Newton's Fourth Law: Irresistible Typewriters!

An edited version of my weekly column, which appears in Friday's The Canberra Times:

Having spent much of the past 12 weeks wading through acres of typewriters, lifting, moving and stacking them in preparation for next month’s exhibition at the Canberra Gallery and Museum, I was not just knackered but totally typewritered out. I went into the paying job and told Canberra Times day editor Grant Newton, “It’s all your fault!” His eyes widened and he asked, “What for now?” “For me having 100 times more typewriters than the 10 which, at the absolute outside, I might possibly need.”

         I reasoned that it all started one Monday morning about 10 years ago when I arrived at The Canberra Times to find my desk festooned with nine colourful portable typewriters. “Where did this little lot come from?” Newton, in those days features editor, owned up and explained he’d been to Revolve on Mugga Lane the day before looking for parts for a cistern. Instead, he’d come away with a little booster for my previously well-contained collection. Little? It quadrupled it in size. And after that I was hooked.  Newton had pointed me to a Golconda I hadn’t known existed. For many years thereafter I haunted Revolve, even when it was forced down the road to Hume, and typewriters were exposed to the elements. Goodness, what treasures I found there!

Unwittingly, perhaps, my friend had introduced Newton’s fourth law of motion: “When two bodies [mine and a typewriter’s] interact by exerting force on each other [its appeal and my compulsion to own it], these action and reaction forces are equal in magnitude [resulting in me irresistibly lifting it], but opposite in direction [thus lowering my bank balance].”

I exacted revenge on Mr Newton by giving him this typewriter

on his 40th birthday, in 2007

One early visit to Mugga Lane was on a Friday morning after I had set a display at the National Library for the Literary Festival. It was to show models favoured by famous writers. One machine I was missing was a Hermes Baby, John Steinbeck’s preferred portable.  On my way home, I speculatively popped into Revolve and instantly stumbled across a near-new Hermes Baby and a rare French Beaucourt Message. Oh, how I miss those days at Revolve!

Revolve in its big green shed, as it once was and is now sorely missed

         One memorable sweltering summer’s afternoon, with the tip’s scents swirling across the open Hume lot, I came across, buried beneath the usual assortment of kitchen sinks, vanity units and light stands, an Adler typewriter which had been used by Willy Scheidegger’s Swiss typing schools. The keytops were supposed to be covered by plastic colour coded caps, designed to teach touch typing, but these had been spread about the case. Helen, my long-time Revolve heroine, charged me the standard princely sum of $5. But when I got it home I found some of the caps were missing. So I went straight back to John Cory Circuit, got down on my hands and knees and dug into the hardened bare earth with my fingernails. Yes, I found all the missing caps. They’d fallen out of the case and been trampled into the ground by the hordes which once prowled through Revolve. That Scheidegger has since put in touch with helpful friends from Geneva to Turin.

Where I dug up the key caps

Until Newton’s intervention, I had kept a slowly emerging interest in check. At a house warming party to which then Canberra Times night editor Andrew Fraser had invited me, in 2001, I noted the way the Remington portable once owned by his father, the late federal MP Jim Fraser, was eye-catchingly positioned in a corner cabinet. Just the sort of thing I could do, I thought, with that little black Imperial I had been eyeing but hitherto resisting in a bric-a-brac store in Moruya. A couple of garage sales later and I had a tidy collection of three typewriters. Then came the first really big mistake: I went looking for the two models I had first used, and found eBay.

Not, as it turned out, that I really needed to go hunting online. I soon figured that in the 1950s and 60s, Canberra’s academics and public servants, and the district’s immigrants, had ensured that this was the typewriter capital of the southern hemisphere. Revolve, after Newton had pointed me in its direction, had become just one form of proof of this. The other was, as I have mentioned here before, the number of Canberrans who, learning I “gave typewriters a good home”, showered me with the gifts of their wonderful old machines.

When I started putting together a book to coincide with next month’s exhibition at the Museum and Gallery in Civic, featuring the 100 typewriters that will be on display there, I became even more acutely aware of how fortunate I have been in this regard. So many of the 100 are listed with the names of their donors. These might be short lines in a small document, but the largesse of such kind and generous people does mean an awful lot to me.

