Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;messydesk, post: 4577194, member: 1765&quot;]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&#039;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.</p><p><br /></p><p><img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6027503/uploads/editor/r4/gbbg26knnmb0.png" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;m thinking to myself that&#039;s pretty early in typewriter history and wondered when the Mint Director&#039;s office first got one, what kind, and what help the archives would be in figuring this out. Of course, I didn&#039;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.</p><p><br /></p><p><img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6027503/uploads/editor/bi/d6wo9az1a79m.png" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>December 1, 1880</p><p>Fairbanks, Morse &amp; Co.</p><p>111 Lake Street</p><p>Chicago</p><p><br /></p><p>Gentlemen:</p><p>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.</p><p>Very respectfully,</p><p>Horatio C. Burchard,</p><p>Director</p><p><br /></p><p>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:</p><p><br /></p><p><img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6027503/uploads/editor/qm/l7z09cdcupxa.png" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>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 &amp; Co. (FM&amp;C), perhaps that&#039;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.</p><p><br /></p><p><img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6027503/uploads/editor/jc/vm29lq1mea9o.png" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p>In due course of departmental business, a draft for the amount will be mailed you.</p><p><br /></p><p>Very Respectfully</p><p>Horatio C. Burchard</p><p>Director</p><p><br /></p><p>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&#039;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 &amp; 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&amp;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.</p><p><br /></p><p><img src="https://www.antiquetypewriters.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Remington-4-Perfected-1.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>The picture above is from a rather impressive website of an antique typewriter collector, <a href="https://www.antiquetypewriters.com/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.antiquetypewriters.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.antiquetypewriters.com</a>, 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&#039;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.</p><p><br /></p><p>By 1897, all correspondence at the mint was typed. One year earlier, Underwood successfully launched &quot;visible&quot; 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.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in