Briefly Blick-Bar

March 1 this year will mark the 100th anniversary of the long-awaited launch of the Blick-Bar frontstrike standard typewriter. Many typewriter histories list the Blick-Bar's birth as 1913, but the Blickensderfer Manufacturing Company's six-figure royalty deal with Syracuse auto maker Harvey Allen Moyer to use its Stamford, Connecticut, factory to make the Moyer typewriter was blocked on November 6, 1913, by two Blickensderfer directors, wealthy young New York businessman John Augustus Le Boutillier (1875-1924) and George Henry Bartholomew (who between them held more than one-sixth of the capital stock). The arrangement had been for Blickensderfer to make and sell the machine and pay royalties on it to the Moyer company.

Le Boutillier and Bartholomew said they were content with the gradual but growing returns on their investments in the low-price Blick typewheel portables and felt the gamble on a $100 standard-sized frontstrike machine "of undemonstrated merit" was far too risky. They feared the move might bring about the collapse of the Blickensderfer company, which was founded in Stamford in 1893.
At the time the Blick-Moyer deal was blocked, the Emmit Girdell Latta-designed machine was to be marketed as the Moyer, but in March 1916 it finally emerged - for the first time - as the Blick-Bar. In the meantime, advances to the mechanical features relating to ball-bearing pivoted typebars had been made by Moyer's typewriter department superintendent, Norwegian-born former long-term Underwood engineer Oscar Carl Kavle (September 9, 1870-). Le Boutillier and Bartholomew believed the patent rights, jointly held by Moyer, Latta and Kavle, had still be to be "determined and settled". 

Harvey Moyer, left, and Oscar Kavle, right, aged 83 in Syracuse in 1953.

Above and below, Typewriter Topics, March edition, 1916.

Apart from the action of Le Boutillier and Bartholomew in calling a special meeting of Blickensderfer stockholders to rescind the decision to make the Moyer in Stamford, several other things had got in the way before the Blick-Bar eventually made its appearance. Not the least of these were George Canfield Blickensderfer's frantic work on the belt-loading mounted machine gun to be used in France in World War I (newspapers across the US reported that this hurried effort led directly to his sudden death on August 15, 1917, 17 weeks after the US had entered the war), the death of his first wife, Nellie, in June 1915, his remarriage, to Kate Helen Cochran, of Brooklyn, on September 21, 1916, the distraction of his sister-in-law Cecilia fighting to spare Amy Archer-Gilligan from a death sentence for multiple murders, and the massive order for the supply by Blickensderfer Manufacturing of typewheels for the Morkrum Printing Telegraph machine. Little wonder poor old George keeled over when he did.

The New York Times, October 25, 1913

Legal and other problems related to the Moyer machine had obviously been sorted out by March 1916, to the point at which the manufacturer would also have naming rights. But production of the Blick-Bar lasted barely a year. After George Blickensderfer's death, what were originally the Moyer-Latta-Kavle patents and the tooling for the Blick-Bar were sold to Harry Annell Smith, who built a factory in Elkhart, Indiana, to make it, but never did.

All lies and jest: Typewriter Topics, September 1916

Where the Blick-Bar did subsequently re-emerge was in England, where long-time Blickensderfer agents the Rimington family (by then running their own British version of the Blick company, as well as the British Typewriters Co and the Empire Typewriter Co) had models such as the British and the British Empire made by George Salter in West Bromwich in the early 1920s. This is the same company which also marketed such models at the Canadian-made Empire (originally Parker Kidder's the Wellington) and its variant, the German-made Blick Universal. The Rimingtons never had their own typewriter factory, unlike the Richardsons, whose Nottingham factory was taken over by the Jardines later in the 20s. Apart from Imperial, the only other major British typewriter plant until after World War II was Salters.

On the subject of the Stamford Blick company supplying the Morkrum Printing Telegraph machine with its typewheels, The New York Times reported on March 19, 1915:

Two interesting points regarding the cost of patents and of setting up production emerged from today's latest research into Blickensderfer and Latta. One is that it had cost George Blickensderfer $400,000 before he made his first machine, and in the preceding seven years the delay in starting manufacturing had eaten into the life of the original patents (in some cases by as much as a half). At that same time, it had cost Latta $10,000 for 67 patents, 46 of them for his famous folding bicycle.

