The Spy Who Typed Me: 50 Years of James Bond

James Bond fever is sweeping the world yet again, with Skyfall marking the Golden Anniversary of Bond movies. According to Ian Fleming biographer John Pearson, Bond was created by Fleming on Tuesday, January 15, 1952.

Pearson says Fleming used a "20-year-old portable typewriter". Yet it also happens to be the same day that Fleming received from the US the gold-plated Royal Quiet DeLuxe he had ordered at a cost of $US174.

According to Fleming, the character Commander James Andrew Thomas Bond was born in Essen, Germany, on November 11, 1920.

Vanity Fair and LIFE are among the publications celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Bond movies. On October 7-14, 1966, LIFE ran a two-part series on Fleming by Pearson, based on Pearson’s biography, which emphasised that Bond had been created by a man with first-hand experience in espionage.

Fleming had died more than two years earlier.

The images of Fleming using an Olympia SF portable typewriter were taken by Harry Benson on February 23, 1964, in Fleming's study at Goldeneye, his home at Oracabessa, St Mary, in north Jamaica.

Four years ago, Fleming's original desk from Goldeneye went on display at the For Your Eyes Only exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London. If this is authentic, Fleming used a Remington Remette. 

Alan Seaver Collection

The exhibition included research notes for the Bond books and memorabilia from Fleming’s time as a foreign correspondent in World War II.

The photos of Fleming using a Triumph were taken at Goldeneye in the late 1950s.

At an action at Christie’s of London on November 1, 2006, a number of Fleming’s letters were sold, including one to his typist, Margaret Anderson, jokingly describing the gold-plated typewriter as a "beastly machine". 

DID YOU KNOW?

One James Bond actor came from this neck of the woods. George Lazenby (On Her Majesty's Secret Service, 1969) was born in Goulburn and grew up in Queanbeyan, just outside Canberra.
When Fleming himself is portrayed in a movie, the part will be played by Geoffrey Rush, who is a dead ringer!

Ian Fleming was a record-breaking long-jumper at Eton College:

And let's not forget Miss Moneypenny (the late Canadian-born actress Lois Maxwell):

On This Day in Typewriter History: The Mercury Typewriter

PART 193

Image from Friedrich Müller's Schreibmaschinen und Schriften-Vervielfältigung  courtesy of Richard Polt at The Classic Typewriter Page

I've been wanting to write something about Frederick Myers and his Mercury typewriter for a few weeks now, and today I get another opportunity to do so.

The last time I approached the subject I baulked at it because the only decent image of the Mercury available is on Richard Polt’s The Classic Typewriter Page, accompanying a story about the Mercury. It can be found here. 

Doing this “On This Day in Typewriter History” series is a tough enough gig, but I rely heavily for help from my typewriter collecting friends across the globe and if I didn’t get the generous assistance and encouragement from people like Richard Polt, Alan Seaver, Will Davis, Peter Weil, Martin Howard, Flavio Mantelli, Paul Robert, Richard Milton, Georg Sommeregger, Herman Price, Anthony Casillo, Wim Van Rompuy, Markus Elster, Chuck Dilts, Darryl Rehr, Tom Russo, Adwoa Bagalini and so many other kind people, it would be absolutely impossible.

Still, I try very hard not to outstay my welcome and to be more self-reliant for images, without which these posts would look very dull indeed. So I have outlaid quite a few dollars to ship in from Germany Friedrich Müller's Schreibmaschinen und Schriften-Vervielfältigung and Ernst Martin's Die Schreibmaschine und ihre Entwicklungsgeschichte, to give myself a few more options. I might not be able to read the text, but I’ll have fun looking at the illustrations! Also, new-found access to back issues of Typewriter Topics will help enormously, too.

Anyway, on to the Mercury ...

Frederick Myers was not, as some typewriter histories would have us believe, an Englishman. At the time of applying for eight of his nine typewriter patents in 1890-91, he was based in Liverpool in England but was a United States citizen. He applied for the ninth in New York.

Myers was born to Frederick and Judah Myers in Baltimore in 1841. He was a mariner and first travelled to Liverpool as a boatswain on the Annapolis in 1871. Myers settled in Preston, Lancashire, with his family and started a grocery store, but in 1874 went bankrupt, owing many creditors. It took a while for him to work his way out of that setback, but Myers seems to have had marginally more success with typewriter inventing.

In 1886-87 Myers designed two machines, one with typebars in two semi-circles hanging over the platen, the keys being attached directly to the bars. The other had a conventional keyboard (though Myers took the “Q” from the top left to the bottom right) with a very large typewheel. Myers patented both throughout Europe and in the US. They were both assigned to the Mercury Type Writing Machine Company of London.

In 1889 Myers came up with the machine we know as the Mercury, yet this patent was unassigned. An improved design for this was patented on this day (December 2) in 1890 and was also unassigned.

