949), the ultimate portable, the Olivetti Lettera 22, was launched (followed 14 years later, in 1963, by the Lettera 32). And what of 1977? Or 1991? Umm …

*This sequence excludes the Underwood 3, which was distinctly a one-off and not a design followed by other manufacturers. But then I suppose the same could be said of the Blick!

Herman Price Collection

Martin Collection, above and below

Richard Milton Collection

Sinclair Lewis's Typewriting Honeymoon

So attached to his portable typewriter was American novelist and playwright Sinclair Lewis that in 1928 he took it with him on his honeymoon. And his new wife, the journalist Dorothy Thompson, seemed amused!

He even found time to use it – on the steps of the specially-built 17-foot long caravan in which Lewis and Thompson spend three summer months touring England and Scotland from May-August 1928. The caravan, by the way, was “equipped as a bungalow, with kitchen and living room” – but, apparently, no typing room!

Perhaps the step typing break was some respite from the early joys of marital bliss. At the time, a female admirer had written to Lewis  offering to be his secretary. She added, "I’ll do everything for you - and when I say everything, I mean everything." (By which, presumably, she meant she’d pour his next drink). Anyway, Dorothy, not Lewis, replied:

My dear Miss:

My husband already has a stenographer who handles his work for him. And, as for "everything," I take care of that myself - and when I say everything I mean everything.

Dorothy Thompson

(Mrs Sinclair Lewis to you.)*

*Posted last week on Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience blog. 

Indeed, in April 1930, after the couple had returned to the United States to settle in Barnard Town, Windsor, Vermont, and filled out their census forms, the dutiful Dorothy listed herself as “Mrs Dorothy T. Lewis”. She never lost her identity, though.

Then again, Dorothy was apparently a quite loquacious lady, and Lewis – perhaps like today’s furtive husband, who has fibbed to his wife that he’s given up smoking for her – just needed to step outside to take a breather. And talk to a man about a dog. And type …

Who knows? But taking a typewriter on a honeymoon? Not even I have done that. Yet. (Not that I can recall, anyway ...)

Still, the justification may well have been that Lewis was working on his next novel, Dodsworth, a satirical work published by Harcourt Brace & Company in March 1929. It was about the differences between US and European intellect, manners and morals. Do Europeans, for example, use a typewriter on their honeymoons?

Using a Fox portable? Lewis is certainly using a Fox standard below:

In 1930, Lewis became the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters." His writing contained “strong characterisations of modern working women”.

Dorothy Thompson was certainly a modern working woman, by then or now standards. Nonetheless, in writing to a friend in Berlin about her impending nuptials and honeymoon with the typewriter-laden Lewis, she said, “I am going to cook and Sinclair will drive (the touring car which pulled the large caravan)”.

Vincent Sheean, towards the end of this moving 1963 memoir about Lewis and Thompson,   Dorothy and Red, wrote, "It is a misfortune - nobody is to blame - that the greatest of American journalists should have been married to the greatest of American writers. Such things ought not to happen."

And sure enough, the marriage, which took place in London on May 14, 1928, didn’t last long – though long enough to produce a son, Michael, born in New York City on June 20, 1930, and later a TV actor (Michael died in a plane crash in New Jersey in 1975, aged 44).

Lewis, Vienna, 1949

The couple parted ways in 1937 and Dorothy was eventually granted a divorce and custody of Michael by a Vermont judge on January 3, 1942, on the grounds of "wilful desertion."

Lewis and Thompson met in Berlin in July 1927, not long after Thompson had become head of the New York Evening Post's Berlin office. The still-married (to Vogue editor Grace Livingston Hegger) Lewis was so smitten he pursued Thompson throughout Europe, including to the Soviet Union. Hegger officially ended her marriage to Lewis the day after its 14^th anniversary, by obtaining a Reno divorce on April 16, 1928, on the grounds of desertion. She gained custody of their son Wells (named after H.G.Wells; he died in 1944 while serving in World War II). Lewis remarried exactly one month later - it was a second marriage for both he and Thompson.

Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Stearns County, Minnesota, on February 7, 1885. He died in Roma, Italy, on January 10, 1951, a well-sozzled 65.

Dorothy Thompson was born in Lancaster, New York, on July 9, 1893, and died in Lisbon, Portugal on January 30, 1961, aged 67. In 1939 she was recognised by Time magazine as the second most influential woman in America next to Eleanor Roosevelt. She was the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, in 1934, and was one of the few women news commentators on radio during the 1930s. Thompson is often referred to as the “First Lady of American Journalism.” 

