No Magic Margin for You!

The drab grey exterior is not exactly charming. It's pretty institutional, but from Remington's advertising department it was nothing short of revolutionary.

This particular model is the Super-Riter. Being the grown-up version of the entire Remington line it had all the gadgets you would expect from a typewriter of this caliber; full tabulator, touch select, snappy response, and even a type bar un-jammer. There is one thing missing. The margin set is not automatic. You must reach behind the paper table and use the margin set tabs. Not a terrible inconvenience, but certainly not one you would expect to see in a full-featured desktop typewriter. I looked around at American machines from the 50s and found that the automatic set margin was pretty common.

Obviously, there's Royal:

and Smith-Corona:

Underwood was a little different with their font-set marginal stops, so they don't count.

This begs the question; Why do Royal and Smith-Corona typewriters have fancy margin sets while the Remington is left out in the cold. Well, the answer has a little to do with a lawsuit.

It was October 3, 1947 when Royal filed suit in the District Court of Connecticut. Royal claimed that Remington Rand violated Royal's patent with the creation of the KMC or Keyboard Margin Control. This feature was prevalent on Remington desktop typewriters before the 1950s. Like Royal's Magic Margin it was a novel way to set margins on a typewriter. Unlike Royal's Magic Margin the KMG was on the body of the typewriter to the right.

Under the hood, both MM and KMC used an actuated arm to press a spring loaded marginal stop. If you are familiar with MM, then the KCM would make total sense. The KMC procedure was very similar to Royal's. Interestingly enough, the entire lawsuit centered around a patent created not by Hart, but a man named William Woodfine. William Woodfine is the grandfather of the Magic Margin.

Woodfine was a Canadian living in Verdun near Montreal when he applied for a U.S. patent for a "Margin Regulator for Typewriters." He wanted to improve margin system so "that rearwarly disposed margin stops may be caused to assume position in correspondence with a selected setting of the carriage through... forwardly projecting control keys." The patent was filed on November 1st, 1932 and issued on July 4, 1933. 

The most interesting part of the whole case against Remington was the revelation that Royal had purchased the Woodfile patent ten years before Smith's judgement. That would be around 1937-1938. The Hart Magic Margin patent was filed in 1938. It seems that Royal stumbled on this novel method for setting a margin and, before they issued their own improvement patent, wanted to secure the rights to Woodfine. 

Remington Rand appealed the ruling and the case came before Learned Hand. Hand was a well-known and well-respected judge and legal philosopher. In his time on the bench he heard many cases including several free speech appeals during World War I. Hand was particularly interested in patent law.

L. Hand's eyebrows frequently wrote their own opinions.

Hand affirmed Smith's earlier judgment in 1948. One of the most interesting outcomes of this case was the number of times that Hand is quoted from the Royal opinion.

Ultimately, Royal's ownership of this patent was upheld and we can see the repercussions of this in Remington's typewriter technology. Nowhere in the 1950s will you see an automatic margin on a Remington. 

The Woodfine patent was also brought up in another margin lawsuit with SCM in the 1960s. I have not looked too closely at the particulars, but I imagine that the outcome was similar. 

Even with all the legal harangue, Remington still made a very high quality typewriter that was used by large sectors of the U.S. Government.

I have another Remington desktop. It's nice as well.

I guess that if you take the body panels off, you can "unroll" the whole typewriter to work on it. I'll have to give that a try.

So, if you happen to see one of these typers out in the wild, give one a try. Even without the fancy margin set you'll still enjoy it.

CTP Data: Year Three

It's been a while since I posted any sort of stats or survey results, but here are some new numbers fresh from my classes today. After I get a few more data points I might do a comparison between the first year of the CTP and this year. It might be an interesting trend. Regardless, please enjoy these typewritten statistics.

History Comes Alive

The Royal "Radio Mill" in my private collection is one of the more interesting typewriters I own. The typeface (10 pitch all-caps) is very easy to read. Considering its purpose, that makes sense. I've been using it recently to make lists for our Sunday shopping. It is a fairly mundane task and I am sure that there have been far more important things that a 10 pitch radio-mill Royal would have done in its life.

Here is one such thing:

This is a naval dispatch is dated 7 DEC 1941; a date that will live in infamy. I found it while browsing the National Archives web page. This particular dispatch was sent to Sqantum Naval Air Station outside of Boston.

What caught my eye wasn't the historical import of the document, but the typeface used to type this dispatch. When I saw it it looked very familiar. I had and idea, so I went to the office and typed this out on my Royal:

My ribbon is a little drier and the original form might be a carbonless carbon, but the similarities are there. What clinched it for me was the number "4." It is very distinctive as you can see in this earlier post:

 When you see something like this it really makes history come alive.

A Silent Tower

I started working on cleaning up a typewriter that has sat neglected for a while. It's this Sears Tower.

Many of you know it as a Skyriter and it is one in every aspect except name. This particular machine is missing the decorative paper arm cover. It is a common piece to find missing. 

I was looking out the sliding glass door at the butte behind our home. (There's another one in front of our house called Deem Hill.) The sky was a pale blue. A haze covered the finer delineations of the rock face. Falcons and eagles circled overhead slowly catching thermals rising and then falling. The hilly country of the Sonoran desert has a stark beauty. It takes time to learn to appreciate it, but the beauty is there to find.

I started to think about the name Tower. It's an odd name to give a typewriter. It makes me think of the towers of Silence that played a significant role in the funerary rights of the Zoroastrians. 

Was this little Tower left to decay out of sight? Will the carrion artists pluck key tops and repurpose them as horrible rings and necklaces? Who will sweep your brittle remains into the ossuary?

I happen to have another Tower from Ton S. This Tower is Presidential, the one above is a Chieftain.

A Chieftan of what? It's fitting that not too far from my home is an amazing museum: The Deer Valley Rock Art Center. At this off-the-beaten-path museum you can see petroglyphs dating back 7,000 years.  Could they be neolithic blog posts? Is this an heir to the kingdom of the Hohokam?

A rock and an idea. It could be the ultimate in distraction-free writing. 

Back to this typewriter. As with most 1950s Smith-Coronae, the sound-deadening material smells very bad. It has a must that can only be eliminated by removal. I was able to remove the offending odor and get to work on the dirty mechanism. It's not a big job, but it might take a few days.

Hermes Ambassador in the Wild

Today was the first day that a student wanted to use the copper-painted Hermes Ambassador. I fitted it out with a nice green ribbon from Baco and let a young lady in my first hour have a go at this freshly customized typewriter.

The response?

"I love this typewriter."

I couldn't agree more.

A Brother-ly Post

After reading a post by Will Davis about a very mysterious Webster, I decided to look at the CTP collection. When I really started looking there were actually quite a few. Many are rebrands, but two are the real-deal.

Typing Pictures

During journals the other day, I grabbed a few pictures of busy typing hands.