Myers continued to work on this design yet in 1891 persisted with the large typewheel idea for Mercury. Eventually he reverted to something like the Mercury typewriter, and to QWERTY. No sane man would be able to make head nor tail of Myers’ designs, yet toward the end of the 19th century the Mercury was somehow made and marketed. It sold for eight guineas, weighed only 8lb and measured 7½ inches square by 4 inches high.

From Mares

Myers returned to the US in 1894 and for the next 30 years concentrated his inventing efforts on the like of phonographs and pneumatic tires. During that time he established both the Myers Manufacturing Company in New York and the Myers Phonograph Corporation. He also designed for Stylophone.

On This Day in Typewriter History: Four Strange Typewriters

PART 192

What have we here? Well, believe it or not, they’re all typewriters, of a sort. Two are from Charles Spiro and one each from Thomas Hall and Suyeoto Fujiki, all dating from 1880-1891. Spiro and Hall were, of course, among the true greats of typewriter inventing. But we know nothing of Fujiki, except that he appears to have been away ahead of his time.

First, Hall’s famous index typewriter, one of the earliest typewriters ever marketed. A patent application was made on this day (December 1) in 1880. It was issued three months later.

Interestingly, this same patent was at the centre of a Federal Circuit Court patent infringement case in Massachusetts in July 1893, between the National Typewriter Company, incorporated in Maine, and the Pope Manufacturing Company. It was decided the “defendant [Pope], being a foreign corporation, incorporated under the laws of Connecticut, cannot, under the recent decisions of the Supreme Court, be sued in this district.” So did Pope make a version of the Hall? And why was this case heard in Massachusetts?

Hall machines were originally made by Hall's own company in New York and Salem, Massachusetts, but according to Paul Lippman's American Typewriters, National manufactured the "Boston Hall" in Philadelphia (from, I believe, 1889). According to the Smithsonian Institute, National is "not to be confused with the company in Philadelphia of the same name". But the Smithsonian seems to be utterly confused itself over whether the "New Model Hall" was made by National or the Philadelphia Typewriter Company. I'm afraid I can't sort that one out.

Here is my Salem Hall, still without a plunger (but I’m getting to it …).

Thomas Hall was born in Philadelphia on February 4, 1834, the son of an English-born machinist, Henry Hall, and his wife Alice Baker Hall. Hall died in Brooklyn on November 19, 1911, aged 77.

The Spiro music writing typewriter was patented on this day in 1885. The machine sold for $10 in 1886.

It was described in Appletons' Annual Cyclopaedia 1890 as the Columbia typewriter having been adapted, “by a special device, to print in the words of a song by the use of an additional typewheel. It is 4½ inches in length, 2 inches in width, and 2½ inches in height, and weighs ½ a pound. There is a disk, a handle, and a base. The disk contains on its periphery the requisite characters ... The disks are three - one containing the notes, one for inserting accidentals, and one for signatures and barring.”

Columbia 2

On this day in 1891, Spiro was issued with a patent for this six-line typewheel (or more likely a typesleeve) typewriter. I don’t know if anything became of the design.

Spiro was born in Prussia on January 1, 1850. He later claimed (in passport applications and on census forms, no less) that he was born New York.  He died in 1933.

Charles Spiro

Suyeoto Fujiki, of Tokyo, was also issued with a “type writing machine” patent on this day in 1891. Fujiki’s stopwatch-like typewriter looks suspiciously like the famous Italian-made Taurus, described by Paul Robert at the Virtual Typewriter Museum as "definitely one of the smallest, oddest, clumsiest and most desirable typewriters ever produced". See. 

The Taurus was produced 17 years after Fujiki’s patent, in 1908, by Pietro Torrani of Milan. The major difference between the two miniature typewriters is that with Fujiki’s design, the device was laid on paper, whereas the Taurus had a thin strip of paper inside the “watch”. Fujiki’s typewriter had an ink pad rolling over the character ring, and a depression key on the opposite end to the winder. The dial was essentially the same. Torrani and his associate Giovanni Zanini, who made a “spy” camera, also called a Taurus, in 1904, perhaps adapted Fujiki’s design when Fujiki’s patent expired in about 1905. 

On This Day in Typewriter History: Kidder’s Midget Typewriter

PART 191

The ‘Incased Collapsible Typewriter’

Is it the Rochester? Or it is something else? The 1920 Bates version

Kidder's 1923 Rochester 'pocket typewriter'

In the January 1923 issue of Office Appliances: The News and Technical Journal of Office Equipment, an item appeared under the headline, “To Produce Midget Typewriter”. The intriguing sub-heading read, “Old Typewriter Man Invents Unique Machine and Interests Group of Well-Known Business Men in Its Manufacture”.

The item said reports of this “midget typewriter” had first appeared in New York daily newspapers in late December 1922, with the announcement of the organisation of Rochester Industries.

The “old typewriter man” to whom the item referred was Wellington Parker Kidder, who at the time of the magazine’s publication was a month short of 70 and who had been inventing typewriters for more than 45 years, starting with the Franklin.

