Ch. 1, Inventing the Pretty Typewriter

Virginia Woolf was fascinated by the gap between the real

and the fictional, the world and the word. They were distinct,

yet never wholly dissevered. “Fiction is like a spider’s web,”

she wrote, “attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still

attached to life at all four corners . . . attached to grossly

material things, like health and money and the houses we live

in.”1 If we are to probe the fictional webs that came to be

spun around the modern secretary, the hundreds of novels and

films in which she is the heroine, we must attend to that

world of “grossly material things” in which those stories took

shape and made sense.

One “grossly material thing” that connected millions of

typists, secretaries, and stenographers was plainly the

typewriter. Traditional histories credit its invention to a

single man, Christopher Latham Sholes (1819-1890) (fig. 1), at

one time the editor of a small-town newspaper in Kenosha,

Wisconsin, and a sometime dabbler in politics. In his

editorials he took positions that were idealistic, downright

impractical, or forthrightly progressive: he urged abolition

of the death penalty, demanded the elimination of war, and

staunchly supported equal rights for women. In 1848 he was

elected a state senator, then served a brief term as city

1

clerk of Kenosha, and in 1851 returned to the state

legislature as an assemblyman. In January, 1853, he met James

Densmore (1820-1889) (fig. 2), then the editor of the True

Democrat (a newspaper in Oshkosh, Wisconsin), a meeting that

would ultimately have a profound effect on his life. Months

later the two men attempted to transform Sholes’s weekly

Telegraph into the Daily Telegraph, a venture that ended in

failure a year later when the price of their wire service from

the Associated Press became too high. The two parted amicably:

Sholes stayed on to edit his weekly, slightly renamed Tribune

and Telegraph in Kenosha while Densmore moved to a nearby town

and another newspaper. But it was not the end of their story.

In 1857 Sholes moved to Milwaukee, where he worked as a

journalist first for the Free Democrat and later The Sentinel,

both Republican newspapers. When the Civil War broke out,

Sholes volunteered, at his own expense, to be the governor’s

personal representative and report on the physical care of

Wisconsin soldiers serving in the Union army. As a reward he

was named collector of the port of Milwaukee in 1863, a

sinecure that entailed only light duties and consumed little

time. It enabled him to quit the newspaper business and devote

himself to his growing interest in inventing machinery, a

penchant he had indulged ever since his move to Milwaukee. In

1860, working with Samuel W. Soule, a draftsman and civil

2

engineer, he had designed a machine for addressing newspapers

sent to customers subscribing by mail, one that was soon

successfully manufactured. He had also designed another

machine for numbering documents requiring successive

pagination or enumeration, such as ledgers, tickets and

coupons. He patented it in 1864, together with improvements

made in 1866 and 1867. It was at this point that he came

across an article in the journal Scientific American of 6

July, 1867, which reported on a “Type Writing Machine” that

had recently been invented. It prompted Sholes to wonder

whether he might be able to devise a better one.2

Working once again with Samuel Soule and also with a

lawyer named Carlos Glidden, Sholes set out to build a working

model of a machine that would embody his essential insight.

The writing machine described in Scientific American had

characters that were arranged on a wheel that would rotate a

character into place, supplemented by a hammer that then stuck

the paper against it. The procedure entailed so many steps to

produce a single letter that it could never be faster than

normal writing. Sholes, instead, decided that he would put

each type or character on a separate bar, and that each bar

would individually strike the paper: a single motion for a

single character. By September, 1867, he had a working model

and even arranged for a demonstration. Charles E. Weller,

3

chief operator at the local office of Western Union telegraph,

was so impressed that he put in an order for the very first

one to leave the shop. He would receive it only four months

later: Sholes had devised the working model of a potentially

useful machine; but reproducing it by manual production was

slow and costly.

To remedy this problem, Sholes and his colleagues decided

they needed capital and manufacturing expertise. Soule was

sent to New York and Washington, lugging a bulky model with

him, but failed to find a backer. Sholes, instead, recalled

his former colleague and friend James Densmore; he sent him a

letter, typed with the new machine, in which he described the

invention and hinted at its possibilities with a quotation

from Shakespeare:

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.

Densmore, now living in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and working

as an attorney for a machine company, was immediately

interested. Weeks of negotiation by correspondence led to an

agreement in November, 1867: in return for paying Sholes,

Soule, and Glidden $200 each, Densmore would receive a 25%

share in the venture and undertake to finance the machine’s

4

manufacture. In the years since his collaboration with Sholes

in Kenosha, Densmore had also become an inventor, having

devised and patented an early version of a tank car for

transporting oil on railroads. His set of skills was suited to

the typewriter enterprise: former editor and publicist,

inventor, and lawyer. In March, 1868, he finally arrived in

Milwaukee, took command of the project, and swiftly discovered

that he was part-owner of a machine much cruder than he had

thought. He immediately demanded improvements.

In late June that year he journeyed to Washington, D.C.,

and filed claims for two patents: one covered the design of

the earlier machine demonstrated back in September, 1867; the

other, the improved machine developed over the last three

months. Densmore now took the newer, improved machine to

Chicago. In association with Soule and E. Payson Porter (who

ran a telegraph school), he spent $1,000 to manufacture

fifteen machines. Alas, when tested at Porter’s school, they

swiftly jammed. Densmore abandoned plans for further

manufacturing and instead returned to prodding Sholes and his

colleagues to make more improvements.

