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Hammond 2 -- 1895


Hammond 2 - 1902
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Hammond Multiplex Folding - 1921

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Varityper 'Handy' -- c1950

 

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The first real competitor to the Remington desk typewriter was the machine designed by an American journalist, James Bartlett Hammond (1839-1913).
Hammond had been a shorthand court reporter who had also covered the Civil War, and is said to have conceived the idea for a printing machine after seeing his dispatches garbled by telegraph operators. During the 1870s, without any engineering training, he worked on a typing machine that used a single printing element, a typewheel or shuttle, instead of a set of type bars.
     It is probable that Hammond drew his inspiration from the machine called the Pterotype, invented by John Pratt, an American living in England, and based on a typewheel. A description of Pratt’s machine was published in Scientific American in 1867 and this article inspired many typewriter pioneers including Christopher Sholes and Lucien Crandall. Hammond was an astute businessman and offered Pratt a cash sum and royalty to stay out of the typewriter business, an offer that Pratt accepted. This effectively gave Hammond control of Pratt's patent for the typewheel. Hammond’s first commercial machine appeared by 1884.
The Hammond machine was significantly smaller and lighter than the Remington simply because its typewheel design required far fewer parts, so the potential for portability seemed to be there from the outset. The machine was also provided with a wooden cover, just like portable machines of a couple of decades later. However, at a thumping 22 pounds, the early Hammond was a long way from being portable. (See the Hammond model 2 of 1895 illustrated at left.)
  
     Hammond was also concerned about helping visually handicapped typists and introduced a factory-modified version of the Hammond 2 with a Braille attachment over the carriage and a central dot so the carriage position could be located by touch. This version also had alternating square and round key caps to make identification easier for blind users.
     In 1905, the Hammond design was improved by the simple addition of a ribbon ‘vibrator’ and a mechanism to make the type shuttle bob down again after striking a letter. Together these design changes turned the new desk model, the Hammond 12 into a machine where the typing was fully visible, able to compete with the new front strike ‘visible’ machine of Underwood. As if still yearning to be seen as a portable or, at least, easily luggable machine, the Hammond 12 was produced around 1913 in a version with a leather carrying case, as illustrated at left.  By 1907 Hammond was so financially successful that the company opened a new, purpose-built typewriter factory in Manhattan, overlooking New York’s East River, close to the Brooklyn Bridge. The 50,000 square foot factory took up an entire block between 69th and 70th Streets. In 1913, James Hammond died and – to everyone’s astonishment -- left all his estate to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. This included his 95% shareholding in The Hammond Typewriter Company. There are no records of exactly when and how the Museum disposed of this legacy and what it did with the Hammond Company. As a result, the history of the company over the next decade is less than clear.   What is known is that, from 1916, Hammond produced a replacement for the No 12 desk machine in the form of the Hammond Multiplex, a machine with two type shuttles that could be quickly alternated to change typefaces. The Multiplex desk machine continued to be manufactured under this name until at least 1926. At the same time that it introduced the Multiplex in 1916, Hammond also started to produce a version of the Multiplex with an aluminium frame, in a carrying case, its first real attempt at portability. During the First World War, the aluminium Multiplex was produced in a Khaki livery for use by the US Army. President Woodrow Wilson owned one of these machines, on which he typed his own letters, and which is still on display at the White House museum.
      The company’s next significant development took place in 1921, when true portability finally came to the Hammond with the launch of the Hammond Folding Multiplex shown on the left. The Folding Multiplex has all the advantages of the full size Hammond: visible typing, fewer working parts, and the ability to change typefaces at will. In addition it offered aluminium construction giving light weight (8-1/2 pounds) and a folding keyboard providing compact size. All this was contained in a case only 12 by 9 by 8 inches. Here, at last, was the machine that James Hammond had originally envisaged; a portable printing machine that could be taken into the field by soldier or journalist and used anywhere to prepare printed reports in any one of 300 typefaces.
     The solution adopted by Hammond's engineers to achieve portability was the opposite of the first commercially successful portable machine, the Standard Folding of 1908. While the Standard's carriage folded over its keyboard, the Hammond's keyboard folded over its carriage, though both machines used aluminium construction. The Hammond was some three pounds heavier than the Standard Folding (two pounds heavier than the Corona 3) because its design relied on several steel rods and bails, and also because the Hammond designers insisted on over-engineering every screw by making them a size too large!
     It’s difficult today to estimate just how financially successful the Folding Multiplex was. There seem to be quite a few surviving machines since many are sold on eBay each year (probably one or two a month) suggesting a healthy original sales volume. But whether successful or not, in 1926 the Hammond Typewriter Company was sold by its shareholders to Frederick Hepburn Co. And by 1928, the company had moved from the old Hammond factory, across the Harlem River to a new address in the Bronx, at 132nd Street and Brook Avenue.
     The new owners changed the company name to The VariTyper Company and at the same time, changed the name of its desk model Multiplex, first to Model 26 and soon after to the Varityper. Some machines of this period carry references to Hammond Patents in parenthesis underneath the name. Although the company continued under its new owner to produce the re-named Multiplex and Folding Multiplex machines, it fell victim to the depression after the crash of 1929 and in 1932, the company filed for bankruptcy, making all its staff redundant.
     Just a few blocks from the old Hammond factory, in the Woolworth Building, another office equipment entrepreneur had fared better. Ralph C Coxhead and his son had set up business around 1920, as the US distributor for the Mercedes mechanical calculating machines made by Christian Hamann of Berlin. Throughout the boom years of the 1920s. Coxhead had added other office machinery to his portfolio. Now, in 1933, he found sufficient financial backers to be able to buy up the patents and assets of the bankrupt VariTyper Company and make it the manufacturing arm of the Ralph C Coxhead Corporation. Coxhead re-hired many of the Hammond staff and re-started both manufacture and development. 
     By the mid-1930s, the Hammond machine’s days as an office or personal typewriter were virtually over. But Coxhead appears to have seen a new future for the Varityper as what would later become known as a typesetting machine – a source of duplicator stencil masters and web offset litho printing masters which, unlike the Linotype and Monotype machines, did not rely on hot metal casting. To describe this new kind of type origination, Coxhead coined the term ‘cold typesetting’. 
     The Varityper was well suited to this purpose because it had both a large library of hundreds of type faces and also a facility for proportional spacing to accommodate their varying widths. To these, Coxhead added the ability to right-justify type (1937), variable letter spacing (1947), and variable line spacing (1953). He also introduced was what almost certainly the first one-time carbon ribbon (actually a large reel of carbon paper) to give sharper images. He also developed a metal (‘Krometal’) typeshuttle to replace the original vulcanised rubber design. Perhaps most important of all, he electrified the Varityper to give consistent letter impressions.
     The company flourished for two decades in its new incarnation, but Coxhead died in the early 1950s and soon after the company was sold to The Addressograph-Multigraph Corporation.  The Coxhead Varityper continued to be manufactured and sold as a typesetting machine until the 1970s (some reports even say 1980). It is a curious Frankenstein-like construction with its knobs and dials and extra long carriage to accommodate magazine and tabloid newspaper-sized pages. Yet underneath the later layers of complexity is the machine that James Hammond designed a century earlier, in 1880. The footprint is the same, the turret with its anvil and typeshuttles is identical as is the keyboard actuating mechanism and ribbon reverser. Even the idiosyncratic cylindrical paper receptacle is the same.
     The underlying similarity had been made even clearer in the 1940s when Coxhead decided to resurrect the purely mechanical Varityper as a personal typewriter and produced the "Handy" model, aimed at scientists and engineers (see machine illustrated at left) with a keyboard of mathematical signs and Greek characters. This is a normal Varityper but with the electric motor, the right justification mechanism, and the carbon ribbon holder all removed. What is left is closely similar to the Hammond Multiplex of 1916 – or even the Hammond 2 of 1895 -- apart from the position of the bell and the design of the paper table. The similarity is so great that some components of the 1950s machine are actually interchangeable with that of 1895 -- a design longevity unrivalled by any other manufacturer.
      From an engineering standpoint, there is indeed little difference. The only real structural changes with the Varityper are the addition of a zinc casting to the aluminium frame to bear the wear caused by the pivoting key levers and the addition of a substantial half-inch diameter bar of silver steel on which the carriage runs on wheel bearings.
     Probably the greatest testament to Hammond's design values is the number of Multiplexes and Folding Multiplexes that have survived, often in excellent condition, suggesting that they were well looked after by appreciative owners. It's interesting to make a side-by-side comparison of comparable Hammond desk and portable typewriters. The Hammond 12 of 1905 (left below) has virtually the same design and same dimensions as the Multiplex Folding of 1921. But the Folding Multiplex and its case together weigh only 8-1/2 pounds compared to the 22 pounds of the earlier machine. 
     A second testament to Hammond’s vision is that the ‘type foundry’ his company designed (the name that typographers give to the company’s type catalogue) became a valuable asset in its own right as photo typesetting took off in the 1960s. As a result the Varityper name continued in use in the 1970s to describe the early electronic typesetting system developed by AM Varityper Corporation to supercede mechanical typesetters -- the first generation of high-precision PostScript imagesetters. AM Varityper was bought by Tegra Corporation in the late 1980s. In the 1990s, Tegra-Varityper was in turn bought out by Pre-Press Solutions Inc and still remains a leader in image-setting technology today.  
     There is a final irony in that Pre-Press Solutions is the name by which Monotype Corporation is today known. Thus, the company that coined the term ‘cold typesetting’, and whose founder dreamed of a portable printing machine, was ultimately taken over by the company whose name was synonymous with ‘hot metal’ typesetting.

 

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