Wellington Parker Kidder (1853-1924)

The item went on, however, to say that the inventor of the “midget typewriter”, to be made by Rochester Industries, was not Kidder but one Harry Bates.  Bates had “developed it in association with Wellington P.Kidder, consulting engineer of the new company [Rochester Industries]. Both gentleman have invented a number of mechanisms in the typewriter field.” That was a gross understatement in Kidder’s case.

In this series, in late July last year, we looked at the Rochester typewriter, for which Typewriter Topics in 1923 had given Kidder all the credit. Kidder had described it as a “pocket typewriter”, one which could fit in “an ordinary overcoat pocket”. This appears to be "tilting typewriter" - it tilts up at the front.

There can be no doubt that Kidder’s “pocket typewriter”, the Rochester, and Bates’s “midget typewriter” are practically one and the same machine - except for the tilt. The "midget typewriter" appears to fold down into the case when the lid is closed. This, too, was a Kidder concept.

The Rochester I featured in this series was heavily advertised in Typewriter Topics in 1923 – with illustrations of a machine which was allegedly launched on the market in June that year - and based on a patent Kidder had applied for on July 25, 1919, and which he assigned to Rochester Industries (of Rochester, incorporated in New York). He renewed the application on Christmas Eve 1923 and it was issued on July 29, 1924. Kidder died nine weeks later, on October 2, 1924.

Kidder's 1918 'midget typewriter'

It turns out, however, that there is an earlier design. This one, for which Kidder applied for a patent on this day (November 30) in 1918, and which was issued on July 5, 1921, was assigned one third to Bates and two-thirds to the International Lettergraph Corporation of 76 East 56th Street, New York (incorporated as a “foreign business corporation” in Delaware on February 17, 1920).

The plot now thickens. On September 20, 1920, Bates applied for a patent for the same machine, assigned to Rochester Industries (image top of post). This was issued on December 30, 1924, almost three months after Kidder had died.

The most obvious link between the Kidder “midget typewriter” design of 1918 and the Bates design of 1920 is that typewriter structure is connected to the lid of the typewriter’s case.

Kidder called his machine an “Incased Collapsible Typewriter” (or of “an otherwise compactible nature”). Being designed in 1918, it is a clear response by Kidder (and Bates, who worked for Underwood) to the Corona 3 (and also perhaps the Fox foldable).

Bates's 1920 practical interpretation of the 1918 Kidder concept

Kidder described the arrangement thus: “The object … is to produce a case which with its machine will upon its closing simultaneously effect the collapse, fold or other movement of the machine by which it is rendered more compact.

“The difficulties of effecting compact incasement by which a portable typewriter of minimum size may be secured is obviously great and the necessity of preserving practical standards of typewriter characteristics is obvious.

“Two general relationships desired may be initially considered. First, the positive and simultaneous actuation of case movement and machine collapse, and second, a like relationship in relative movement of machine and case.

“While these features are fundamentally distinct and each highly important they are capable of combination.”

So what to make of all this? It seems clear that Kidder began working on his “midget typewriter” on behalf of Bates and the International Lettergraph Corp. Then Bates took it over as his own project, after Rochester Industries had been set up. But Kidder later renewed his application and had another dab at it. Was Kidder enticed back into the venture because Bates couldn’t complete it on his own? Or did Kidder simply return on his own accord, having decided to abandon the “midget” in favour of the “pocket” typewriter?

Interestingly, nowhere in Typewriter Topics’ lengthy blurb about the Rochester is Bates mentioned. Apart from Kidder, the only other person referred to is Rochester Industries president Morton Howard Anderson (born to Norwegian parents in Wisconsin, November 14, 1873; died Los Angeles, March 3, 1955).

Harry Bates is perhaps best known as the inventor of the coin-operated, time-controlled machine which he designed in 1908 and later re-assigned to the Underwood Automatic Typewriter Pay Station Company.

In the September 1912 edition of Popular Mechanics Magazine, a lead feature article on Bates said “typewriter pay stations” had been “introduced throughout the country”.

Bates worked for the Underwood Typewriter Company from 1912 until 1920, but his first typewriter design was a truly weird machine he assigned to George H. Russell of Rensselaer in 1904. He also worked on teaching and educational machines for Underwood.

Born in New York City in October 1868, Bates first worked as a newspaper journalist before becoming manager of a typewriter store. Before embarking on the Rochester project, he was advertising manager for Underwood.

Bates' toy version of 1934

Whether or not the Rochester pocket typewriter did appear in June 1923, the Kidder-Bates “midget typewriter” idea disappeared for 10 years. Then it suddenly re-emerged with a large number of patents assigned to the Bates Laboratory of New York.

Bates' 1934 version of the 'midget typewriter'

These new designs came from Bates and, in some cases, Bates and a Joseph Lee Sweeney. They included noiseless (developed by Raphael Atti from Kidder’s original concepts), compact and toy versions. These patents were issued right up until 1941.

The final 1938 Bates-Sweeney design incorporated Bates'

educational and teaching typewriter ideas.