The next stage of tinkering required more than two years,

and it was only in March, 1871, that Densmore felt he could

undertake a second attempt at manufacturing. This time he used

a machine shop in Milwaukee owned by Charles F. Kleinsteuber

5

(fig. 3); it included a brass foundry as well as general

machine tools for model making. The newly manufactured

machines worked well enough at the beginning, but after

intense usage some of their characters fell out of alignment.

Production was halted after making only twenty-five machines,

and once more Densmore directed his team of inventors to find

a solution.

By the spring of 1872, Densmore was again convinced that

the machine was technically ready; he also decided that he

would personally supervise a third attempt at manufacturing,

this one to take place in Milwaukee but at a different

location, an old mill with water power. By late June he had

installed second-hand tools, chosen a superintendent, and

hired several laborers. But the machines were still being

handmade. Densmore inspected each one and often required

alterations or the remaking of parts. Even he could see that

the scale of the Milwaukee operations was inappropriate: “I am

anxious to get everything in such shape that the various parts

can be made by machinery, without this everlasting filing and

fitting, which makes but a botch after it is done.”3 The

machines were a technical success and a financial failure.

“The fact is that as we are now making them they are costing

more than we ask for them. And until we cheapen the making, we

are losing all the time,” he complained.4 It was in November,

6

1872, that Densmore and Sholes decided to make one last change

to the machine, altering its keyboard in a way that would make

it less likely to jam by separating the most frequently used

keys, resulting in the famous QWERTY configuration--so named

after the first six letters in the topmost row of keys--that

has become the so-called “universal” keyboard still in use

today. Every time that we use or office PC or home laptop, our

fingers retrace the steps that were taken to solve a problem

that hasn’t existed for more than thirty years: preventing the

typewriter bars from jamming as the rose toward the central

point where the keys struck the page.

One month later, in December, Densmore was visited by a

friend who bore the sonorous name of George Washington Newton

Yost; it was Yost who suggested to him that he take the

typewriter elsewhere for manufacturing. He recommended the

arms makers Eliphalet Remington & Sons of Ilion, New York, and

offered to accompany him there. Some two months later, in mid-

February, 1873, Densmore and Yost journeyed to Ilion. A

picturesque town with a small creek that flowed into the

Mohawk River, the largest tributary of the Hudson, it was

dominated by the massive Remington factory, so vast it would

cover five acres if spread out on a single floor (fig. 4).

Staying at a small hotel, Yost and Densmore were greeted by

three men: Philo Remington, the eldest of the founder’s three

7

sons and the firm’s president since their father had died in

1861; Henry Benedict, a young executive; and Jefferson Clough,

the superintendent and head mechanic of the Remington works.

Yost and Densmore gave the men a working demonstration of

their machine. Fifty years later, Benedict recalled:

We examined and discussed the machine for perhaps an

hour-and-a-half or two hours and then adjourned for lunch

or dinner. As we left the room, Mr. Remington said to me,

“What do you think of it?”

I replied, “That machine is very crude, but there is

an idea there that will revolutionize business.”

Mr. Remington asked, “Do you think we ought to take

it up?”

I said, “We must on no account let it get away. It

isn’t necessary to tell these people that we are

crazy over the invention, but I’m afraid I am pretty

nearly so.”5

One part of Benedict’s recollection may have been affected by

the half-century of events that had subsequently intervened,

his confident assertion that the typewriter would

“revolutionize business.” If that is what he truly said to

Remington, he was extraordinarily prescient. Sholes and

8

Densmore, instead, thought it useful for telegraph operators

wishing to convert Morse code into legible text, which is why

the first demonstration of the machine in 1867 had included

the telegraph operator who then ordered the first machine to

be produced, or why Densmore’s first manufacturing attempt in

Chicago had been in collaboration with a man who ran a school

for training telegraph operators.6 Who would use the typewriter

was still an unanswered question that lingered in the

background during the two weeks of negotiation that followed.

On 1 March, a contract was at last signed, with terms that

greatly favored the Remingtons. Densmore would pay them

$10,000 in advance, and also grant a royalty of $0.50 per

machine to Jefferson Clough, the Remington head mechanic who

would redesign the machine for mass manufacture. The

Remingtons agreed to produce at least 1,000 units, plus a

further 24,000 at their discretion, and would receive a fixed

price for each machine manufactured (the exact sum is not

known).7

Densmore now had to find cash to meet these new

obligations. He borrowed $3,000 from Clough, enough to keep a

few creditors at bay, then returned to Chicago to hustle up

$10,000 from Anson Stager, a telegraph entrepreneur who, in

exchange, received exclusive rights for selling typewriters in

certain western states for the Western Electric Company. It

9

was yet another financial complication--just when Densmore

thought he had solved them.