Here are a few of the donated typewriters which will be in the exhibition:

Carl Sundberg’s European-made Remington Portable Typewriters

To mark last week’s end of Maya Stein’s epic 1300-mile, 40-day poetry-writing Type-Ride from Amherst, Massachusetts, to Milwaukee, toting her Remington Ten Forty portable typewriter behind her bike, let’s take a look at Carl Sundberg’s Sperry-Rand Remington portable typewriter designs, all for machines which were made in Holland and Germany.

But first, a congratulatory flower for Maya:

The Ten Forty (Envoy II series) was one of many Remington typewriters that came from the drawingboard of Sundberg, one of America’s leading late 20th century industrial designers.

Indeed, Sundberg was probably the most influential typewriter designer of the age. Among the many leading typewriter designers influenced by Sundberg were Ettore Sottsass, Henry Dreyfuss, Richard Penney, Charles Jaworski and Ed Johnson, Eliot Noyes, Anton Demmel, Laird Covey, Karl Baughman, Alfons Boothby, David Chase and Philip Stevens. Even the original Barbie toy typewriter was a salute to Sundberg.

Sundberg’s first typewriter design was for IBM in 1955. This was for what we generally call the IBM Executive (Model C/Model 41); John Steinbeck can be seen below using one. Noyes followed Sundberg's design with the casing for the Selectric.

In 1959 Sundberg, working with partner Montgomery Ferar, switched allegiance to Sperry Rand and designed the much-loved Remington Monarch portable. This was the first of the Remington portables made in Holland, after Remington pulled out of Glasgow in Scotland because of industrial disputes (see separate post).
There were larger-sized versions of this same design made, and Thomas A.Russo in his book Mechanical Typewriters (2002) says these are "Believed to [represent] the first appearance of a typewriter with a plastic-like casing. The material was Cycolac, a Borg-Warner product composed of an ABS compound ... It was actually stronger than the traditional die cast aluminium frames. Another added feature is that the colour was impregnated into the material, eliminating the need to repaint." ABS stands for Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene.  ABS was certainly used later in the 1960s, on the Olivetti Valentine, and in later model Remington portables shown below, such as the Envoy II and III series. However, it's my firm belief that the Monarchs of the Sundberg design shown here are made of metal. I also have some of the larger versions, including a standard-sized machine, and to me they are also made of metal.

As well as the Monarch, Remington resurrected other earlier model names, such as Quiet-Riter, Travel-Riter, Letter-Riter, Personal-Riter and, perhaps most notably, Envoy. But many new model names also began to appear, ranging from Starfire to Streamliner to Riviera, Capri (Sears-Tower), Ten Forty, Correspondent, Reporter, Premier and Premium, to name but a few.

In 1961 Sundberg followed the Monarch with the Envoy II series design. This model appeared under numerous names, including the Ten Forty. The Envoy II and III lines were certainly made of plastic, but whether to use of Cycolac was Sundberg's innovation is unknown.

GTHawk Collection

That same year, Sundberg designed another Remington portable, most commonly known as the Fleetwing. This line was, according to Thomas Russo, made in Germany, and is relatively rare, especially when compared with the very common Envoy II machines. GTHawk says his Fleetwing, with the serial number ERF115417, was made in Britain in 1963, which seems a bit odd given it was designed in the year (1961) that Remington moved out of Britain; the company was long gone from there by 1963. The ERF sequence, according to the 1973 British Typewriter Age Guide, starts at 500,000.

The Envoy II was followed by the Envoy III series, another model which appeared under countless names and colours. This used the same base and mechanics and many of the same components as the Envoy II, but had a new, more squared-off top mask.

In 1965 Sundberg designed a fourth Remington portable, the Mark II, one which is also relatively rare compared to the Envoys II and III. Again, Russo says these were made in Germany. 

