Robert Messenger's Typewriting Blog
A client brought his late uncle's 1927 Royal portable into the workshop this morning (serial number P32950). The machine itself is in almost immaculate condition, though I've never seen such moldy, rotting ribbon. The case is also a mess and glued to the front of it was this wonderful Doonesbury cartoon strip from Garry Trudeau - about Washington Post reporter Rick Redfern being issued with a…
Around the time my dear friend Geoffrey Borny announced he was to direct a season of the Canberra Rep’s The Glass Menagerie , I chanced upon a copy of the 1978 book The World of Tennessee Williams , edited by Richard E. Leavitt. In it was a photograph of Williams at a typewriter I hadn’t seen before - and that was unusual. In his exhaustive list of writers and their typewriters on his ‘Classic…
VISITORS to the typewriter museum invariably express astonishment when the origin of the “Shift” key on a computer keyboard is demonstrated to them. I point it out by shifting the carriage on my 1878 Remington No 2 standard typewriter, the first model capable of producing type in upper and lower case letters. Of course, hardly any of the hundreds of millions of people who press a “Shift” key…
It’s coming up this month to the 91st anniversary of Jesse Owens’s remarkable achievement of establishing six world records on the one afternoon at Ferry Field in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His long jump record of 26 feet 8¼ inches (8.13m) stood for a quarter of a century. Later, Bob Beamon soared through rarified air to 29 feet 2 inches (8.9m) at the Mexico City Olympic Games, a record which stood for…
There was I preparing to write a post in praise of Japanese-made typewriters. Then up turns a man who is opting out of this mad, mad, mad world and heading off to an overgrown paddock in Fiji. So he needs his typewriter put in working order. No computers where he's going. He found the Brother in an op-shop some years ago, all of $35 worth, and has never been able to use it. I’m not surprised. It’s…
ON THE day I was born – 78 years ago yesterday – a young man in Detroit, Michigan, turned his life around. He did it with a battered old Underwood typewriter and 40 cartons of noodle soup. Of course this all happened 8733 miles from where I entered the world, but who knows how far positive vibes can reach? And how long it takes for them to find their target? Joseph Purdum Waitz, then a 26-year-old…
So pleased to see that Margaret Talbot, a 22-year veteran staff writer for The New Yorker , has taken the trouble to check the facts laid out in my ozTypewriter blog posts of September 2020. Talbot devoted a lengthy "A Critic at Large" article to Shere Hite in the March 9 issue of The New Yorker . Fittingly, Talbot's piece appeared under the headline "Doing It Right", for that is exactly what…
Typewriter historian Michael Adler as a 12-year-old "violin genius", in Sydney in 1947. When The Sydney Morning Herald reviewed Michael Adler’s first typewriter history, it said The Writing Machine was “an authoritative book on a subject on which surprisingly little information is available”. This was in February 1974, a time when manual typebasket machines were already well on the way toward…
The groundbreaking typewriter historian Michael Hugo Adler died on the Fourth of July this year, aged 90, on the Greek Island of Mykonos. At the time, the passing of a man who had made such a massive contribution to our knowledge of typewriter history went completely unnoticed. Adler was inspired to collect and restore vintage typewriters and study the history of the writing machine after paying…
Today, April 25, is Anzac Day, and many New Zealanders will be honouring their war dead. But one brave New Zealander, who died on Anzac Day in 1963, will not be remembered. All that remains to remind us of this man’s life is his Imperial Good Companion portable typewriter and its (appropriately) bright red case, which are in Te Papa Tongarewa (Museum of New Zealand). Reginald John “Chip” Bailey…
Further to my post yesterday, today I received from Laurie Cox of the Stroppel Hotel and Mineral Baths in Midland, South Dakota, these images of Julia Talledge at her Oliver No 9 typewriter. It was yet another happy consequence of family members getting in touch with me following an ozTypewriter post. In this case, it was a post titled "Calamity-less Julia, Her Typewriter and The Black Hills of…
Of the 2937 posts on this blog, one that I am most proud of was published on March 13, 2019, under the heading, “Betsy Beaton, The Boy With Green Hair and the Underwood 6 Typewriter”. There wasn’t a lot in it about typewriters, but it took many, many hours of research to identify the lady in the photo with the Underwood standard – and her achievements. The end result was satisfying to say the…
I’ve been asked to service before sale this 1903 (serial #302981) Underwood 5. It’s history includes a thorough rebuild in the 1920s or 30s by an Elizabeth Street, Sydney, outfit called Typewriter Trading Co. The Underwood is pretty close to being immaculate for its age, but I’m intrigued by the lack of a shift lock key. The right shift key automatically activates the lock, which is a lever with a…
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…
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 "automatic return" Halda Barking mad?: What was really wrong with it - a piece of bark in the escapement mechanism.
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 (t heir…
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…
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…
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.…