In November, 1872, four months before Densmore signed the

agreement with the Remingtons, he had added up his own

investment in the typewriter and found that he had spent

$13,000 in financing experiments, patents, and manufacturing.8

Most of it was money he had borrowed against the future

royalties that would accrue to his 25% share of the project,

including substantial loans advanced to him by his brothers

Amos and Emmet. It was time to reach a comprehensive

settlement that would not only convert these loans from

liabilities into assets, albeit passive ones, but also

formalize other transactions that had altered the financial

relations among the four co-owners of the patent claim:

Christopher Latham Sholes, Densmore himself, the draftsman

Samuel Soule, and the lawyer Carlos Glidden. Soule, during the

intervening years, had moved to New York and agreed to sell

Densmore his 25% share for $500 (which Densmore duly

purchased, though his actual payments were extended over

time). Glidden, instead, had drifted away from the typewriter

project, absorbed in another invention, and to finance work on

it had offered Sholes his 25% share in exchange for his

serving as co-signer for a note of $250. When Sholes

hesitated, Densmore instructed him to go ahead and promised

10

that he, Densmore, would pay for the note, as he later did.

Densmore, in short, owned 50% of the original patents and co-

owned 25% with Sholes; while Sholes owned his own 25%.

Glidden, meanwhile, had returned to the typewriter project and

helped Sholes in further developing it between 1870 and 1872.

He was therefore justified, or so he thought, in claiming back

a portion of the share he had sold. Densmore rejected this

claim; he himself had paid Glidden a salary for working with

Sholes, and in his view owed him nothing further. Glidden then

turned to Sholes, asking that he give him a portion from his

share in the business. Sholes had so little faith in the

commercial viability of the typewriter that he was happy to

placate Glidden with a portion from his own share.

The formalization of these arrangements was an “agreement

of trust” that Densmore drew up and executed on 16 November,

1872. The various owners of all interests in patents already

obtained, pending, or to be applied for, agreed to assign them

to Densmore and Sholes jointly, as trustees. The trustees

could make and sell instruments or license others to do so,

and all proceeds would be divided as follows:

James Densmore 40%

Christopher Latham Sholes 30%

Carlos Glidden 10%

Amos Densmore 10%

11

Emmett Densmore 10%

But in April, 1873, less than a month after Densmore had

contracted with Remington, Sholes decided to sell off one of

his three remaining 10% shares; he mistrusted the typewriter’s

commercial prospects, and his present needs were pressing. He

disposed of it in fractions to Amos Densmore and two others

for a total of $5,350, partly paid in cash. Densmore grew

alarmed: outsiders buying shares from Sholes might create

trouble for his ongoing management. In response he formulated

a new plan: together with his brother Amos and G. W. N. Yost,

he would buy out Sholes and any other shareholders. To do so

he created a new firm, Densmore, Yost & Company, one that

promptly repurchased all the portions Sholes had sold to

outsiders, as well as Emmett Densmore’s entire tenth, and one

of Shole’s two remaining tenths, the latter bought with

$10,000 in promissory notes. The agreement was struck in

September, 1874. Sholes was now left with only a single share,

ten percent of the whole.9

Meanwhile, on 30 April, 1874, the first Remington-made

machine finally arrived at the sales office that Densmore had

opened in New York. It was a handsome piece, enclosed in metal

painted with glossy black enamel, and distinctly resembling a

sewing machine, replete with a foot treadle (such as

contemporary sewing machines had) that shifted the paper from

12

one line to the next (fig. 5). Two months later six more

machines were shipped to Washington and ten to Chicago, all

for use by shorthand reporters who would pay for them by

writing glowing testimonials. Things were up and running—at

last. Remington announced it was ready to produce as many as a

hundred machines in the next month. But its estimate of

production capacity bore no relationship to real demand. By

the end of 1874 only 400 machines had been sold. And figures

for the next four years were hardly better, averaging 900 per

year. Between 1874 and 1878, four thousand typewriters were

manufactured and sold.10

Tellingly, that figure broadly coincides with another

figure from the U.S. census for the year 1880, one that shows

only 5,000 people employed as stenographers or typists in the

United States. But it also shows something else more

startling: already 2,000 of them (or 40%) were female. Those

figures are still more startling when compared to the

corresponding figures from the census of a decade earlier in

1870, when the same occupational category had contained only

154 workers in total, of which a mere 7 were female (or 4.5%).

Not only had the number of total workers increased by more

than 3000% in the intervening decade, but the percentage of

female workers had multiplied by tenfold.11 It signalled the

beginning of a revolution. And yet it was also a revolution

13

that a contemporary might have failed to discern. For while

the census of 1880 was plainly conducted in the year 1880, the

labor of compiling and collating its results was so vast that

it was not completed and published until ten years later, in

1890. The delay was a sign of a broader development: private

enterprise was growing so large that government efforts to

monitor it were hamstrung by inadequate data retrieval and

collation technologies. The typewriter would become a critical

instrument for more rapid and efficient data production in

large corporations; but this use was apparent to neither

Sholes nor Densmore. Densmore had poured his energies in

getting the typewriter manufactured; but his ability to bring

it to market was hampered by his inability to imagine it being

used by a commercial sector, rather than isolated individuals.

The machine, early advertisements urged, was suited to

lawyers, clergymen, editors, and court reporters. But those

made up a tiny market when compared to the business sector

that would soon adopt it. Yet already in 1875 there was a

telling hint of the future. The firm of Dun, Barlow & Co.

(predecessor of the celebrated business information firm, Dun

& Bradstreet) purchased one hundred typewriters to equip its

main office, then sent another forty to its branches

throughout the United States, together with instructions that

all reports now had to be typed. Previously subscribers who

14

sought out the firm’s business evaluations had to go to its

offices to consult a handwritten ledger; now typewritten

reports would be routinely mailed to them.12 It was data

intensive firms such as Dun Barlow that constituted the real

market for the typewriter.

