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Coxhead (1927)

Coxhead (1927)

SKU: R14

Coxhead

 

Year of production:  1927

 

Company:  Hammond Typewriter Company, New York, U.S.A.

 

Serial No. 406923./9

 

This is a good example of the machine developed from the Hammond and then Varityper.  Ralph C Coxhead developed this when he took over and restarted the Hammond principle. 

 

This machine is an early effort and was used for ‘Cold Type’ composing and printing.  Unfortunately this machine has a broken ‘hammer casting’ and this cannot be replaced.

 

History

 

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. 


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.

 

Later:

 

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.

 

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 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 parentsis 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.

 

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