Australian Museum's Typewriters On The Move

An artist's impression of the new museum on the Parramatta River.

The present Powerhouse Museum is close to the city centre but restricted in display area.

A Columbia is one of hundreds of historically significant typewriters in the present museum.

Sydney's Powerhouse Museum, which houses one of the most extensive collections of typewriters in Australia, is to be moved to the city's western suburbs, to the banks of the Parramatta River. The vision is to build a "Sydney Smithsonian".

Officially, the facility is known as the Museum of Arts and Applied Sciences. 

Above, Powerhouse typewriter curator Matthew Connell with the Columbia and below, with the museum's early Sholes & Glidden, which was donated to the Powerhouse by Chartres.

Very few of the Powerhouse's typewriters are ever displayed to the public.

Construction of the new site will begin in 2018 and be complete by 2022.  During that time, hundreds of valuable old typewriters will be taken from the vaults at the present site at Ultimo, close to the city centre, to Parramatta. Happily, the new museum will have the capacity to showcase 40 per cent more exhibits, allowing curators to put many more of its wonderful typewriter collection on public display. The New South Wales Government is hoping to lift visits to one million a year by 2030. The Powerhouse's typewriter collection is, among Australian institutions, comparable to only the almost equally impressive Museum Victoria collection in Melbourne. As with Museum Victoria's gifts to my collection (including a Salem Hall), I am bracing myself to catch one of two machines which might "fall off the back of the truck" during the Powerhouse's shift. Here's hoping!

Among the hundreds of thousands of items to be moved is this train, which is in the entrance of the present Powerhouse.

The Museum of Arts and Applied Sciences is more popularly known as the Powerhouse Museum because of the site on which it was built. A name for the new museum has not yet been settled on, but Powerhouse may well be retained. 

A few of the Powerhouse's typewriters:

Matthew Connell tests out the rare Federal

 A gold-plated Royal portable

 The Shavian keyboard Imperial Good Companion

Red Hot Portable Typewriter Sale

What offers? Contact oztypewriter@hotmail.com to become the proud owner of these classic beauties:

(No case with the Val)

Wake Up and Smell the Typewriter Coffee

Quite apart from user-fair weather "friends", in my case the reality of the situation, however unpleasant, was that I arose this morning to the knowledge (thanks to a personalised Google doodle) I had turned 68. Some Typospherians might still get a birthday sleep-in, even a cooked breakfast in bed, things way beyond Charlie the Cat's capabilities. My dawn wasn't all that bad, though: awoken by sparkling sunshine at 6am, ahead of an autumn day on which the temperature reached a rather startling 86 degrees. And as the day cools, this sweating blog will crawl past two-and-a-quarter million page views.

Still, what better way to start any day than with typewriter coffee? Or, to be more precise, Smith-Corona-Marchant coffee.

It was on this day 50 years ago that SCM took over Proctor-Silex, an announcement (in The New York Times) which was accompanied by another concerning an expansion of typewriter production facilities. These proved a boon for SCM shares, which on April 5, 1966, rose to 61 5/8th (and by almost 10 points in a week) on the back of a volume of 173,200 stock traded.

What would a typewriter company want with a coffee percolator-toaster-blender-ice maker manufacturer?

Proctor-Silex had only been created six years earlier, with the merger of Proctor Electric and Silex. But SCM president Emerson Ernest "Bud" Mead (1916-76) was in rapid expansion mode. He and Proctor-Silex boss Walter Schwartz agreed on a one-to-three merger which established a combined $75 million net worth, representing a book value of $19 a share - a price which rose to $26 over the next few years. Indeed, stock climbed 600 per cent in eight months, reaching five times net worth and six times the earning average of three years. In time the bubble broke and the stock slid back to $15. Yet investors who held 10 Proctor shares in 1903 found these were worth $1.3 million in 1966. 

