I posted this a few days ago on the PCGS forum, so a handful of you have probably already seen this. Hopefully, the rest of you find this cool. Recently, I found myself looking into when the Mint Director's office first got a typewriter. I blame the NNP and RogerB for this, as the repository of Mint paperwork there is rather vast and is likely to make you think you can find out anything if you spend enough time careening down that rabbit hole. What started this was a typed order for dies to be sent to San Francisco for 1888. I'm thinking to myself that's pretty early in typewriter history and wondered when the Mint Director's office first got one, what kind, and what help the archives would be in figuring this out. Of course, I didn't think it to myself, I thought it out loud, by which I mean I posted it to the thread on VAMWorld where the letter appeared. Shortly thereafter, Roger posted this from December 1, 1880, from the Fair Copy Book. December 1, 1880 Fairbanks, Morse & Co. 111 Lake Street Chicago Gentlemen: I will thank you to forward to this bureau one dozen bundles of black copying typewriter ribbon manufactured by Stephen T. Smith, also instructions for the proper management of the machine. Forward your bill in duplicate for payment. Very respectfully, Horatio C. Burchard, Director 1880 is way earlier than 1887, so I started spelunking through the General Correspondence box looking for more clues. Lo an behold, November 1880 has a few typed pages in the box, no more than 1 per day, including this, the earliest typed page in the box: So it was back to the Fair Copy Book of letters from the Mint Director. Fortunately, the front of the book contains an index making it possible to go to letters to a specific recipient. Since Burchard wanted ribbons and maintenance instructions from Fairbanks, Morse & Co. (FM&C), perhaps that's where he got the typewriter. The lone entry for the rest of 1880 was on November 11, the day after the above letter was typed. Your bill of the 5th instant, for one type writer amounting to $50 purchased by me, has been approved and referred to the proper officers of the Department for payment. In due course of departmental business, a draft for the amount will be mailed you. Very Respectfully Horatio C. Burchard Director So apparently he liked the typewriter enough to pay for it. I looked in vain for the bill to see if it showed the make and model, but it wasn't to be found. Nevertheless, there were other ways to investigate this. I started looking into typewriters that were made around then and came up with the Sholes & Glidden typewriter, which was mass produced in 1873 by Remington as the Remington No. 1. It only had upper case letters. Remington outsourced their marketing to FM&C, a scale manufacturer which was by that time a rather diverse industrial supplier, in 1878. Remington also produced a typewriter with both upper and lower case, using a shift key (rather than a second set of keys), the Remington 2, and another upper-case only called the Remington Perfected 4, seemingly a replacement for the Remington 1, which received accolades at the Paris Exposition in 1878. The picture above is from a rather impressive website of an antique typewriter collector, https://www.antiquetypewriters.com, as is some of the information about it. I contacted the collector and sent him the above picture of the November 10, 1880 page to see if the typeface indicated which model produced it, but he said that there were multiple fonts in production for multiple typewriters, so the model couldn't be determined, but he agreed that it was quite possibly the Remington Perfected 4, maybe the Remington 1. He was rather excited to see the letter, and was impressed that it still existed. By 1897, all correspondence at the mint was typed. One year earlier, Underwood successfully launched "visible" typewriters, where the type bars struck the front of the platen like those of us who have used a typewriter are used to seeing. Before that, the type struck the underside of the platen so that you were typing blind.
Very intriguing. I personally think it is really cool in the first letter to Mr. Fox the mentioning of all the mint dies. It's just really cool to me that I have some of the coins from that year that could have been minted because of this letter.
After reading some of the handwritten correspondence from before that time I'm sure they were THRILLED with the typewriter. (Some people wrote in a beautiful script, but a great many are horrible.) I think the clerks hired to write out the fair copy books were specially selected for good handwriting. So far I haven't seen bad handwriting in those books.
I like the sentence the Mint Director uses "as early as practicable" .. Neat word. Never saw it used in that way. Nice thread. Thanks for sharing!
What impressed me was the perfect typing. Also the "early" Remington is a QWERTY. The first typewriters were arranged in alphabetic order. It took a few years to devise an ergonomic (or anti-ergonomic) layout. You should join the Numismatic Bibliomania Society and submit this as a feature article. It would be an important addition to the archives.
While Remington developed the QWERTY layout, there's actually no proof anywhere showing exactly why it was established. The popular belief that it was to slow down typists doesn't make logical sense, because typists became fast again after learning it, requiring a new layout every so often. Anything other than a QWERTY layout today would be considered non-ergonomic, but only temporarily. As an exercise, set your keyboard to German or French for a day, which is a minor deviation, and see how that works. The initial deviations from the alphabetical layout that Sholes & Glidden had on their typewriter, which was then further developed and sold by Remington had to do with moving keys around to avoid type bars jamming when adjacent letters were used, thus speeding up the typist. The QWERTY Wikipedia page shows some of the evolutionary steps in this. There is conjecture that a study of common letter pairs influenced the layout, but no proof. Another explanation that is offered is that telegraph operators wanted similarly coded letters to be away from each other. While years could have been spent optimizing key placement, once something hit mass production, it became important to have a de facto standard established so that you could be a market leader. Remington's essential monopoly on mass-produced typewriters meant they could stop experimenting when it was good enough, and let everyone get used to using their standard. I'll consider that.
Whatever and however typewriters came to be, I sure am glad that computers have pretty much replaced them. I say that because I wrote an entire book, at least 20 short stories, and more poems that I care to count, on a 1927 Underwood Portable. I'd rather die than ever use one again !
Believe me, in early mint documents it gets used that way a LOT. One I liked when I first started working with the documents was approbation, they were always seeking someone's approbation on things It's a perfectly valid word but just one you don't normally see anymore. Today we seek approval.