Densmore also didn’t foresee another problem, the

question of who would operate the machine and where he or she

would get the training. Yes, the typewriter was significantly

faster than the pen, producing some sixty words per minute,

much more than the twenty to thirty of someone writing by

hand. But if an employee had to spend three months or more to

learn how to use it, the price of the machine became

formidable when the cost in lost productive labor was added to

its already hefty price ($125).

At the end of the first year when the typewriter was

manufactured by Remington, 1874, Densmore tried to address the

sales problem. Together with George Washington Newton Yost and

his brother Amos, he formed a new firm, the Type-Writer

Company; Yost and Densmore were each credited with 1,000

shares in the firm, and Densmore’s brother Amos with 500.13 It

immediately granted to Yost (and a new associate of his) both

its contract with Remington for manufacturing typewriters and

its agency for all sales. But sales throughout the early

months of 1875 were so poor that another arrangement soon had

15

to be found. On 1 November, 1875, the Type-Writer company set

aside its original contract with Remington and entered into a

new one. Remington acquired the exclusive right to make and

sell the typewriters in return for a fifteen dollar fee paid

on each machine. But Remington was wary of the expense

required to assemble a sizeable sales force; instead it struck

a deal with yet another firm headed by Yost, which became the

exclusive selling agent till the end of 1878. When that

arrangement expired, Remington turned to Fairbanks & Company,

famous scale manufacturers who had outlets throughout the

country; a four-year contract granted Fairbanks an exclusive

agency for typewriter sales. But Fairbanks found itself in the

same position: it had offices in many places, but not

employees familiar with the new machine or cognizant of its

potential clientele. In response they did what the Remingtons

had done: they turned to the irrepressible G. W. N. Yost, whom

they hired to direct and organize sales.14

Already back in 1876, Yost had found his best salesman in

the field, a man named William O. Wyckoff (fig. 6). Wyckoff

was a court reporter for a judicial district formed by ten

counties in central New York, the same area assigned him as

his sales territory. When he encountered resistance to buying

typewriters on the grounds that nobody was qualified to

operate them, he opened his own typewriting school and soon

16

offered a skilled operator to accompany each machine that he

sold. During 1876, when the total sales of typewriters across

the United States numbered 900, Wyckoff alone sold 157

machines. His pupils, it was claimed, could produce seventy

words per minute (wpm).15

While Wyckoff’s student pool was composed of both men and

women, that was not the case for students atf another

institution that soon took up the typewriter. In 1881 the

Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in New York City

offered its first class in typewriting. Eight pupils were

permitted to attend. All were promptly hired to work in

business offices where the only previous female employees had

been scrubbing women who cleaned up at night.16 We know little

about the content or structure of these early lessons in

typing, but they must have differed substantially from later

practice, for it was only in 1882 that the first book appeared

which advocated typing with all ten fingers, or “touch” typing

as it came to be known.17 How much these pedagogical

developments improved the actual performance of typists cannot

be precisely quantified, but it was probably considerable.

Until now, the Remingtons had enjoyed a virtual monopoly.

But after working only a year for Fairbanks & Co., the selling

agents, Yost left to pursue his own ambitions: to create a

rival brand of typewriter that would compete with Remington.

17

To do this, however, he had to persuade Densmore and the Type-

Writer Company to let him use their patents, despite the

exclusive contract with Remington. A lawyer working with Yost

convinced Densmore that he could do so with impunity: the

Type-writer Company had issued bonds to secure its many debts,

and in his role as trustee for the bondholders Densmore could

violate the Remington contract as long as any fees that came

to him were strictly applied to retiring the bonds. On 12

January, 1880, Densmore and Yost signed an agreement to just

that effect. Whether a typewriter was sold by Remington or

Yost, it would always mean profit for Densmore, or at least a

reduction in the mountain of debts he had accumulated. Events

did not turn out as he hoped. When Remington learned about his

deal, it was furious. It cut off all payments due him from

ongoing typewriter sales. It further demanded that he turn

over to Remington any new patents that he had obtained since

1873 (two had been applied for in 1878), as well as rights to

a new portable typewriter that Sholes was working on. Densmore

resisted manfully. But after more than a year he was starved

into submission. Remington set out to castrate him. It took

over all the functions of the Type-Writer Company from him.

Henceforth, Remington itself would directly pay all royalties

due to third parties; of any remaining sum, one half would

then go to pay off the $59,000 in debts to Remington that

18

Densmore ($9,000) and Yost ($50,000) had built up. Densmore,

henceforth, would receive only $3.00 per typewriter.18

The question of the other shareholders in the Type-Writer

Company had also been simplified the previous year, in 1880.

Sholes had long wanted to sell his last remaining share of

10%. He heartily disliked the machine that Remington had made

from his invention. “It simply don’t pay, can’t pay,” he wrote

to Densmore already in 1876. “It is too large, too cumbrous,

too complicated, too expensive, too troublesome for what it

achieves. . . . What I wanted from the first was to get out

entirely.”19 He disliked it so much that he even refused to use

it, preferring to write with a lead pencil. In the summer of

1878 he reiterated his account of why typewriter sales were so

poor: “The trouble is just where I have always placed it--to

wit: that the machine, taking everything into account, is not

a labor-saving machine. The public doesn’t need it--doesn’t

want it. It doesn’t sell itself.”20 In 1880 he was finally

granted his wish to sever all financial connections to the

Remington typewriter. Densmore agreed to pay him the amount

still due him on the old promissory notes that had been signed

when Sholes had last sold a 10% stake in the firm, and for the

last remaining share he paid him $3,000 in cash, as well as

another $2,800 for Sholes’s entire interest in a portable

typewriter he was working on. Sholes, in his own words, was

19

“glad to get out entirely.”21 After 1880, he had no financial

connection to the typewriter; and after 1881, Densmore was

reduced to a mere recipient of royalties, without no further

role in its development.