I'm left wondering: Did Dorothy also take her typewriter on her honeymoon? 

From The New York Times of April 24, 1928

Beauty and the Beasts: The Typewriter in the Leopold and Loeb Case

The Underwood 3 portable is one of the most beautiful typewriters ever made. Yet in May 1924, when this model had been on the market a mere five years, a little Underwood 3 was used for great evil.

In this photo taken on June 9, 1924, 19 days after 14-year-old Bobby Franks had been cruelly murdered in Chicago by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, Illinois State Attorney Robert Crowe, left, and diver Frank P. Blair, centre, are seen with the stolen Underwood 3 portable typewriter that was used by Leopold to write the ransom note in this infamous case.

Blair had recovered the Underwood portable from a muddy Jackson Park, Chicago, lagoon. The typewriter proved "the clincher" in incriminating Leopold and Loeb.
Leopold and Loeb had stolen the Underwood 3 on November 10, 1923, during a raid on Loeb's former Zeta Beta Tau fraternity house at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Police investigating the murder were later able to trace the typewriter back to this burglary, and to its owner Pierce H. Bitker, thus making the link between this particular machine and Loeb and Leopold.

Loeb had used pliers to take some of the keytops off Bitker’s typewriter. The pair threw a “little bundle” of keys off a bridge near a golden Statue of Liberty in Jackson Park. They then threw the Underwood, in its case, off the east side of a big stone bridge leading to the outer harbour.

After a confession made by Loeb to Assistant State Attorney John Sbarbaro and Captain William Shoemaker at 4am on May 31, 10 days after the murder, Blair was able to recover the Underwood. Here is the transcript of Loeb’s statement, typed by shorthand reporter F.A.Sheeder.

Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jr  and Richard Albert Loeb were two extremely intelligent, wealthy teenage Chicago law students who on May 21, 1924, carried out a “thrill killing”, intent on committing the perfect crime. In doing so, they took the innocent life of young Robert “Bobby’ Franks, son of Chicago millionaire Jacob Franks. All three families lived in the same affluent Kenwood neighbourhood on Chicago's Southside. Loeb's father, Albert, was vice-president of Sears Roebuck.

Leopold, left, and Loeb

Leopold and Loeb were sentenced to life imprisonment for murder and 99 years for kidnapping. Loeb died after an razor attack from a fellow prisoner in 1936, aged 30. Loeb was accused of making a sexual advance on the prisoner who killed him, leading to Ed Lahey’s lead sentence in the Chicago Daily News: "Richard Loeb, despite his erudition, today ended his sentence with a proposition." Leopold, after 33 years in prison, was released on parole in 1958, moved to Puerto Rico and died there in 1971, aged 66.

Clarence Darrow defended the murderers and his summation in their trial is noted for its influential criticism of capital punishment and retributive, as opposed to rehabilitative, penal systems.

After Bobby Franks’ body was found, Loeb took a pair of pliers to the stolen Underwood 3, which had been used to write letters to the Franks family and the ransom note. Loeb said he “pried off the keys, just the very tips of the keys, where the imprints would show”.

The Underwood 3 was in Leopold's possession. He also  owned a Hammond Multiplex typewriter, which police had confiscated in an attempt to make a match with the ransom note.

It was two reporters, however, who learned that Leopold had at least once used a portable typewriter to write study sheets. The reporters got their hands on a couple of these sheets and compared them with the typing on the ransom note. Leopold then admitted that he may have typed on the portable, but denied owning the machine - at least that part was true! His house was searched, but the portable was not found. However, a maid, Elizabeth Sattler, told police she remembered seeing an Underwood portable typewriter in the library of the Leopold house several weeks earlier.

Elizabeth Sattler, above, gave evidence at Leopold and Loeb's trial, regarding Leopold's use of the Hammond and the Underwood typewriters. When attorney Robert Crowe asked her to identify the Underwood 3, he said it would have been in "a little better condition" when she last saw it. Leopold and Loeb apparently started smiling. Evil is as evil does. 

The caption for this image says it is part of an Leopold and Loeb exhibit at Northwestern University Library, Evanston, Illinois. "One of Leopold and Loeb's ransom notes is displayed next to an Underwood typewriter similar to the one they used to type the note". Umm ... not quite ...
At least the exhibit got the brand right. This is from Stephen Dolginoff’s 2009 musical Thrill Me: The Leopold and Loeb Story: