Jefferson Moody Clough, The Unsung "Typewriter Maker of Ilion"

World Typewriter Day was marked yesterday and merely acted as a reminder that Latham Sholes’s earliest patents were barely practical and needed a lot of work before a fully functioning typewriter could emerge. One man responsible for much of that work was Jefferson Moody Clough (1829-1908). The 1916 Encyclopedia of Massachusetts states Clough was also “paid handsomely” to perfect the Hammond and Yōst typewriters.

Above is the only known photograph of Clough, the man who deserves as much credit as anyone for the successful launch of the typewriter on July 1, 1874. It was under Clough’s supervision that E. Remington & Sons of Ilion, New York, was able to mass produce a marketable machine from the crudely-made early versions of the Sholes & Glidden. Outside of Latham Sholes and Carlos Glidden themselves, Clough was one of only two people who were paid royalties in the typewriter’s earliest years – in Clough’s case 50 cents for every machine sold. Sholes and Glidden got a dollar each. A third dollar went to Charles Ames Washburn for his carriage movement patent - the royalties came from each $125 typewriter sale, but the $3.50 was to be paid from just $12 a machine which flowed through to James Densmore and George Yōst's Type-Writer Company from Remington. 

At the time of his retirement from the Winchester Repeating Arms Company in New Haven, Connecticut, on September 1, 1892, Clough was nationally known as “The Gunmaker of Ilion”. His work on the Sholes & Glidden, Remington 1 and 2 and Hammond and Yōst typewriters had all but been forgotten. Newspapers reported he had been “intimately associated all his life with the development of the two best American rifles, the Remington and Winchester”. In 1904 he perfected a Clough Mauser Gun, the rights to which were bought to stop it going into production and competing in the marketplace with the like of Remington and Winchester.

Clough left Remington at the most important period in China’s so-called “Self-Strengthening Movement” (1861-1895) - its development of military industries and the construction of arsenals sponsored by the central government. Qing dynasty statesman and general Li Hongzhang wanted the Jiangnan Arsenal to produce breech loading rifles of the Remington type but the few local products made were more costly and far inferior to the imported rifles. During the Ili crisis, when Qing China threatened to go to war against Russia over the Russian occupation of Ili, China bought 260,260 modern rifles from Europe and offered Jefferson Clough a vast amount of money to oversee its arsenals.

Clough declined the Chinese offer and instead accepted $7500 a year ($250,000 in today’s money) to work for Winchester in New Haven. Ill health forced his retirement in 1892 and Clough retired to the 500-acre Phelps farm at Belchertown, Massachusetts. He began to recover his health in 1894 but died of bowel cancer at Belchertown on January 16, 1908, aged 78.

In The Name of the Father of the Typewriter

The Nizzoli Triumvirate and the Vision of Treasure in Raymond Chandler's Olivetti Studio 44 Typewriter

Now is the Time for all Good Typewriter Men (and Women) to Come to the Aid of the Olivetti Studio 44

RIP Barbara Walters (1929-2022)

Barbara Jill Walters (September 25, 1929 – December 30, 2022) was an American broadcast journalist known for her interviewing ability. Walters appeared as a host of numerous television programs, including Today, the ABC Evening News, 20/20 and The View. Walters was a working journalist from 1951 until her retirement in 2015. She died at her home in Manhattan on Friday, aged 93.

The Joys of Fixing Typewriters

The "automatic return" Halda

Barking mad?: What was really wrong with it - a piece of bark in the escapement mechanism.

Vale Angela Lansbury (1925-2022)

It's a very long time since typewriters featured so heavily on our television screens. They've done so today as networks have paid tribute to the late actress Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury. Lansbury died in her sleep at her home in Los Angeles on Tuesday morning, five days before her 97th birthday. Born in London, she was a distant cousin of former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (their grandfathers were first cousins). Lansbury was known for her frequent use of Royal standard typewriters in her role as Jessica Fletcher in the TV series Murder She Wrote.

Above, Lansbury and Turnbull. Below, a baby Turnbull at a Mercedes portable typewriter.

Mitterhofer Typewriter Claim Upsets US Historian

The 1864 Mitterhofer machine was on show in the exhibition "Mountains, People and the Economy of the Ostmark" in 1939.

Today the 200th anniversary of the birth of early typewriter inventor Peter Mitterhofer is being marked in his home town of Parcines in the Tyrol. In August 1925 US newspapers ran a story from Innsbruck saying a memorial tablet had been unveiled at Mitterhoffer’s home. The story claimed Mitterhofer was THE inventor of the typewriter, and went on to state that Carlos Glidden had seen Mitterhofer’s machine at the Imperial Polytechnic Institute at Vienna and given the idea to Latham Sholes and Samuel Soulé. That is to say, the Sholes & Glidden was a COPY of Mitterhofer’s machine. This caused huge indignation in America. In October 1925, US newspaper stories headed “Exposes attempt to discredit famous American inventor” explaimed how Colonel John Wright Vrooman (1844-1929), president of the Herkimer County Historical Association, had proved that Glidden had never been outside the US and had never heard of Mitterhofer. Vrooman had “defeated a foreign attempt to take the honor [of inventing the typewriter] from America.”

