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In many ways it’s misleading to compare historical figures to more recent celebrities, but it’s often the quickest way to explain their significance, so I’m going to grit my teeth and say that George C. Blickensderfer was the Steve Jobs of his day, his day being the 1890s to the eve of WWI.
Blickensderfer made an electric typewriter in 1900, but didn’t put it on the market because it was too advanced— not enough homes and businesses had electrical outlets.
There’s a local collector, Martin Howard, who acquires and restores antique typewriters—I’ve seen them on display a few times, and I fell in love at first sight with the Blickensderfer No. 6 “Featherweight,” which has the stripped-down design of the No.5, but was made from aluminum, so that they could keep the weight down to five pounds. For comparison, Andrew has an early-20th-century Underwood: various internet sources put the weight of an Underwood anywhere from thirty to thirty-five pounds; I had to help carry it home from the flea market, and it weighs *at least* that much. Aluminum’s another thing where everybody seems to have forgotten what a game-changer it was—a metal that looks like silver but is miraculously lightweight. The No. 6 is like finding a laptop from 1912.
On the rare occasions you get to see these typewriters today, it gives the same glimpsing-an-AU feel you get from looking at Cambrian fossils. Blickensderfer typewriters had a different keyboard layout, though the now-standard QWERTY keyboard was available on request. Instead of each key controlling a letter die, all the keys connected to a wheel which held all the letters and numbers, and which could be switched out if you wanted to change font. There were wheels and keyboard layouts for different languages; there were models with a right-to-left carriage mechanism so you could type in Hebrew or Arabic—I don’t know if there were models for the Chinese and Japanese markets, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
The company was first hit hard by WWI, which cut a lot of their international business, and then by the death of George Blickensderfer in 1917, which seems to have left them directionless. They limped along for another decade, but went under in the ‘twenties, and the world seems largely to have forgotten these beautiful machines.
Blickensderfer made an electric typewriter in 1900, but didn’t put it on the market because it was too advanced— not enough homes and businesses had electrical outlets.
There’s a local collector, Martin Howard, who acquires and restores antique typewriters—I’ve seen them on display a few times, and I fell in love at first sight with the Blickensderfer No. 6 “Featherweight,” which has the stripped-down design of the No.5, but was made from aluminum, so that they could keep the weight down to five pounds. For comparison, Andrew has an early-20th-century Underwood: various internet sources put the weight of an Underwood anywhere from thirty to thirty-five pounds; I had to help carry it home from the flea market, and it weighs *at least* that much. Aluminum’s another thing where everybody seems to have forgotten what a game-changer it was—a metal that looks like silver but is miraculously lightweight. The No. 6 is like finding a laptop from 1912.
On the rare occasions you get to see these typewriters today, it gives the same glimpsing-an-AU feel you get from looking at Cambrian fossils. Blickensderfer typewriters had a different keyboard layout, though the now-standard QWERTY keyboard was available on request. Instead of each key controlling a letter die, all the keys connected to a wheel which held all the letters and numbers, and which could be switched out if you wanted to change font. There were wheels and keyboard layouts for different languages; there were models with a right-to-left carriage mechanism so you could type in Hebrew or Arabic—I don’t know if there were models for the Chinese and Japanese markets, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
The company was first hit hard by WWI, which cut a lot of their international business, and then by the death of George Blickensderfer in 1917, which seems to have left them directionless. They limped along for another decade, but went under in the ‘twenties, and the world seems largely to have forgotten these beautiful machines.