Knowing that Yost’s new rival machine, the Caligraph,

would be coming onto the market in mid-1881, Remington took

another step. It discontinued its selling agreement with

Fairbanks & Company and instead turned to the man who’d

directed Fairbanks’s sales division ever since Yost’s

departure, Clarence W. Seamans (fig. 7). Seamans, in turn,

recruited William O. Wyckoff, the salesman who had started his

own classes in typing back in 1876, and together the two

approached Henry Benedict (fig. 8), the young executive who

had first urged the Remingtons to take on the typewriter in

1873. The three formed a partnership (Wyckoff, Seamans, and

Benedict) and on 1 August, 1882, contracted with Remington to

be the exclusive sales agents for the typewriter. They would

take all the typewriters the firm could produce. Their impact

on sales was immediate:

1880 610

1881 1,170

1882 2,272

1883 3,376

20

1884 4,000

-----------------

Total 11,42822

Despite the rising sales figures, the firm of E.

Remington & Sons was increasingly in trouble, as it had been

ever since the late 1870s. In the wake of the American Civil

War, Remington had adopted a dual strategy for growth,

expanding firearms sales to foreign governments while

diversifying into non-military and consumer products,

especially agricultural equipment and sewing machines. The

decision to manufacture typewriters had formed part of this

plan. But over the next decade (1875-1885) things had slowly

gone awry. The Egyptian and Mexican governments had defaulted

on large orders of firearms that could never be retrieved; the

agricultural equipment division was being hammered by

competition from manufacturers in the midwest; and Remington

sewing machines did poorly against competition from the

established Singer brand. By early 1886, Remington was in

crisis.

It was now that Wyckoff, Seamans, and Benedict made an

audacious move. In March that year they purchased the entire

typewriter business from Remington. How they raised the

capital for this is not known, but they paid the very

21

substantial sum of $197,000 for the whole business, which

included plant, valued at $50,000; stock and material, valued

at $25,000; and franchise and patents, valued at $100,000.

That left them with $50,000 in cash with which to continue

manufacturing. The three men now created the Remington

Standard Typewriter Manufacturing Company with an authorized

capital of $225,000. (It had also been agreed that they could

continue to use the Remington name on their typewriters.) Even

this massive cash injection was not enough to stave off

disaster for Remington & Sons. The next month, on 22 April,

1886, the firm was placed in the hands of receivers who took

two years to liquidate it.23

Other firms were now gearing up to compete. In addition

to Yost’s Caligraph, new models being made by three other

firms by 1885. Wyckoff, Seamans, and Benedict responded by

cutting the price: in 1883 they cut from $125 to $100, and in

1885 to $95.24 They also reorganized and rationalized their

manufacturing; by 1888, only two years after buying out the

Remingtons, they were producing 1,500 typewriters a month, or

18,000 per year. Compare that with the 11,000 produced and

sold between 1880 and 1884.25 (Their achievement is even more

impressive if one recalls that each machine had more than

2,000 parts.) Their business was booming for reasons

identified by an anonymous contemporary writing in the

22

Penman’s Art Journal: “Five years ago the typewriter was

simply a mechanical curiosity. Today its monotonous click can

be heard in almost every well regulated business establishment

in the country.”26 Wyckoff, Seamans, and Benedict also expanded

exporting sales: they opened offices in Berlin in 1883, Paris

in 1884, and London in 1886.27 They aimed at global dominance.

The typewriter’s explosive growth in production and sales

occurred in tandem with an impressive expansion of office

culture. In 1880, recall, there were 5,000 stenographers and

typists according to the U. S. census, of whom 40% were women.

A decade later the figure had increased more than sixfold to

33,418, of whom 63.6% were women. The number of women

stenographers/typists had jumped from 2,000 to 21,270, a more

than tenfold increase. Some of this increase in typists could

be explained as merely a part of a much larger growth in

office workers. In 1880 bookkeepers, cashiers, and accounts

had numbered 74,919; by 1890 their number had more than

doubled to 159,374. Women’s share of this occupational

category also expanded vertiginously: in 1880 they had

constituted only 5.7% of all bookkeepers, cashiers, and

accountants; by 1890, instead, their share had tripled,

reaching 17.4%.28 True, the American population had also been

increasing during the same decade, from 50.2 to 63 million

people, a gain of 25%. But during the same decade, by one

23

generous estimate, the total of all clerical workers had

leaped from 172,600 to 801,500, a gain of 364%.29 Even a more

conservative reading of the census data discerned an increase

in clerical workers from 152,536 to 427,944, a gain of 280%.30

Women were joining the business workforce at an unprecedented

pace. Yes, within a decade the overall population had grown by

25%; and yes, the number of clerical workers had expanded by

364% (generous) or 280% (conservative reading); but even by a

conservative reading, the number of female clerical workers

had jumped from 7,000 to 76,000, a gain of nearly 1100%.