Duffy Moon Collection

Many collectors have commented on the likeness of this German Torpedo with its Remington-style keytops  to the fourth Sundberg Remington design. I do not have a Fleetwing or a Mark II in my collection and am happy to accept Thomas Russo's word that both lines were made in Germany. It might be assumed, if this was indeed the case, that Remington's connection with Torpedo, which dated back to 1931, was a factor. One will note from the serial numbers below that neither the Fleetwing nor Mark II had particularly long production lives (five and three years respectively).

Among Sundberg’s 160 patents are at least 12 for typewriters, many of them jointly with Ferar and most for Sperry Rand.

Will Davis on his Portable Typewriter Reference Site says of Sundberg’s portable designs: “This line consisted of very small and cheap portables … made in Holland, and which used rocking carriage shift.  There are numerous variations in these machines' body styles, and the line was made from about 1961-1973 or so, as near as we can figure.

“The more interesting machines in this line have black keytops, on which the characters are printed in the same colour as the typewriter body.  [The] Envoy II, introduced in 1965, has this feature, and also has the articulated ribbon cover.  Most have a simple snap-on cover; be careful the first time you encounter a machine of this line, as force is needed to open the snap-on cover, but will damage an articulated one.”

Will says the Sperry Rand logo was first used in 1967, but I tend to think it came in a few years earlier. After all, Remington-Rand merged with the Sperry Corporation in 1955, and Sperry Rand’s name is on the 1961 Monarch.

Ryan Adney Collection

Will adds, “This sort of styling is sensibly the last for true Remington-made machines; in the late 1960s, Remington had begun selling machines which were manufactured by Brother in Japan, only one of which (the Remington Performer) was specially styled for Remington [actually, this is not quite true, either, as the Performer is the Brother Super Deluxe 1450]. 

"These, then, mark the end of the oldest US typewriter manufacturer's production.”

CARL SUNDBERG-DESIGNED

REMINGTON PORTABLE TYPEWRITERS:

SERIAL NUMBERS 1962-73

Carl Wilhelm Sundberg was born in Calumet, Michigan, on March 11, 1910. He graduated from Northern High School and attended Wicker Art School in Detroit. He began his career in 1927 designing custom car bodies under Ray Dietrich at Dietrich Body Company, then worked in plastics design at Kurz-Kasch. He joined General Motors Art and Color Section, under Harley J. Earl, where he met Ferar. In 1934, he and Ferar left GM and formed the partnership of Sundberg-Ferar. 

Company headquarters moved from Detroit to Royal Oak, Michigan, and then to Southfield, Michigan, in 1959.

Sundberg’s enduring achievements stretched way beyond typewriters, of course. Indeed, in this photo, Sundberg and Ferar are seen with many of their designs, and I cannot see one typewriter amongst them!

Sundberg designed computers for IBM and in the 1960s many jukeboxes for Seeburg. On a much larger scale, in 1964 he and Ferar designed the Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART), the first new US regional transit system since 1907 set a new typeform for modern mass transit. In 1986 it was adapted by the New South Wales Rail Authority in Australia. Sundberg and Ferar also designed subway and rapid transit vehicles for New York City, Washington DC, Chicago, Atlanta and Dallas.

Ferar (born in Boston, 1910) and an architecture graduate from MIT (1932), joined Sundberg in designing appliances for Sears Roebuck, Whirlpool, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Carrier, Masco, Chrysler and Electrolux. From 1970-80 Ferar taught industrial design at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit. Both he and Sundberg retired in 1975.

Sundberg had helped his friend Powel Crosley in styling Crosley’s late 1940s sedans. Famous car-designer John Tjaarda was paid $5000 to submit dashboard designs for Crosley’s Hotshot, but they weren't used. Instead, Sundberg and Crosley did most of the styling. Ironically, Tjaarda’s son Tom Tjaarda, also a car designer, later took to designing typewriters (see the SCM Ghia-designed Super G).  The 1950  Crosley Hotshot was a small, economical but amazingly well-built sports car that won awards in international racing and sold for half the price of most of its competitors.

Sundberg died in Boynton Beach, Florida, on March 1, 1982, aged 71.

Some more Sundberg Remington typewriters:

From Maya's journey