The Hammond in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll's Typewriter Through the Looking Glass

Lewis Carroll's Hammond Model 1 typewriter

with Ideal keyboard (serial number 5621), sold to him by Witherby and Company of 74 Cornhill, London, on May 3, 1888 (when the author was 56) and now in the possession of American Carroll scholar and author Charlie Lovett.

It apparently remains in good working order and has four typeshuttles in different fonts, three of them housed in a wooden mounting on top of the front section (a very unusual extra). Below is an example of the Model 1 (serial number 9980) without the mounting for the spare typeshuttles. It was presumably optional - or was it Carroll's own idea? The split shuttles were folded together when stored in the mounting.

Carroll's real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and his Oxford University college, Christ Church, written by Carroll inside the case (below) of his Hammond typewriter.

For some time now I have been in the habit, when loitering with intent at a bookbarn, to pick up an interesting-looking book and turn to its index to see if it contains the word "typewriter". I rarely have any success, but just before Christmas (and still during the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) I came across The Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Discovering the Whimsical, Thoughtful and Sometimes Lonely Man Who Created Alice in Wonderland, by Jenny Woolf. This offered a bonus, as there were two pages mentioning typewriters, so I had to have it at a princely $10. 

Through the meticulous research over 18 years by Peter Weil - which Peter is always only too happy to share, for the sake of our collective knowledge of typewriter history - I had been well aware for some time that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's "early typewriter" was a Hammond. I was under the impression, however, that Dodgson had used it exclusively for his mathematical texts. Among other uses he put the Hammond to was in replying to requests for material, typed in the third person. Its present owner, Carroll scholar Charlie Lovett, says Dodgson "mostly used the typewriter to amuse his young friends, who would 'print poetry' on it".

One of Dodgson's first uses for his Hammond was to type a new edition

of his Memoria Technica in June 1888.

Little did I realise just how much is known about Dodgson's Hammond, or that it had come up for auction at Market Harborough in Leicestershire, England, on March 5, 2012. It sold for £7475 (including the 15 per cent buyer's premium, adding £975; that's about $US11,000 all up at today's exchange rates, an absolute bargain in my humble opinion). We know a lot about the typewriters owned and used by many famous authors, but seldom do we have information on when and where those machines were acquired by those writers, who taught them to use the typewriter, or - perhaps more importantly - what became of the typewriters. Amazingly, when Dodgson died on January 14, 1898, his Hammond was sold as part of the disposal of his estate for a mere £6 - to his own brother, Wilfred Longley Dodgson (1838-1914, below).

Charles Dodgson's typewriter instructor was the classical scholar Henry William Chandler (1828-89), from 1867 the Waynflete professor of moral and metaphysical philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford, and from 1884 a curator of the Bodleian Library. Dodgson's diary entry of May 4, 1888, says, "Chandler came across to show me how to work the 'Hammond Type-Writer', which arrived yesterday." How Chandler came to know about using a typewriter we may never know. And given Chandler, an insomniac, was in the habit of dosing himself up with chloral and prussic acid, we can only imagine how patient a typewriter teacher he was. But Dodgson's natural penchant for gadgets probably meant he needed very little tuition. Chandler died a year and 13 days after Dodgson had acquired the Hammond.

Sixteen days after taking possession of his Hammond, on Saturday May 19, 1888, Dodgson recorded a visit from a representative from Witherby and Company, the London firm which had sold him the machine. This was possibly a standard "customer service" follow-up, to ensure safe arrival from London and satisfactory performance. The agent was passing through Oxford and called in to discuss the typewriter with Dodgson. Witherby's, a major stationery company (which still exists) was the original British agent for Hammond (along with the more popular Hall index typewriter), but in 1890 Hammond established its own branch office in London, on "typewriter row" at 50 Queen Victoria Street.

Dodgson's Hammond from another angle. 

Dodgson's Hammond is today owned by North Carolina-born Charlie Lovett (1962-), a past president of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, a noted collector of Carroll ephemera and author of five books on Carroll. His quest for this Carroll "holy grail' began in the early 1980s when he found, in an antiques shop in London, a small handwritten note by Dodgson in which he asked for help in operating his new typewriter. Lovett has done much research into the Hammond and believes Dodgson took the machine with him on his summer travels to Eastbourne. 