Yet perhaps the most telling statistic of the many

associated with the 1890 census was another detailing how long

it took to count and collate these vertiginous numbers.

Previously, it had taken a decade to compile and publish the

data from the 1880 census; by contrast, the much larger data

field for the 1890 census was processed within two years (and

also cost $5 million less!). This extraordinary acceleration

was brought about by a new machine called the Hollerith

tabulator, a device that relied on something equally novel

called the punched card, both devised by Herman Hollerith

(1860-1929). The idea was simple: an electric current would

attempt to pass through, but be blocked by a card, except

where a hole had been punched through it; where the current

then passed through, it set off a counter. (Herman Hollerith

24

went on to found the firm that became IBM in 1921.)31 The

Hollerith tabulator was only the most dramatic sign of a much

wider technological revolution sweeping through office

culture.

Assessing the scope of that revolution can be difficult

because it entailed techniques of information management so

elementary, and later so ubiquitous, that only with effort can

we appreciate their novelty. Consider the loose-leaf ledger

system, sometimes called a ring or post bound system, which

was first marketed in 1894. It meant that an account of any

size could be kept together in its proper alphabetic or

numeric order; as it grew over time, new bits of information

could be added ad infinitum, while bits that were no longer

active or relevant could be removed and discarded. It sounds

simple, and almost everyone has maintained a loose-leaf ledger

or notebook at some point in life. But compare it with the

bound ledger-books that all firms used prior to its invention.

When an account reached the end of a book or the set of pages

allocated to it, it had to be restarted again somewhere else,

with laborious cross-referencing to enable someone to keep

track of it. Another device was the vertical filing system,

first devised in 1892 by the Library Bureau (an organization

founded in 1876 by Melvil Dewey to promote his decimal system

and sell supplies to libraries). One year later, replete with

25

the first file cases to hold the new system, it was unveiled

at the Chicago World’s Fair, where it won a gold medal.32 By

about 1905 it had become a standard office practice.33 With

heavy card-stock dividers and folders that could be re-labeled

as needed, it offered flexibility and order in managing

complex, constantly changing pools of information. The same

was true for card files or index cards in standardized sizes;

they could be arranged into any convenient order

(alphabetical, chronological, numerical), removed for work and

then reinserted in their proper place; and in more advanced

systems using punched cards, they could even be sorted and

collated by tabulating machines of the sort first deployed for

the American census of 1890.34 These elementary yet crucial

techniques of information management were increasingly

complemented by an array of new machines, starting with the

telephone, itself invented at the same time as the first

typewriters were being produced (1876). There were mimeograph

or stencil machines, “business phonographs” or Dictaphones,

stenotypes, adding machines and calculators attached in turn

to billing and address machines.35 The office, with its ranks

of new information technologies and techniques, was itself

becoming a gigantic machine that produced, collated, stored,

and retrieved information. At its center stood the female

secretary or typist, a fallible mechanism lodged within the

26

larger machine, another device for producing, storing,

retrieving data. As if to underscore this new relationship,

writers between 1890 and 1920 often referred to the new

writing machine and the secretary or typist with the same

term, “typewriter,” merging them in a single word. Edna, the

Pretty Typewriter designated a contemporary novel (see the

next chapter) that recounted the doings of an attractive young

woman, not the activities of a nicely decorated machine.36

In the United States, typewriters of both sorts, as well

as the offices that housed them, were increasingly nestled

within another new machine, an architectural machine, the

commercial high-rise building or “sky-scraper” as it was

called after 1890. It took shape at a confluence of

technological and commercial imperatives. Consider that new

material, steel, an alloy of iron with a low percentage of

carbon and small amounts of other elements, an achievement

made possible by discoveries of Sir Henry Bessemer in England

in 1855, William Kelly in the United States in 1847 and 1857,

and Siemens-Martin in Germany by 1868. That it possessed

greater homogeneity, strength, and ductility than iron was

well established by the 1870s when its powers were

dramatically demonstrated in the carbon-steel wires used to

form the suspension cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, which

opened in 1883. But variations in quality caused it to be

27

distrusted by architects and engineers even after steel beams

began to be rolled on a large scale in the 1880s.37 By 1893,

instead, its use was being unequivocally urged for modern

office buildings: “The frame should be of milled steel,

columns, girders, beams, etc., using the usual commercial

shapes. The various parts should be rivetted together and the

column connections made so as to maintain the full strength of

the column.”38 The frame, bolstered by wind bracing, now became

a “skeleton” that supported the body of the building. Walls no

longer fulfilled a support or load-bearing function; they

became like curtains that were draped on the building’s

exterior. As a consequence they could be much thinner and so

free up space within the building’s interior, which in turn

meant more rent from occupants and more profit for the

owner/developer. It was necessary to add only a few more

developments: the electrically operated elevator (introduced

by Otis Brothers in 1889), central heating, incandescent

electric lighting throughout the building, forced-draft

ventilation, and automatic controls. Furnishings would also

have to accommodate women, wrote the architect and engineer

George Hill in 1893: “In the floor where the toilets for women

are there should be placed a double number of water-closets,

and, if possible, sufficient room for a sofa and a connection

for a small gas stove.”39

28

One last, yet crucial change would take place in the

design of the typewriter. In 1893 the Underwood firm,

previously a manufacturer of typewriter supplies (ribbons,

etc.), introduced its own typewriter designed by Franz Xavier

Wagner. Unlike all the Remington and other models produced

until now, it had a front-striking mechanism, which is to say

that all the keys, laid out in an arc that was visible to the

typist, would rise upward and forward to strike the paper,

then fall back, so that a typist could instantly see the

character that had just been produced. Amazingly, at least to

a later observer, all the machines that had been produced till

then were back-striking machines: the key would rise at the

back of the machine and strike the paper from behind. Only

after a typist had completed three or four lines could he or

she pause to discern whether any errors had been made. All

manufacturers, including Remington, were soon imitating the

front-striking mechanism.

