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Technology and Promotion: The Typewriter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Richard N. Current
Affiliation:
University of Illinois

Extract

The inventor does the work and the promoter gets the money. That seems to sum up the popular view of the relation between promotion and technology in nineteenth-century America. Take the typewriter as an example. Thomas A. Edison declared in 1921: “Mr. Christopher L. Sholes was the father of the typewriter and got nothing but trouble and neglect in connection with the invention. He fell into the hands of promoters with the usual results.” Who were these promoters? Edison did not name names, but chief among them were in fact the following: James Densmore, George Washington Newton Yost, the firm of E. Remington & Sons, and finally the latter's selling agents—Wyckoff, Seamans, and Benedict—who in 1886 bought the Remingtons' typewriter property and organized the Remington Standard Typewriter Company, which was eventually succeeded by Remington Rand, Inc. Among all these, Densmore is the one whom Edison had particularly in mind, and the one whom many others have denounced. Indeed, according to one account, the only thing Densmore did for the typewriter was to give Sholes $6,000 for the invention and then turn it over to the Remingtons for a cool million!

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1951

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References

1 This paper was read at the meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, December 29, 1950. It represents a summary of part of the author's forthcoming joint biography of C. Latham Sholes and James Densmore, and is based principally on the Sholes-Densmore correspondence in the possession of Miss Priscilla Densmore of Marquette, Michigan, who with great generosity gave the author free access to the collection.