Lovett (above) writes, "Within a week of receiving his machine, Dodgson, ever the inventor, had devised two improvements. The first involved the loading of the paper. Dodgson’s method was slightly more difficult, but much less likely to result in damaged paper (Dodgson himself called it a "very simple dodge"). The second improvement made his typewriter more like a modern word processor, for it produced a justified right margin. He achieved this by counting the number of characters in each line, and adding an appropriate number of spaces between words in order to produce lines of uniform length. Though this process was certainly tedious, Dodgson used it on occasion to produce documents that looked professionally printed. This, along with his references to its function as 'printing', is an indication that he considered his typewriter to be essentially a home printing press, a view that vanished but today again prevails in our expectation of producing professional-quality publications on home computers." (Note by RM: the idea that a typewriter was a "home printer" was shared by the great majority of owners of early typewriters, right across the world, including here in Australia. It should also be noted that Dodgson's laborious system of "justifying" lines has since come to be considered an "invention" [or at least a "modification"] of his, when it clearly was no such thing, but simply a very straightforward manipulation of the typewriter, of which any child was capable. I did it myself as a youngster.) 

Charles Dodgson, c1890?

"Dodgson used his typewriter for composing correspondence, entertaining his child friends and, in one instance, producing one of his desktop publications. He did not, however, rely heavily on the typewriter. The machine always remained something of a novelty to him and was more frequently used for the entertainment of children than for serious writing. Although Dodgson composed tens of thousands of letters in his lifetime, and several thousand of these are still extant, a careful search has brought to

light only 15 typed letters.

Wilfred Longley Dodgson on Charles' Velociman.

"When Dodgson died in 1898, his Hammond typewriter was not included in the sale of his effects; it was purchased [on February 18, 1898] by his brother Wilfred (referred to in early census returns by his second name, Longley, not Wilfred) from the estate for £6. Wilfred used the machine in association with his career as a land agent and was still using it as late as 1908, when he received a letter from [the] Hammond Typewriter [Company, presumably of London] on 26 March replying to his letter of the 25th in which he requested some new ribbon. The letter reads, in part: 'We are very glad to hear that you find the machine after all these years such a true servant to you that it is still enabled to do the work which you require of it.'"

Dodgson looks like he's dreamily polishing the turret from a Hammond,

 but he isn't. The photo was taken in 1863.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born in Daresbury, Cheshire, on January 27, 1832, and died at Guildford, Surrey, on January 14, 1898, aged 65. A writer, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer, he was a lecturer of mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford and published texts including Memoria Technica, Curiosa Mathematica, Principles of Parliamentary Representation and Symbolic Logic. He worked primarily in the fields of geometry, matrix algebra, mathematical logic and recreational mathematics. Two volumes, Curiosa Mathematica I (1888) and Curiosa Mathematica II (1892), could well have been written on his Hammond.

The Spirit Typewriter: Outing Ouija with the 'Edison of India'

Popular Science, February 1921

Gopalswamy Doraiswamy Naidu (1893-1974) is these days referred to as the "Edison of India". However, more than two years before Naidu's National Electric Works at Peelamedu, Coimbatore, had produced India's first car, obituaries in The New York Times and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle had declared Sunker Abaji Bisey as the "Edison of India".

*The name Atomidine comes from a company Bisey formed in 1932, three years before he died. It is a liquid iodine preparation that was recommended as a therapeutic measure in more than 2000 "readings" (channelled writings) by the "Sleeping Prophet", Edgar Cayce, one of America's greatest psychics. Cayce had been introduced to it by Bisey in 1931. His followers maintain Cayce was able to tap into some sort of higher consciousness, such as a god or the akashic record, to get his "psychic knowledge." In 1910 atomic iodine treatments had saved Bisey's life from malaria infection he contracted in France.

Sunker Abaji Bisey

Bisey is also known for two other inventions, the Ideal Type-Casting Machine and the "Spirit Typewriter" (Spiritualistic Communication Apparatus). His typecaster was the first to use a universally adjustable non-rubbing mold for casting single type. It also made lead rules.