Mead had succeeded Elwyn Lawrence Smith (1894-1979, son of Wilbert Smith of L.C. Smith Brothers fame) as SCM president at the annual meeting in 1960 - Smith had been with the company 41 years. Although born in New York City, Mead grew up in Hinsdale, Illinois. As a young man he bought old Model T Fords and sold the parts at a profit. He worked for the Union Tank Car Company in Chicago while studying accounting at Northwestern University from 1935-40. In 1942 he became a shipping clerk with American Expansion Bolt & Manufacturing and by 1944 was plant superintendent. Having saved $4000 to start his own outfit, from 1945 he turned Mead Manufacturing, an electrical control and switch company, into a million-dollar-a-year business and in 1949 joined Kleinschmidt Laboratories and helped expand sales from $300,000 to $12 million a year. In 1956, the company was purchased by Smith-Corona. Edward Harold Litchfield (1914-68, below), board chairman of Smith-Corona since 1956 and Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, said: “We had old management and a weak engineering staff. Kleinschmidt had able young management and some engineering depth. We bought Kleinschmidt, in part, because we wanted Mead.”

On July 9, 1983, SCM sold its Proctor-Silex appliance unit to a newly-formed affiliate of New Jersey-based organisation Wesray Corporation, a private concern, for $56 million, despite it being still profitable, with sales of $150 million in the fiscal year 1983.

Typewriter juice, anyone?

The Other 1868 Danish Writing Machine

The New York Times, March 13, 1924.

The professor at the Poly Teknisk Læreanstalt at Sølvtorvet in Copenhagen

was in fact called Hannover - he wasn't in Hanover.

My daughter-in-law Emily Hansen-Messenger is rightly very proud of her Danish heritage and takes a genuine interest in my typewriter obsession. So to mark her birthday last week I went looking for something a bit different that connected Denmark with typewriters. To my considerable surprise, I found that in 1924 at least two US newspapers declared a Dane to be the true inventor of the typewriter, a Copenhagen city official and teacher called Jacob Ahrend Peters.

Scranton Republican, May 8, 1924. Peters was born in 1835, so he was 89 when he died.

As far back as Ernst Martin, typewriter historians were, with good reason, unconvinced by these claims. Martin wrote that Peters "allegedly" designed a typewriter between 1862-64. "The machine had apparently [a] kick lever in the manner of the later [Hansen] writing ball."

Jacob Ahrend Peters (born Sankt Nicolai, Schleswig, 1835; died Copenhagen 1924)

Naturally, the Peters machine has been of great interest to Hansen writing ball researchers, the more so because the bearer of the 1924 "news", Poly Teknisk Læreanstalt, Sølvtorvet (Copenhagen) professor Harald Immanuel Hannover (1861-1937), was initially of the opinion that Rasmus Malling-Hansen (1835-90) had more or less plagiarised Peters' invention.

Teller of false tales: Hannover

Hansen's daughters, Johanne Elisabeth Agerskov (1873-1946) and Engelke Marie Wiberg (1868-1949), had already taken up the cudgels on their father's behalf by the time Ernst Martin got to the story - and with ultimate success.  The item which appeared in The New York Times in 1924 was lifted from an article Hannover had had published a day earlier (March 12) in Berlingske Tidende, a Danish national daily.

Hannover’s institution had been given what remained of Peters' prototype by a relative of Peters, who died on March 11, 1924, soon after Hannover had interviewed him. In 1925 Agerskov corrected Hannover's misconceptions in a book called Hvem var Skrivekuglens Opfinder? En Polemik og en Redegørelse (“Who Was the Inventor of the Writing Ball?: A Polemic and a Statement”).
Martin dated Peters' machine to 1862-64, possibly based on what Hannover had written, but the patent wasn't applied for until April 18, 1868 (and issued in 1870, according to Michael Adler) and the new prototype appeared in 1872. Hansen started work on his writing ball in 1865 (according to Adler) and it was in production by 1870.

Hannover's 1924 Berlingske Tidende article.