By 1893, twenty years after James Densmore had first

negotiated the contract with E. Remington and Sons to

manufacture the typewriter, an entire office ecology had

evolved in which the machine had finally found its home, a

world in which new machines and information management

techniques were marshalled to execute, record, and expedite an

immense quantity of transactions. At the heart of that world

29

stood an equally novel figure: the typist, the secretary, the

pretty typewriter, the female clerical worker, the office

girl, the business girl, the bachelor girl. In the ensuing

decades, these real-life figures were reformulated as

spectacle and placed at the center of a fictional universe,

becoming the principal protagonist in hundreds of novels and

films, the heroine of comic strips, cartoons, and postcards,

the subject matter of worried office manuals and anxious

conduct books, the enigmatic muse of poetry and popular song.

The result was a mythology as sprawling and complex as the

metropolis that was its setting. Already in the 1890s,

newspaper headlines testify to an almost obsessive fascination

with the doings of this semi-real, semi-mythical figure:

Pretty Typewriters on the Limited (1890)

Eloped with His Pretty Typewriter (1891)

Did Not Kill Herself: Investigating the Death of the

Pretty Typewriter (1894)

Suicide of a Pretty Typewriter (1894)

Rescue Pretty Typewriter (1899).40

“The lady typewriter,” a New Yorker wrote in 1893, “has come

to stay and afford a mark for wit and humor rivalling the

mother-in-law, the tramp, the amateur fisherman, and the other

30

time-honored subjects of jokes.”41 Another noted the same

phenomenon, but also a profound transformation in the very

appearance of the cityscape:

One of the most striking features of the industrial life

of New York to-day is the conspicuous part played in it

by the female sex. Not many years ago it was rather an

uncommon thing to see girls or women employed in business

offices. . . . To-day women-workers are everywhere. . .

With the invention of the typewriting machine a vast new

field was opened to wage-earners of the gentler sex,

which they were quick to occupy. On few subjects have

more jokes been made, and ill-natured slurs cast, than on

the “pretty typewriter.”42

It was in the early 1890s that the first novels appeared which

featured a secretary as their heroine. One novel, Estelle’s

Millionaire Lover; or, The Prettiest Typewriter in New York.

mustered hyperbolic prose to describe Estelle’s effect on her

contemporaries as she set off to work in the morning; she

becomes a goddess who transfixes the gaze of fellow commuters

and mesmerizes her male colleagues when she enters the office:

“The clerks all looked up from their work to smile and nod at

her, thankful for a glance of her beautiful eyes in return;

for, without exception, they were all infatuated with her.”43

31

The clerks, of course, are figures who stand in for the book’s

readers, contemporaries experiencing a collective infatuation

with this uniquely modern heroine. They epitomize an entire

culture feeling the first flush of attraction toward a figure

who encodes all the allure and promise, and all the mystery of

the modern world. The typewriter, a useful if somewhat noisy

machine, had become the precondition for something far more

arresting: the pretty typewriter.

32

Notes to Chapter 1

1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich, 1929), 43.

2. Richard N. Current, The Typewriter and the Men Who Made It

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1954; second edition

Arcadia, CA: Post-Era Books, 1988), 1-11; herafter cited

simply as Current. See also Anonymous, “Type Writing Machine,”

Scientific American, 17.1 (6 July 1867): 3. Current’s account

of the typewriter’s invention and early manufacturing remains

the most authoritative because it was based on the

correspondence between Sholes and Densmore, then in the hands

of Priscilla Densmore, who later donated it to the Carl P.

Dietz collection at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Maddeningly,

Current does not furnish footnotes to indicate the specific

dates of letters, though he did so earlier in essays preceding

his book’s publication: “The Original Typewriter Enterprise,

1867-1873,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 32, no. 4 (June

1949): 391-407; and “Technology and Promotion: The

Typewriter,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 25,

no. 2 (June 1951): 77-83. Also useful is George N. Engler,

33

“The Typewriter Industry: The Impact of a Significant

Technological Innovation” (Ph.D. diss., University of

California at Los Angeles, 1969).

3. Quoted in Current, 53, 55.

4. James Densmore to Walter J. Barron, 8 Nov. 1872, quoted in

Current, 60.

5. Henry Benedict, quoted in [Alan C. Reiley], The Story of

the Typewriter, 1873-1923 (Herkimer, New York: Herkimer County

Historical Society, 1923), 57-58.

