1920 – All Hail the Remington Portable Typewriter (And Dodge the Russian Arms Dealer)

Events in 1919 flattered to deceive the portable typewriter marketplace of 1920. On December 10, 1919, The Wall Street Journal said Remington had started making its “unusually good model” and would “put it out in the next few weeks”. At that point Remington directors and stockholders were no doubt rubbing their hands in glee. With Underwood finding it couldn’t produce enough typewriters to meet early demand at its Hartford, Connecticut, plant, Remington seemed certain to steal a march on its major rival – and to be the first of the major manufacturers to truly challenge Corona’s stranglehold on the portable market.

       In the event, the champagne stayed on ice at 374 Broadway a very long time. Just as Underwood had been forced to do in August 1920, in moving portables production to another plant, Remington moved the manufacturing of its portables to one of its former Union Trust stable factories – the Smith Premier plant in Syracuse, where production of the Smith Premier standard was discontinued to allow for the making of the new portable (a Monarch standard continued to be made). It wasn’t until September 27 that the Journal was able to report the 7½lb Remington portable (“with all the features of the standard Remington’) was “now in quantity production”. The machine was due on the market in 60 days (that is, November).

But only one shift key

       As it turned out, the Journal reported the market launch on October 25, highlighting such landmark features as typebars being actuated by meshing bevel-gears and a one-shift keyboard. The $60 Remington portable made its public debut at the National Business Show at the Grand Central Palace in New York from October 25-30. Typewriter Topics reported, “The new Remington portable typewriter was put on display for the first time. Take it from one who saw, the Remington portable was the centre of mobs at all times.”

Announced in April 1920

       Topics’ coverage of the show pointed out, however, that not far from the Remington fuss was another one surrounding yet another portable. This was the Gourland – the difference being the directors of the Gourland Typewriter Corporation had something already well and truly on the market to show for their efforts. “Gourland luminaries were having the time of their lives,” wrote Topics editor Ernest Merton Best. And well might they. They were “listening to the unusual compliments passed about regarding their product.” One of the Gourland team was Walter Wilbur Ramer, head of the Typewriter Factory Sales Corporation and previously of the Wholesale Typewriter Company, Montclair. Another “luminary” at the show was Neal D. Becker, president of Hammond. While Hammond in 1920 continued to strenuously push its 11lb “lightweight” version as a portable, guess what Becker took when he went to Europe: a National portable!

       Typewriter Topics got to review the Remington portable for its November issue, saying its “advent has been long expected by the typewriter trade.” In terms of full market flow, in the end there was really only a few weeks between the arrival of the Underwood and the Remington portables, making the advent of a four-bank portable an even more crippling blow for Underwood’s huge hopes for its machine - and after five years of planning to boot! What should have been a full year start for Underwood turned out to be just a matter of a month or so. Admittedly, Remington portable production didn’t hit its straps until 1921.

       Topics added, “The great and growing demand for a small, compact, practical, portable writing machine has long been recognised in typewriter circles. To fill this need the Remingtons began their exceptional work on a portable machine long ago. With the usual Remington thoroughness, one by one the usual objections to small machines were overcome. The fact that new portables were being marketed one after another did not hasten the Remingtons. They were determined to build a machine which would supply all of the exacting requirements of the people for whom a typewriter of this type is intended. And the portable Remington is distinctive among portable machines, chiefly because of its standard keyboard” ... Remington thoroughness is maintained throughout the entire construction of the new addition to the Remington family. Strength and reliability have not been sacrificed in the effort to achieve lightness. The lightness of the machine is due to the design itself.” (My italic emphasis, not TT’s).

       Typewriter Topics pointed out that as long ago as 1876, William Ozmun Wyckoff  (of Wyckoff, Seamans and Benedict fame) had written to later Remington president John Walter Earle predicting that “the ultimate future of the typewriter would be in the home”. Topics believed the Remington portable had brought that prophecy to fulfilment. “The advent of the portable machine … marks the definite advance into the other and wider field [beyond business] …”

       Quite why it took Remington 11 months to finally launch the machine remains uncertain. Topics suggested it was because of the “insistent demands of the business world” and from salesmen to make standards a priority, causing congestion at plants such as Ilion and Syracuse. Was it only because a post-Revolution Russian order for Smith Premiers fell through, allowing space to make the Remington portables at Syracuse? Was it because, as Topics also claimed, Remington was in no haste and wanted to take their time in perfecting the machine before putting it on the market. This last notion, of prolonged finickiness, makes little economic sense, since a large gap pretty much remained in the portable market from the end of 1919, factoring in the slow and unsteady drip of Underwood three-banks. Perhaps Remington simply wanted to first let the Gourland enterprise come to its inevitable demise?

Remington’s planning for a real portable certainly took at least four years. It was primarily designed by John Henry Barr, who, meeting the challenge of the Corona 3 head-on, first applied for a patent on the machine on August 12, 1915 (US1267356A). Barr said in his application, “One of the main objects of the invention is to produce a machine … in which a contraction of the [standard, four-bank] keyboard may be readily effected at will, in order to reduce the compass of the machine and thus facilitate packing and transporting or carrying the machine. A further object of my invention is to provide a comparatively small, cheap and light yet highly efficient typewriting machine.” A patent for the final design was applied for on May 21, 1918, and issued on October 28, 1919 (US1320034A).

Barr wasn’t a full-time Remington employee, but a professor of machine design and mechanical engineering at Cornell University. And before his portable reached the market, he had had plenty of staff help from experienced Remington engineers like English-born Arthur William Smith and Arthur J. Briggs. A superb outcome was always a very strong possibility.

With that in mind, Topics, reporting in November 1919 on Remington’s soaring, portable anticipatory stock value, referred to “Wall Street dope” about “a public announcement of discontinuance of selling by the Remington company of a side-line – ‘a well-known make of portable typewriter’ – the inference being that this either has been unprofitable or that more money would be made from the sale of an entirely new portable typewriter of Remington make.”

October 1919

The “portable” to be discontinued was the Syracuse-made Remington Junior, which was taken off the market and replaced by a rehashed Junior, the Century No 10, in June 1919. Launched to great fanfare and very heavy nationwide advertising in July 1914, the $50 Junior was no match for the same-priced but genuinely portable Corona 3. The Century had an even shorter career, being discontinued in 1921. But as Richard Polt points out on his The Classic Typewriter Page Present Remington Portables, “The situation is complicated by a few Century typewriters that are essentially just Remington Juniors with a Century name decal.”  Barr also chiefly designed the Junior.

While clearing the decks in its former Union Trust range of factories, Remington was quite probably blindsided by a Lithuanian-born arms dealer for the Russian Revolution, and general international wheeler-dealer, Michael Jacob Gourland.

In hindsight it seems to have been most opportunistic of Gourland to set up the Gourland Typewriter Corporation in February 1919 (capitalised at $2 million) and to make a widely-advertised public offering for $250,000 cumulative preferred stock in the company in mid-February 1920. The corporation said it had already contracted to manufacture 50,000 of its machines, labelled the “Baby Grand”, by the end of 1920 alone, and that production would subsequently increase.

       Underwood’s problems in making machines in Hartford, Connecticut, to meet the early demand for its new three-bank portable - while at the same time maintaining the rate of production of its standards - was common knowledge. The slow rate of portable manufacturing wasn’t overcome until Underwood bought the Bullard Machine Tool Company plant in Bridgeport on August 17, 1920. In the meantime, Remington’s breakthrough four-bank portable, promised for the first few weeks of 1920, had failed to appear and didn’t do so until the end of October. So no doubt Gourland saw a tantalising opening, evident in his spruiking the 9½lb “Baby Grand” as being “said to be the only single-shift, standard and universal keyboard portable typewriter.” Unlike a Corona it didn’t fold and unlike a Fox (and the Remington, if Gourland knew in advance what Remington was planning) it didn’t collapse. In the absence of the Remington – and faced with real competition from only the three-bank Coronas and a relatively few Underwoods - that much could at least be said to be true.

       The Gourland prospectus said the typewriter “will come on the market at a time when experts advise that the present demand for typewriters is far greater than the supply and they predict that the proposed output of 50,000 machines the first year could be largely oversold. Contracts for exports already entered into and the domestic demand indicate this result.” Gourland forecast a first year profit of $1 million. This was based on projected sales, but Michael Gourland planned to keep the overheads low by employing young Brooklyn girls to assemble his machines.

Of course, the first year of business brought nothing like that sort of profit. Indeed, in June Gourland was still looking for draftsmen and mechanics and by August it was in debt. On May 24, 1921, Gourland called a stockholders meeting to consider refinancing and reorganisation. The corporation changed its name to GT in February 1922. Undaunted, Gourland increased capital to $5 million in 1922, but under a new Wilmington-based board, led by stenographer Telesphore Leon Crouteau and without Michael Gourland. In truth, the Gourland typewriter-making enterprise had lasted less than two years.

       The Gourland prospectus emphasised that Charles Spiro, who it called the “dean of typewriter art”, was the consulting engineer in the design of the typewriter.  “The parts number 625, which is 50 parts less than those in other small machines … It is a standard typewriter in all but its size.” The latter sentence was in turn picked by Remington. It’s most likely the Gourland was actually designed by Jesse Alexander, was a cut down version of Alexander’s Perfect and was almost certainly made in Alexander’s factory at 35 Ormond Place, Brooklyn, premises he’d acquired from furniture manufacturers the Langrock Brothers.

       Michael Gourland was unquestionably an opportunist. Born in Vilnius on November 24, 1879, he spent time in Britain in 1912-13 negotiating on behalf of the pre-revolution Russian Government (as well as Austria, Romania and Holland) for the rights to mechanical parts. Gourland was sent from St Petersburg to New York through Liverpool in August 1916 to buy munitions for Russian revolutionaries. He and his twin brother George, a broker, set up the Russian-American Commercial and Industrial Company to cover for their activities. Its branches were in New York, St Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa and Rybinsk. When the February Bourgeois Democratic Revolution ended after Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication, on March 16, Gourland was in Boston making absolutely certain everyone knew which side he had been on all along.

       After the collapse of his typewriter venture, Gourland quickly got into movies and then cosmetics. He died in New York on October 5, 1951.

John H.Barr and the Remington 1 Portable Typewriter

Any lingering doubts there might have been about the remarkable John Henry Barr’s lead role in the revolutionary design for the first Remington portable typewriter can now be safely put to rest. Hitherto, it has largely been assumed that Barr, at the very least, led a team of Remington engineers in designing the portable with its folding typebasket arrangement. It turns out Barr is in fact the designated inventor of this machine, the world’s first four-bank portable typewriter, known for its trendsetting flat profile and geared typebar mechanism.

Barr, a professor of machine design and mechanical engineering at Cornell University, is perhaps more famous for his own typewriter, the Barr, which he produced after he had resigned from Remington in 1923. It is believed Barr tried to interest Remington in this latter design, but failed to impress the company with it, so he left Remington to make it under his own steam (this outstanding collection of Barrs from Herman Price's Chestnut Ridge Museum).

Through research into the Barr typewriter, most notably by Will Davis on the Portable Typewriter Reference Site, Barr’s involvement with the first Remington portable was established. Until then, we only had the word of Remington, which, in the same year Barr left Remington, had told the author of A Condensed History of the Writing Machine that the first four-bank portable was “the work of several Remington engineers”.

Judging by the patent applications, that does not seem to be the case. The credit should go almost exclusively, if not completely, to Barr. He is, after all, marked down on the patents assigned to Remington as the “inventor”.

Unlike Lee Spear Burridge, who was four years dead when his Underwood 3 appeared (see previous post), Barr was still very much alive and kicking when the Remington portable went into production. He might well have been kicking when he read the Condensed History and saw that, with his departure from Remington, the manufacturer had withheld his name from any association with the machine. But like Burridge with Underwood, Barr had already assigned a number of patents to Remington. And in this case, again like Burridge, he was obviously determined to meet the Corona 3 challenge with a machine that remained compact without requiring a folding carriage arrangement.

Barr applied for the patent for the Remington four-bank portable on May 21, 1918, and it was granted on October 28, 1919. Almost exactly one year later the machine went into production at Ilion in New York. On his The Classic Typewriter Page, Richard Polt quotes, with thanks to Ed Neuert, from Vol 1, No 1 (August 2, 1926) of The Remport (a newsletter for Remington portable sellers), in which it was stated, "The Remington Portable was first exhibited at the New York Business Show in October, 1920. Its manufacture began shortly thereafter but for many months only a limited number of machines were available for delivery … the first dealership contracts of record were entered during September, 1921.”

The Remington No 1 ended the 27-year reign of three-bank portables, dating back to George Blickensderfer’s Blick 5 of 1893 and embracing Frank Rose’s Standard Folding (which went into production in 1907, two years after Rose’s death), Otto Petermann’s Corona 3 (1912) and Burridge’s Underwood 3 (1919). The end of the three-bank meant just one shift key for capitals, figures and symbols, and Remington proudly and rightly promoted the Barr design as the first portable capable of everything a standard size typewriter could do. Just as importantly, Barr's invention forced Corona and Underwood to follow suit with their own four-bank portables. 

John H.Barr applied for more than 60 patents related to the typewriter during a 34-year typewriter-designing career, which started with Smith Premier in 1903, moved to the Union Typewriter Company in 1909, then to Remington for 10 years from 1913, and finally the Barr-Morse Corporation from 1923-1937 (given his track record, he might have been amused to see Remington put the name Smith Premier on one of his Remington inventions).

John Henry Barr was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, on June 19, 1861, the son of John Henry Barr I and his wife Eliza (nee Tillotson, born December 29, 1826). John Henry II was the fifth of seven children (his siblings were George Tillotson Barr, Henry Austin Barr, Sarah Moore Barr, Mary Warner Barr, Margaret Tillotson Barr and Martha Helen Barr).

John H.Barr II, the typewriter inventor, died, aged 75, at Ithaca, New York, where he lived at 505 East Seneca Street, on March 27, 1937. He was cremated at Rochester. He was survived by three sisters and by his wife, Katherine Louise (nee Kennedy, born January 31, 1863, in Minneapolis) and their son, John Henry Barr III (born Ithaca, July 1890), who at the time of his father’s death was living in Easton, Pennsylvania.

Barr was married in Minneapolis on June 4, 1884. He met his wife while they were fellow students at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. John and Katherine later studied together at Cornell University Graduate School, from 1888-89. Their son graduated from Cornell in 1913.

As a youngster, John H.Barr had moved with his family from Terre Haute to Mankato, Minnesota, and Barr received Bachelor in Mechanical Engineering and Master of Science degrees at the University of Minnesota, the latter honour in 1883. He also taught mechanical engineering there. From 1887 he studied at the Cornell University Graduate School, Ithaca, and in 1889 won a Master of Mechanical Engineering degree at Cornell and in 1891 joined the faculty as assistant professor of mechanical engineering. Four years later he was appointed associate professor of machine design and was promoted to a full professorship in 1898. He was alumni trustee in 1905 and again in 1915.

He wrote technical papers and Notes on the Design of Machine Elements: For Use in Connection with Unwin's Machine Design, Part I (1901), which with Professor Dexter Simpson Kimball was expanded into Elements of Machine Design in 1909. In 1905, Barr also wrote the textbook Kinematics of Machinery: A Brief Treatise on Constrained Motions of Machine Elements (revised 1911). Barr was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Franklin Institute.

Maybe it was a question of better pay, or simply an overriding love of typewiters: who knows? - but in 1903 Barr resigned from his professorship at Cornell to become a director and factory manager of the Smith Premier Typewriter Company in Syracuse. From 1909-1913 he was a consulting engineer for the Union Typewriter Company and then from 1913-1923 for the Remington Typewriter Company.

During World War I, Barr was attached to the aircraft armament section of the American Expeditionary Force air service in Washington and was later a major in the ordnance department attached to headquarters in Paris.

I’ll leave Will Davis to tell the full story of Barr’s own brand of typewriter, at http://machinesoflovinggrace.com/ptf/Barr1.html and http://machinesoflovinggrace.com/ptf/Barr9.html

(Barr's two great inventions, above side-by-side, are from my collection)

Suffice to say here that Barr’s groundbreaking designs continued with the Barr, patented in 1925-1926, as it incorporated basket shift (like the single shift key on the Remington portable, this was previously only used on standard typewriters) and parallel key action, later adapted by Corona and, in the post-World War II era, by Erika in Germany and the Winsor line in Spain.

The Barr portable was built at the Ithaca plant of Morse Chain Company. When Barr died in 1937, the company was sold and moved to Weedsport, New York.  Production of the machine ended in 1939 and the company went bankrupt. Will Davis says, “It seems certain that no more than 41,000 machines of all variants were built in the US and Canada from 1926 through 1939 …  At this moment [May 2008], 38 machines are verified to be in the hands of collectors or museums. (Thanks to Richard Polt, one of them is in my collection.)

It has been suggested that the Barr lived on, in at least some forms, after World War II. In the mid to late 1950s, a US chain store, which was buying sewing machines from Brother in Japan, encouraged Brother to join the portable typewriter market, since Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward were enjoying success in selling rebranded machines. Brother did produce a portable, in 1961, and some suspect the Barr design was part of it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: Images from the websites of Herman Price, Will Davis and Richard Polt.

March 1921: Remington Was Self-Destructing When its Portable Typewriter Saved the Day

That the triumph of its four-bank portable saved the Remington Typewriter Company from self-destructing in 1921-22 is evident from The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of 21 months of bitter boardroom and courtroom in-fighting between the company’s shareholders and its board of directors. A group of justifiably upset investors had seized control of Remington in January 1916 with a five-year voting trust, resulting from a bond issue which had saved Remington from an even earlier demise. In May 1919 the voting trust put a finance committee in charge of operations, but the conservative “old guard”, refusing advice from this committee, had regained command by May 1920. A truce was finally settled on in mid-November 1922, following the elevation of Benjamin La Fon Winchell (1858-1942) to the presidency, succeeding Frank Nicholas Kondolf (1863-1944).

"Let's get back on track," says ex-railways boss Benjamin La Fon Winchell.

It was almost exactly 100 years ago, in mid-March 1921, that The Wall Street Journal signaled fresh “trouble at mill” at Ilion. A large part of the festering problems being experienced by Remington had been caused by four years of its board's refusal – from 1916 to 1920 – to respond to constant urging from the voting trust to bring out a portable. Unfortunately, the Journal added, by the time Remington did produce a portable, Corona was selling 120,000 machines a year. “[Corona] has the field practically usurped,” said the newspaper. “Here again, Remington’s failure to appreciate the industry’s trend is the cause.”

Remington planned an annual output of 250,000 portables, but its total production of all typewriter models in 1919 was 120,000 machines, rising to 165,000 in 1920. It earned $2.9 million in 1919 but just $1.9 million in 1920. Ultimately, of course, Remington was to win over the portable market from the three-bank Coronas and Underwoods, once production delays were overcome. And the board settlement of November 1922 had much to do with the early inroads the portable had made, stablising the company’s finances and showing that in spite of all the bickering, Remington could still get some things right.   

Neither one thing nor the other.

In a scathing critique of Remington’s blind obstinacy from the turn of the century to 1920, the Journal said that just as Remington had declared an efficient visible writing standard typewriter a mechanical impossibility, so too had it said the same thing about a portable typebar machine weighing under 10lb. “So [Remington] proceeded to put forth, as a great advance in typewriter design, the Remington Junior. This machine, on account of its weight, was not ‘portable’, and because of its double shift was not an office machine. Therefore, having no field, it proved a disaster.”

Calling for changes to the board of directors, the Journal said, “The same people who refused to recognise the value of the visible typewriter, and so would not buy out Underwood for $1.5 million, and who had so little mechanical understanding as to foster the Remington Junior, are in charge of the Remington company.” Earlier, the Journal said, “There was a time when Remington stood first in the typewriter field and there was no second. And there was a time also when it could have bought out Underwood. This was in 1903 when Remington shares as dividend shares were selling to 130. But sound financial management did not prevail .” The company’s shares sunk to 8⅛ in 1915. Bonds issued for new capital resulted in the voting trust being installed.

The Journal believed a fear that control of the company would not change at the April 1921 annual meeting was the reason its shares were “showing such peculiar weakness”. With earnings down $1 million on 1919-20, the newspaper pointed out Remington’s shares had gone from 105½ in October 1919 to 24½ in February 1921. Given Remington had started to sell its improved Model 10 standard (the “self-starter”) only a few weeks earlier, and was pushing production to meet huge demand for the portable - both in the US and overseas - the newspaper put the company’s share weakness down to boardroom matters. The Journal said there was apprehension in the stock exchange concerning the outcome of Remington’s annual meeting in April. It was anticipated there would be a new challenge from shareholders over the way Remington was being operated. The Journal said, “The financial district does not view an inventory increase and the borrowing of $1 million soon after the old regime regained control as indicative of the type of management the company needed in uncertain times like the present.”

The share value had dropped in December 1920 but picked up by 13 points to 37½ in January. That there was renewed weakness in February 1921 gave the Journal clues about the wariness of investors having little to do with the company’s line of typewriters. “Many attach far greater importance to certain internal factors in the situation than to the external signs of the company’s progress and renewed life [with the Model 10 and the portable],” the Journal said. “The real reason for the decline appears to be an increasingly belief that the general run of Remington stockholders do not realise what is the real weakness in the company, and that therefore at the annual meeting next month the same crowd which ran the company into the ditch in 1915 will secure control of the board and again dictate Remington’s policies.” The Journal said a lack of financial foresight and conservatism had resulted in inventories rising from $6 million to $10 million since May 1920 (in the same period Underwood increased its stock of typewriters by $250,000). Close to $1 million had been spent on buying and equipping a plant in Flushing to meet overseas orders for the portable, followed by the borrowing of another $1 million.

George Ed Smith

The Journal quoted an unnamed source, “one of the most prominent men in the industry”, as stressing that no typewriter company had succeeded without having a president thoroughly acquainted with typewriters. “Inevitably the prestige of a typewriter company begins quickly to decline as soon as those in charge of its affairs lose touch with the industry and are no longer able to anticipate the trend in its development. The whole trouble with Remington ... is that with the passing of the ‘blind’ typewriter those in charge lost completely their touch with the trend in typewriter developments.” The Journal pointed to Underwood, saying it had succeeded with something Remington declared to be impossible [“visible writing’]. Similarly, Royal’s early success was attributed to it having George Ed Smith in charge.

“The Remington company today would not have the [L.C.] Smith, the Royal … and the Woodstock machines as serious competitors had the directors, 15 years or so ago, listened to L.C. Smith and striven to develop an efficient visible writer with which to meet the Underwood competition. Because of the refusal, year after year, of the Remington directors to realise the significance of the increasing seriousness of the Underwood competition, L.C. Smith withdrew from the Remington company [the Union Trust], and with the proceeds from the sale of his shares, began to develop the L.C Smith machine, which, within a few years, became one of the best visible models on the market.

“As a result of all this blindness, the Remington company, 13 years after Underwood displaced it from its commanding position in the typewriter industry, is out with the first really efficient visible model bearing the Remington name [the Model 10]; and even now would not have it on the market had it not been for four years of continual prodding by the voting trust to modernise the company’s standard model.”