The Bisey-Ideal Typecaster Corporation, or Biso-Type Ltd enterprise, dates from before Bisey's move from Britain to the United States. It started life as the Multiple Type-Casting Machine, first constructed in 1903. Bisey took an improved and modified unit to the Universal Type-Casting Machine Company of New York in 1916 and by April 1917 had completed work on his ultimate machine. With Bisey as director and technical adviser, his company was incorporated in August 1920, and headquartered at 8th Avenue and 40th Street West in New York City. But by November 1929 it was in such financial strife it couldn't pay its bills. Almost nothing is known of it today. One of the directors of Biso-Type was Henry Mayers Hyndman (1842-1921), a Cambridge-educated supporter of Indian self-rule and founder of Britain's Social Democratic Federation and the British (later National) Socialist Party.
All the while, Bisey was mixing his typecaster operation with his work promoting Atomidine through his American Beslin (“best liquid iodine”) Corporation, making a product he had first marketed in England in 1913. In 1926 Laboratoire Durveaux purchased Beslin and six years later Bisey formed Atomidine. Meanwhile, in 1917, Bisey patented a washing compound called Rola.

Bisey was a Maratha engineer born in Bombay (now Mumbai) on April 29, 1867. He studied at the Dhulia High School and after completing his education in 1887 entered the Public Service as an accountant's clerk. In 1895 Bisey exhibited optical illusions in Manchester and London and two years later won a Inventors' Review and Scientific Record prize for a machine which automatically weighed and delivered from bulk powder substances such as ground coffee, sugar and flour. He left India in May 1899 and his inventions in England from 1899 to 1908 were various automatic advertising machines. Some of these were revolving lamps with lights of different colours for display, exhibited at the London Coronation Show in 1902. By this time he had formed the Bisey Inventions Syndicate, with the backing of Sir Ratanji Tata (1871-1918), an Indian financier and philanthropist who was the son of the noted Parsi merchant Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata (1839-1904). Tata senior was a pioneer industrialist who founded the Tata Group, India's biggest conglomerate company. Tata is regarded as the "Father of Indian Industry". Bisey also had financial support from Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917), known as the Grand Old Man of India, a Parsi intellectual, educator, cotton trader, and early Indian politician (a founder of the Indian National Congress) and social leader. Naoroji had been a Liberal Party Member of Parliament in the House of Commons (1892-95), the first Asian to be a British MP.

In March 1920 Bisey applied for a patent for a foolproof alternative to the then popular Ouija board. His Spirit Typewriter operated with a triangular planchette that depressed typewriter-like keys. As the circular device was spun first, and the messages typed out-of-sight from the bottom of the device, the idea was to receive communications from the dead ("spirit operator") untainted by human influence. Bisey only made one copy of his invention - being counter-productive, it was hardly likely to be purchased by an Ouija-obsessed nation. 

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 29, 1929

More bangs for your bucks: Lizzie and May Bangs

The idea of spirits using typewriters had been around long before Bisey's machine came along to debunk the nonsense. In 1893, a spiritualist newspaper reported that a Smith Premier typewriter began to write by itself during a séance with a medium named Lizzie Bangs: “The medium does not touch the typewriter at all; it is used independent of or without contact from the medium’s hands or fingers. There is no holding or hesitating in the action of the machine; on the contrary, you hear that it is operated with an astonishing degree of swiftness and dexterity.”

One of the most enthusiastic attendees at Bangs’ 1893 séance was typewriter entrepreneur George Washington Newton Yost. In 1895 Yost financed a similar event at Carnegie Hall, showcasing the sham skills of the notorious Chicago charlatan Henry R. Rogers. Later that year, a few months after Yost’s death and four years after spiritualist Helene Petrova Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, had died, 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. In the early 20th Century that wicked Manchurian William Thompson Braham (1846-1910) invented a “wonderful spirit communicator” modelled on early index typewriters.

2016: The Year of the Typewriter?

*Words are Winged:

Yes, here's that Sun No 2 again, on someone's T-shirt.

Everything works fine on mine except that the ink pod

doesn't swing across to brush the typeslug on its way

to the printing point, so I don't get an impression.

I believe Richard Polt's Sun No 2 may be similar in this regard. 

Typewriter Topics ushered in 1916 with high expectations of record typewriter sales. One hundred years later we're hoping the interest being generated across the globe by Richard Polt's book The Typewriter Revolution will result in further growth in (second-hand) typewriter sales. I thought Ted Munk made some excellent points in his blog post of three weeks ago, "Aristocratic Monkey Spanking, the Revolution and Secret Society Wars Cycle 19", and I hope he won't mind me reproducing some of them here:

Yes, so let's make 2016 the Year of the Typewriter!

Miss Typewriter 2015