Salute to the Corona 3 Portable Typewriter on its 100th Anniversary: Part III

Reaching Record Peaks:

The Midas Touch

New Model, Expanded Factory,

1300% increase in British business,

100 new Groton homes,

Australian Prime Minister takes on world tour

The Corona Typewriter Company greeted 1916 full of confidence in its immediate future. Indeed, looking back now, it seems almost like cockiness. But why not? The Corona 3 folding portable typewriter had become, in 3 ½  short years from its advent in May 1912, by far the hottest topic in the worldwide typewriter industry.
Monthly Typewriter Topics issues in 1916 were to be jam packed with Corona 3 news - about the massive expansion of the Groton factory, building 100 new homes in Groton to accommodate rapid increases in staff numbers, record sales, and Corona conventions across the US to mark the introduction of a modified, improved version of the Corona 3.
The Corona 3, Typewriter Topics noted, had developed something of a Midas touch. In mid-October 1916, Corona Typewriter Company workers had - when they found some spare time from making thousands of the new portable typewriters each month - uncovered a rich source of natural gas outside Groton.
World War I had closed off major typewriter markets (Germany, perhaps, most notably; think of the emergence of Corona 3-like machines in that country at this time). But Corona had more than compensated for this loss of trade. Business in Britain had increased 13-fold.
As in the previous year, Corona 3s were proving their popularity, portability and adaptability by being taken everywhere humanly accessible, and being used by adventurers, political activists and Australian prime ministers on trips around the world and across America.
Motivated by positive feedback from Ray Nickson, Florian and Cameron Kopf, I am pressing on with this series while I can, with just two days left before the year of the centenary of the Corona 3 ends.

REACHING THE HIGHEST PEAKS

AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER'S CORONA 3

Billy Hughes

Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes was introduced to the Corona 3 folding portable typewriter by his private secretary, former typewriter salesman Percival Edgar (Percy) Deane. Deane, born on August 10, 1890,  at Port Melbourne, was an expert shorthand-writer. He served in Egypt in 1914 but was invalided home and was appointed private secretary to Hughes at a salary of £408. Shortly after taking up his post, Deane met and married Hughes's typist, Ruth Marjorie Manning.

Hughes took his Corona 3 with him when he travelled across the Pacific and North America on his way to England in mid-1916. William Morris Hughes was born on September 25, 1862, at Pimlico, London, the son of a Welsh-born British Houses of Parliament carpenter. Billy Hughes left Britain for Queensland in October 1884 as an assisted migrant. He became Australian Prime Minister in October 1915 when Andrew Fisher resigned. Hughes was given secret information by governor-general Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson about Japan's intentions in the Pacific and decided he must have urgent discussions with the British government and the prime ministers of Canada and New Zealand. Hughes and his Corona 3 reached England, via Wellington and Ottawa, on March 7, 1916. There he had help from Rupert Murdoch's war correspondent father, Keith Murdoch, in public relations. In June Hughes was part of the British delegation to an allied conference in Paris to determine economic policies towards Germany. While in France he visited the front, where he had contact with the Australian troops.

CORONA 3s ON THE FRONT

SUFFRAGETTES RIDE GOLDEN FLIER 

WITH A CORONA 3

On April 6, 1916, in an attempt to influence politicians and public opinion, suffragists Nell Richardson and Alice Burke, left New York in their yellow Baby Saxon car (the "Golden Flier") to drive across and around America to gain support for voting rights for women. With them was a black kitten, also named Saxon, and a black Corona 3 folding portable typewriter. Sponsored by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Burke, of Illinois, and Richardson, of Virginia, got back to New York at the end of September 1916 after travelling 10,700 miles.  The United States was divided into “yellow” and “black” states: yellow states supported women’s suffrage; black states did not. The pair got lost for four nights in a desert. They expressed surprise that Southern men were more interested in hearing what they had to say than those in more northern states.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE:

THE CORONA 3 AND THE 'SPY'

William Washburn Nutting was a "mid-westerner of great personal charm and energies, with no yachting experience whatever when he arrived in New York in about 1907", to begin a career as a writer and later editor of various yachting magazines, including Motor Boat. He subsequently was commissioned in the US Navy and served on the famed 110-foot sub chasers of World War I. Nutting was the first Commodore of the Cruising Yacht Club of America. 

CORONA 3 AT WORLD'S

MOST POPULAR WATERING HOLE

MIDAS TOUCH OF CORINA 3

October 19, 1916: "...Everybody connected

with the Corona was lucky"

Corona's first "spot colour" advertisement, Typewriter Topics 1916 

LONDON'S CALLING

WHY CAN'T ONE BUY A SECOND-HAND CORINA 3?

THE NEW CORONA 3, APRIL 1916

CORONA EXPANSION

Pre-expansion

August 1, 1916

September 1, 1916

October 1, 1916

CORONA CONVENTIONS

Salute to the Corona 3 Portable Typewriter on its 100th Anniversary: Part II

On Land, At Sea, in the Air - 

the Corona 3 was EVERYWHERE!

(EVEN IN FAR OFF AUSTRALIA)

(and in the wastes of the ARCTIC Circle)

There can be no doubt that the First World War (1914-18) was timely for Corona, if any war could be described as "timely" for anyone. 

But evidence that this compact, lightweight portable typewriter could easily be taken into all theatres of war, and used in the air, at sea (and under it) and anywhere on the land unquestionably boosted sales considerably.

Corona definitely played on this in its promotion of the typewriter.

Note the use of the tripod in the New York display below. Australian war correspondent Charles Bean (later Australia's official war historian) used such a tripod, and it can be seen with one of his Corona 3s in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. After the war, Bean wrote the first volumes of his official war history on a Corona 3 at Tuggeranong Homestead in Canberra.

Typewriter Topics 1915.

The tripods were designed in February 1915 by Otto Petermann (see earlier post).

THE CORONA 3:

'SOME PEACH' OF A TYPEWRITER

These letters, published in Typewriter Topics in 1915, one from a Scottish Corona salesman serving on the Western Front, the other from a Siedel & Naumann head mechanic imprisoned in a PoW camp on the Isle of Man, are quite fascinating. The "present belligerent typewriter men" were, at least briefly from 1918-39, reunited with "a higher and better feeling":

Canadian soldier beside a field gun

The notorious Count Jacques Alexander von Mourik de Beaufort

(aka Jack or James van Maurik de Beaufort) did indeed survive the war, as this report

from a May 1917 edition of Variety testifies:

The "Count" and his bulldog "Bob"

The Corona 3 reaches Australia, 1915

In February 1915, Corona revealed its new logo in Typewriter Topics

In a time of war, life went on for Corona: