The first Royal typewriter emerged from a factory at the foot
of 46th Street and Second Avenue, Bay Ridge, South Brooklyn, in September 1906,
and within three months Royal was looking for “stationers, bank cashiers and
men who are hustlers” to find easy pickings by becoming agents for the
typewriter. Meanwhile, the output of the Brooklyn plant was increased to almost
five times its original capacity.
Thomas Fortune Ryan (1851-1928)
On June 1, 1907, the tobacco, insurance and transportation
magnate Thomas Fortune Ryan made it officially known that he had became
involved with Royal. On that day Ryan announced on Wall Street that he had
appointed his son, Allan Aloysius Ryan, as president and treasurer of the
company. In fact, Allan Ryan had been installed as president by Royal stockholders on April 15, and was at the head of a board which included Hess, Edward Manning, Jacob Neahr and, representing the ridiculously wealthy Guggenheim family, Simon Robert Guggenheim (1861-1949). From that date Allan Ryan had been busy seeking out a site for a new Royal
factory in Hartford, Connecticut, having already
headhunted Underwood's Hartford-based general manager Manning. But from the day of the Wall Street announcement, the Ryans began to make it clear their sights
were on much larger targets than simply pushing a new typewriter on the market.
They claimed they had a confrontation with the Union typewriter trust in mind – and
the ultimate typewriter trust was said to be their weapon of war.
Allan Aloysius Ryan (1880-1940)
According
to Bliven, Thomas Ryan “didn’t say a word to the press when he handed Hess and
Meyers [sic] $200,000 and told them to go ahead with the Royal typewriter.” I
turns out the Ryan family’s plans went way beyond just Royal. They
weren’t in the least bit afraid to “say a word to the press” across the United
States about a merger of “all the typewriting companies of any consequence in
this country in a giant trust”.
Typewriter Topics' take on the matter:
“Purpose
hardly concealed,” reported The Brooklyn Daily Eagle on September 6, 1907.
Referring to the Union Trust put together by Remington in 1893, the Eagle
stated, “This is to gather in rivals of the present trust, and then to compel the
latter to surrender”. So the idea was not just to bring a new typewriter on to
the market, but in the process to crush what was left of Remington’s cartel
(Smith Premier, Densmore, Yost, New Century and Monarch). “This company [Royal] is backed by some of
the most powerful financial interests in the United States,” added the Eagle,
saying the merger “will be an accomplished fact inside of a year.” The companies targeted by Royal, as identified by the Eagle, were Underwood, L.C. Smith, Oliver, Williams,
Stearns, Moyer and Blickensderfer, each of which would continue to be sold
under their original brand names.
Former US Vice-President Levi Parsons Morton (1824-1920)
Thomas
Ryan’s Royal team, headed up by his son Allan, had Hess as vice-president and
secretary, and financier and long-standing Mergenthaler Linotype Company
president Philip Tell Dodge as one of the directors. Offices were set up in the
Postal Telegraph Building, Broadway and Murray Street, Manhattan, and plans
were already well advanced to set up a large new factory in Hartford,
Connecticut. Major stakeholders included such financial heavyweights the Guggenheim
brothers – Isaac, Daniel, Maurice, Solomon, Benjamin, Simon and William - Harry
Payne Whitney, former US vice-president Levi Parsons Morton, steel magnate
Charles Michael Schwab and close Ryan ally John B. McDonald, the Irish-born
builder of the first New York subway. With that sort of monetary oomph behind
it, how could Royal possibly fail? Or the mooted merger for that matter? An
“in-the-know” Royal source told the Eagle, “It may be put down as certain that
the capitalists behind the Royal company did not embark in that enterprise
merely for the purpose of placing a new machine on the market. In combination
lies the only salvation of the typewriter business in this country.”
Harry Payne Whitney (1872-1930)
Allan
Ryan told the Eagle, “The typewriter business has never been properly developed
in this or any other country. No one seemed to grasp the possibilities of the
situation and, after careful investigation, I and my associates formed the present company for the purpose of developing the business to
its full extent.” He went on to talk about increasing Royal’s sphere of
influence in the typewriter world.
Edward James Manning (1865-1938)
From
a purely typewriter point of view, the success of the Ryans in luring the
massively experienced Edward James Manning away from Underwood, where he’d been
a technical mastermind for 17 years, was the greatest coup of all. Manning changed
camps on April 5, 1907, (his employees gave him a diamond ring as a going-away
gift). Manning followed Jacob Eugene Neahr, who in October 1906 was recruited from Underwood to take care of Royal sales. The pair joined Royal’s new board of directors. Manning was
appointed general manager and brought with him his English-born offsider
Charles Belnap Cook. As well, the Ryans robbed Underwood of its auditor Charles
Marvin Burlingame, who became company accountant at Royal. Royal went on to
cherry pick Underwood staff across the country – Iowa state manager and highly
successful salesman Tom Symonds switched sides in Des Moines in April 1907, as
just one example. Another was Arthur Rattray, who went from Hartford to New
York in mid-May, to be joined by W.A. Wells in September. M.F. Klopfenstein and
his repairman Harry L. Newhard followed suit from Allentown, Pennsylvania, in
late June, and Charles F. Courtney of Reading, Pennslyvania, in September. Right
across the US, typewriter people were showing enormous advance faith in the new
product.
One of the first newspaper adverts to appear after the Ryan takeover of Royal was placed by Tom Symonds in the Des Moines Register on November 10, 1907.
Allan
Ryan claimed the typewriter industry, as conducted in 1907, was “practically in
its infancy”. Of the 80 million in the US, and millions in other “civilised
countries”, a great many wanted typewriters, but he estimated “only about 250,000”
were made in 1906. The “total yearly output is ridiculously small.” Ryan said
that within 10 years Royal’s new plant would produce 140,000 typewriters a year
alone (70,000 was the initial projected output). “I also believe that there
will be a legitimate demand for all the machines that can be made.”
Charles Michael Schwab (1862-1939)
On
September 14, 1907, The Los Angeles Herald followed the Brooklyn Eagle’s story
under the headline "Think Ryan heads typewriter trust: New Royal company
may absorb Remington: Schwab, Guggenheim
and Other Prominent Capitalists Representing Many Millions Are Interested In
Concern.” It said, “Rumors have been heard for some time that a group of
American capitalists, with Thomas F. Ryan at their head, were forming a large
company to acquire all the largest typewriter interests in the country and to
obtain control of the business, all over the world.” The Herald said the
consortium had “combined holdings … sufficient to effect an absolute monopoly
of the typewriter business. “It was learned that the Royal Typewriter Company
is the nucleus of the big enterprise and that a plant, said to be the largest
of the kind in the world is now being erected in Hartford, Connecticut. Several
of the chief men of the Underwood Typewriter Company have been employed by the
Ryan concern and two of them have been made directors of the new company.”
The
Herald quoted Neahr as saying, “Up to the present time we have been giving most
of our attention to the foreign trade. The foreign market for American
typewriters is something enormous and will continue to grow. In the matter of
making typewriters, Europeans are just where we were 12 years ago, and our great
difficulty just now is to make our machines as fast as they are sold abroad. We
have just closed a contract for 6000 machines in England, and have sold 200
recently to the French government.
“In Hartford we are putting up the largest
typewriter factory in the world, and are offering all sorts of inducements to
workmen to complete it as rapidly as possible.” Asked about “the so-called
Royal Typewriter Company” absorbing other large American typewriter concerns,
Neahr replied, “I shall not discuss that part of the business, but you may draw
your own conclusions. The Royal machine was perfected only a year ago and has
not been placed on the market here [in the US] to any extent. But capitalists
who have made a careful investigation are satisfied that there is a big future
in the business and the new company has succeeded in procuring the services of
some of the best typewriter experts in the world. We have about 12 from the Underwood
company.” Neahr said 25 “of the strongest capitalists in the country” were stockholders
in the new company, but they didn’t want their names mentioned “until certain
negotiations now pending are closed”.
Philip Tell Dodge (1851-1931)
The
involvement of Wisconsin-born, Washington-based Philip Tell Dodge in the Royal
establishment is interesting. He had had a long involvement in the typewriter
business. He was patent attorney for the first typewriter design from Christopher
Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel Willard Soulé. Dodge was also employed
by Sholes to patent his machine for printing numbers, and the previous
year Sholes and Soulé employed Dodge's father, William Castle Dodge, as their
patent attorney for an earlier version of this machine. Philip Dodge went on to
become a patent counsel for Remington and it was he who secured the Byron Alden
Brooks patent for the shift device first used on the Remington 2 in 1878.
Starting in late 1891, Dodge served 37 years as general manager and president
of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company.
Given
the financial clout behind Royal, and the company’s boasts about its production
and sales capacities, the good aldermen of Hartford, Connecticut, must have
been astounded to read in September 1907 of ambitions for global domination.
Three months earlier, on June 10, 1907, a petition from Manning for Royal to be
relieved from assessment of taxes for five years was discussed by Hartford’s
board of aldermen, board of finance and a joint special committee. It was found
the alderman, though they agreed to a three-year abatement, didn’t have the
power to help Royal. The typewriter company had bought 5¼ acres of land for its
new Hartford factory on May 25, 1907. In April it had considered Manchester,
nine miles east of Hartford, but on Manning’s insistence settled on Hartford.
It was merely a return to home turf for Manning. The Hartford factory was
opened on March 14, 1908. Heavy advertising in New York newspapers for the
Royal typewriter started in October 1908.
There
were two obvious benefits from the brouhaha about the “gigantic” Royal typewriter
trust. First, the Royal typewriter received more, and more widespread,
publicity than, even with its big backers, it could possibly have afforded in
paid advertising. Second, it immediately proved bad publicity for the more
established companies mentioned, such as Underwood, whose officials reacted
with immediate denials and stated Underwood had never been, nor ever would be,
part of a trust. There was far more at stake than in the first match between
the two company teams in the Hartford Church Bowling League on March 19, 1908.
But by then, talk of the ultimate typewriter trust was long dead.
Typewriter Topics, September 1907:
.jpg)