Sources: 

http://toward-the-light.net/Johanne%20Agerskov%20-%20Messenger%20of%20the%20Light.html

http://www.malling-hansen.org/the-writing-ball/exhibition-in-denmark-2015.html

http://www.malling-hansen.org/the-writing-ball/the-controversy-in-1925.html

The Brother 1413-Remington 713 'Compact' Electric Typewriter

A 1969 Brother 1413 electric "compact" masquerading as a Remington 713. Why? Remington closed its Glasgow typewriter factory in February 1968 and, faced with an urgent need to meet a new market demand in 1969, had to come to an arrangement with Brother to rebrand Japanese "compact" electrics that were already on the US market. The reason? A strike shut down its Calcutta factory for six months from April 1969 and 1550 of Remington's Elmira, New York, machinists walked off the job on June 16. They picketed the plant, stopping thousands of typewriters from being shipped out, including those electrics assembled in Toronto, and they stayed out for four months. The solution? Simple! Buy Brothers at $110 and resell them under a Remington badge for $179.

The 11-inch carriage variation advertised in 1972. 

The price had gone up $80-$120.

The Brother 1400 series advertised in 1969

When the Ettore Sottsass-designed Olivetti Praxis 48 reached the United States market in mid-January 1968 (as an Olivetti Underwood, of course; it reached the Australian market as an Olivetti in November that year), it sparked panic in the ranks of rival US and German typewriter companies. During the next five years, a plethora of competitors emerged in what was fallaciously called a "compact" electric typewriter field. 

Cincinnati Enquirer, 1970

Predictably, none of Olivetti's opponents emerged with a design which came within a bull's roar of the timeless Sottsass classic (though they almost all copied the Praxis' high, square front). But the challenge was more about price than looks.
This was an attempt to create a new office machine niche in a market which had become so completely dominated by IBM (full-size, 46lb) that IBM sales were advancing at the rate Remington's, SCM's and Royal's were declining - and that's their combined losses! These new machines were also variously described as "intermediate" and "light duty and lower cost". Whatever might have been the case for their duties, they were certainly not cheap - many buyers would have got very little change out of $400, as some were not all that much cheaper than the 15in carriage IBM. Nor could it be said that they were in any way lightweight. The Remington 713 weighs a whopping 28lb, just six pounds lighter than a Remington 10!

The last model to make its entry into this new field, in late June 1973, was the Adler MX:

The other brands and models mentioned in this advertising blurb for the Adler MX were:

The Singapore-made Smith-Corona

Secretarial 300 of September 1972

The November 1969 Royal 560

(this is Taylor Harbin's machine)

 The Olympia 35 of late April 1969

And the "Remington" 713 of May 1969

But ahead of the pack were the Brother 1400 series electrics, which reached the American market - at less than half the price of the Praxis 48 - in early April 1969. Nagoya mechanical engineers Yukio Hishida and Toshio Nakai had begun to apply for US patents for components for their typewriter in November 1968. 

In a 1973 report on its findings in Litton Industries' appeal against a US Federal Trade Commission ban on its attempted 1969 takeover of Triumph-Adler, the FTC said:

Thus the Remington 713, costing $69-$78 more than the Brother 1400s (the price rose by another $120 by 1972), was made in Nagoya by Brother:

The Remington 713 reached Australia in November 1969, a year after the Praxis 48:

Last month Steve Kuterescz posed the question on his writelephant blog, "[What is] The smallest 'electric' (non-electronic) typewriter?" David Lawrence in Auckland responded by saying the Olympia Monica portable is the smallest package. For the record, I ran the tape over a couple of my machines and put them on the scales:

Remington 317: 28lb, 17 1/2 inches knob to knob, 6in high, 14in long.

Olympia Reporter: 17lb, 15 1/2 inches knob-to-knob, 5in high, 13 1/2 inches long.

Eighteen months ago I wrote about a Facit 9401 electronic typewriter masquerading as a Remstar 2001. It came to me from the estate of a leading Australian public servant who, on May 7, 1987, paid a staggering $1525 for it. With the purchase, he traded in a Remington 713 for $350. I wonder if it's the trade-in I found at a recycling centre a few weeks ago?