6. In October, 1870, furthermore, Densmore showed the machine

to George Harrington and D. N. Craig, officers of the newly

organized Automatic Telegraph Company, without securing their

financial support. On 31 October, 1869, Sholes wrote to

Densmore about another visitor who had examined the current

model of the typewriter: “The Colonel talks about it very much

as you do, anticipating that it will become as important in

the literary world, as the sewing machine is in the

stitcherary world.” Densmore, in other words, anticipated that

the typewriter would be of use to the literary world, or the

telegraphic world; but he did not see the business world as a

significant market, and it is unlikely that Henry Benedict did

so already back in 1873. For Densmore’s approach to Harrington

and Craig, see Current, The Typewriter, 41-43; for Sholes’s

letter to Densmore, see Current, “The Original Typewriter

34

Enterprise,” 405 n. 35.

7. On Densmore and the Remington firm, see Current, The

Typewriter, 60-64.

8. Ibid., 60.

9. The financial arrangements in the last three paragraphs are

taken from Current, 75-77.

10. Ibid., 73, 87.

11. For these census figures see Margery W. Davies, Woman’s

Place Is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers,

1870-1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983),

Appendix: Table 1, [178-179].

12. Erastus Wiman, Chances of Success: Episodes and

Observations in the Life of a Busy Man (New York: American

News Co., 1893; reprint Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, n.d.), 160-

163.

13. Current, 79.

14. See Current, 79-90, and Donald Hoke, Ingenious Yankees:

The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private

Sector (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, 132-149,

and especially 299 n. 69.

15. On Wyckoff and his typewriting classes, see Current, 85.

16. Bliven, 71; maybe Mary S. Sims, The YWCA, an Unfolding

Purpose (New York: Woman’s Press, [1950]), give page numbers.

17. Mrs. M. V. Longley, Type-writer Lessons, for the Use of

35

Teachers and Learners, Adapted to Remington’s Perfected Type-

writers (Cincinnati: privately published, 1882).

18. Current, 98-100.

19. Quoted in ibid., 90.

20. Quoted in ibid., 97.

21. Ibid., 128.

22. Ibid., 105.

23. Hoke, Ingenious Yankees, 147-148.

24. Current,108; Engler, “The Typewriter Industry,” 23.

25. Current, 110; Engler, “The Typewriter Industry,” 24-25.

26. Quoted in Current, 110.

27. [Reiley], The Story of the Typewriter, 94.

28. Census figures are from Davies, A Woman’s Place, [178].

29. William Henry Leffingwell, Office Management: Principles

and Practice (Chicago & New York: A. W. Shaw, 1925), 6.

30. Davies, A Woman’s Place, [178].

31. James W. Cortada, Before the Computer: IBM, NCR,

Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created,

1865-1956 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 48;

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience

(New York: Random House, 1973), 172-173.

32. See JoAnne Yates, Control Through Communication: The Rise

of System in American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1989), 56-63. Earlier but still useful

36

surveys of similar innovations are 1981 Elyce J. Rotella, "The

Transformation of the American Office: Changes in Employment

and Technology," Journal of Economic History 41 (1981): 51-57;

and Thomas Whalen, "Office Technology and Socio-Economic

Change, 1870-1955," IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 2.2

(June 1983): 12-18.

33. Whalen, “Office Technology,” 16, notes that vertical

filing is taken for granted by one writer in 1907 (W. V.

Booth, M. D. Wilber, et. al., eds., Accounting and Business

Methods [Chicago: The System Company, 1907], 5), but treated

as recent by another in 1913 (John William Schulze, The

American Office: Its Organization, Management, and Records

[New York: Key Publishing Co., 1913], 39).

34. Hollerith’s first commercial client was the New York

Central Railroad in 1895. “Between 1900 and 1917, companies in

other industries began to use his equipment, most notably

insurance firms,” writes James Cortada, Before the Computer,

50. In support of this claim he cites G. W. Baehne, Practical

Applications of Punched Card Method in Colleges and

Universities (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 6,

and Arthur L. Norberg, “High-Technology Calculation in the

Early Twentieth Century: Punched Card Machinery in Business

and Government,” Technology and Culture 31, no. 4 (October

1990): 766-768. See also JoAnne Yates, “Early Interactions

37

between the Life Insurance and Computer Industries,” IEEE

Annals of the History of Computing 19, no. 3 (July 1997): 60-

73, especially 62-63.

35. See Cortada, Before the Computer.

36. Grace Miller White, Edna, The Pretty Typewriter (New York:

J. G. Ogilvie, 1907).

37. Sarah Bradford Landau and Carl W. Condit, Rise of the New

York Skyscraper, 1865-1913 (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1996), 146-158 and 170-175.

38. George Hill, “Some Practical Limiting Conditions in the

Design of the Modern Office Building,” Architectural Record 2

(April-June 1893): 445-468, here 466.

39. Ibid., 449.

40. Washington Post, 31 January 1890, 2; Chicago Tribune, 1

January 1891, 1; Washington Post, 21 March 1894, 1; Washington

Post, 15 October1894, 1; Chicago Tribune, 5 November 1899, 4.

41. Erastus Wiman, Chances of Success: Episodes and

Observations in the Life of a Busy Man (New York: American

News Co., 1893; reprint Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, n.d), 163.

42. Daniel B. Shepp, Shepp’s New York City Illustrated

(Chicago, Philadelphia: Globe Bible Publishing, 1894), 177-78.

43. Julia Ward [pseudonym for John Russell Coryell], Estelle’s

Millionaire Lover; or, The Prettiest Typewriter in New York

(New York: Street & Smith, 1893), 10.

38

39