Ninety-seven years on, however, Mitterhofer's Wikipedia entry still says, "Technical details of his developments were patented by Sholes and Glidden in the US in 1868 independently of Mitterhofer as an in-house development and created the basis for the series production of the first usable typewriters ... Professor Rudolf Granichstaedten-Czerva, who published a biography of Peter Mitterhofer in 1924, [said] Mitterhofer experienced the success of the typewriters manufactured in the US by Sholes, but without having any part in it. On August 27, 1893, he died bitter. On his tombstone is the saying: 'The others who learned from him were allowed to reap the fruits of his talent'. It was probably the great similarity of Mitterhofer's models with the models produced in America by the Remington company that prompted the Innsbruck professor to write the saying on the tombstone." All of which, of course, is utter nonsense.

The Queen is Dead, Long Live the King’s Typewriter

My dear friend Gary McGill, originally from Dillmanstown outside Kumara, was, I believe, the only male born in New Zealand on the same day that King Charles III entered the world. Gary still has a typewriter. I wonder if Charles still has his?

Charles got his typewriter on May 5, 1949, nine days before he turned six months old. It was given to his mother, then Princess Elizabeth, at the British Industries Fair at Olympia in London. The typewriter is an Empire Aristocrat with 18-carat gold key rings and typebars (which Gary’s doesn’t have). The Aristocrat was presented to the future Queen by a Mrs S.S. Elliott, secretary of the Office Appliances Trade Association. Future British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, as president of the Board of Trade, had welcomed the princess, her husband, mother and sister to the fair.

Mrs Elliott told Elizabeth, “We thought that perhaps Prince Charles might begin to learn his alphabet from the keyboard.” “What a good idea,” replied Elizabeth.

The Empire Aristocrat was made by Bill Mawle’s company, British Typewriters, in West Bromwich. It was from this plant, originally established as George Salter’s Spring Works, that in 1878 the West Bromwich Albion football club emerged, out of the company’s cricket team. In 1935 Mawle, a World War I flying ace (and later Group Captain Mawle OBE DFC), was sales manager for the Imperial Typewriter Company in Leicester. He was sent to a trade show in Switzerland and there spotted a new slimline portable typewriter, later to become famous as the Hermes Baby. Mawle bought the British rights to the design for £3000 and returned to Britain to begin manufacturing at the then abandoned Sattler factory. Mawle’s company, later known as Empire Typewriters, was sold to the American typewriter concern L.C. Smith Corona in 1962.

WD-40 and Typewriters: Never the Twain Should Meet

Whenever I fix a typewriter, I offer the customer free after-service care. Yesterday, for the first time, that offer was taken up. Three years ago I had worked on a 70-year-old Royal HHP standard which had been bought for a Canberra woman by her mother-in-law, from the San Francisco Typewriter Exchange. Last week the owner contacted me to say the keys and typebars wouldn’t move. She wasn’t wrong. It would have taken a sledgehammer to get them operational.

The owner said she had no knowledge of anyone spraying anything into the segment. But, from experience, that is exactly what had happened. And the guilty item: WD-40! WD-40 is a water dispersant spray, not a lubricant. WD-40 shouldn’t be allowed within a 100 miles of a typewriter, the keys and typebars of which work through a combination of a multitude of gears, levers and springs and good ol’ gravity. Allow WD-40 anywhere near those gears, lever connections and springs, or the groves of the segment, and you’re asking for big, big problems. WD-40 works like Lanolin, it congeals and clogs.

It took 24 hours of serious bubble bathing, relubricating and much gentle manual persuasion to get the keys and typebars working properly again. Today’s lesson? Never use WD-40 as a lubricant. And never, ever, use it on a typewriter.

When Jeff Missed Out To The Typewriter Guy

While I was cleaning up this Remington Noiseless portable for today’s typewriter presentation, I came across what I at first took to be a bit of foliage or piece of cloth buried inside the workings of the machine. Nothing unusual in that. I brushed it out and only some time later looked more closely at it - and realised it was a typed slip of paper. “Do you love me or Jeff” was the plaintive cry of the guy who once owned this lovely machine. “No” the future Mrs Typewriter Guy seems to have written on it in pencil. I’m taking it to mean she didn’t love Jeff, just the Typewriter Guy. Lovers of typewriters, after all, make the best lovers. What’s your interpretation?

The Ongoing Popularity of Portable Typewriters

RIP James Caan (1940-2022)

Actor James Caan, who died in Los Angeles on Wednesday, aged 82, will be best remembered by typewriter lovers for his manhandling of a Royal 10 standard in the 1990 movie Misery. He also used a Smith-Corona electric portable in that film, and it wasn't the only movie in which Caan used a typewriter. He was seen typing on an L.C. Smith in 1975's Funny Girl, in which he played impresario and theatrical showman Billy Rose, opposite Barbra Streisand as comedienne Fanny Brice, Rose's first wife, and also in Neil Simon's semi-autobographical Chapter Two in 1979, in which Caan played George Schneider, a New York City author. In this movie Caan was also using a Royal, but a much more modern Ultronic electric. James Edmund Caan was born in The Bronx on March 26, 1940.

The stunt typewriter