By ROBERT MESSENGER

“Mr Blickensderfer's intense thought on his later inventions resulted in injury to his nervous system, which … hastened the end,” wrote the Advocate, who described George C as having had a “fertile mind” and as being an “impetuous genius”.

Blickensderfer was just 67 when he died. Sadly, the marvelous world of making things that he had created around him was to too quickly die with him. Since he’d been inventing, or at least trying to, since his attempt to become the first person to fly, when he was 10, on a farm back in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1860 (a small matter of 43 years ahead of the Wright brothers), it was hardly surprising that folk supposed his gray matter had just plum worn out.

Blickensderfer the sky-reaching 10-year-old might not have gotten off the ground away ahead of the Wrights, but he did succeed in most of the things he set out to do. The question is, what is Blickensderfer remembered for today?

Some of us are old enough to recall department stores where items, payment and change whirled around in a jangling and popping, bewildering, suspended railway of canisters. That was George C. We take for granted the electric elevator. Blickensderfer patented it in 1888, four years before Frank Sprague’s company was formed (Sprague subsequently sold out to Otis).

Then there’s the speed-controlled revolving door (Blickensderfer patent, 1912). And the bull’s eye spark plug (“the plug with the crystal ports”, enabling mechanics to see if they were working).

One of the clever Blickensderfer inventions was for the French Government, a machine gun belt feed put to much effective Allied use on the Western Front in World War I. He even designed the tripod to go with it.

Blickensderfer also invented the electric typewriter, in 1901. But like so many Blickensderfer ideas, it was away ahead of its time. The Blick electric pre-dated IBM and SCM electrics by half a century. IBM’s much-vaunted golfball, a changeable typeface device, was 68 years behind Blickensderfer’s typewheel.

Indeed, it is Blickensderfer’s 1893 manual typewriter which to this day remains his crowning glory. Apart from having no typekeys, it had no ribbon, but an inkpad. No typewriter collector worth his or her salt would dare claim to be a real collector without owning a Blick 5.

The Blickensderfer 5 was the world’s first portable, by accident rather than design. Blickensderfer had, since 1887, been working on the ultimate desktop, a machine which would draw vertical and horizontal lines, tabulate, automatically space between words, sing Dixie, hop scotch and dance the fandango.

With the benefit of hindsight, today’s vintage typewriter experts believe Blickensderfer, on this particular project, might well have taken on more than he could achieve. But he’d booked his stand in the typewriter pavilion at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the Columbian Exposition, and was bound to turn up.

So he pared back the Blick 1 and turned up with a sales rep called Cutter and a red-haired 17-year-old typist called Estelle May Munson, whom he’d coached in repetitively typing a simple phrase. Munson’s demonstrations on the spare, bare Blick 5 were so impressive no-one wanted to look at any other machine. The competition packed up and went home early, and George C took reams of orders.

The legend of the Blick 5 was born. Thanks to letters written home by Munson to her family from Chicago each day, and kept by the Munsons, we know the story. A book, The Five-Pound Secretary (referring to the typewriter, not Estelle May), written by Amsterdam historian Paul Robert (The Virtual Typewriter Museum) and a Blickensderfer descendant, Robert, has been devoted to it.

Blickensderfer went on to make other models. They did tabulate. He made them for companies in New Zealand, Britain, France and Germany. He sold them from Brisbane to Cairo and all parts in between (the agent in Australia was John Stephen Southerden of Enoggera, whose father Edward Barton Southerden owned a drapery store on Queen Street, Brisbane). He made typewheels in italic and bold, and in Slovak, Armenian and Hebrew.

But his Blick 5 remains without doubt the most remarkable typewriter ever built. Among its many virtues were that it was “visible” (one could actually see what one was writing) and it employed not a QWERTY keyboard, in 1893 a 20-year-old arrangement known as the “Universal”, but a innovatory DHIATENSOR format, titled by Blickensderfer “Scientific” and “Ideal”.

It was one fifth the weight of contemporary typewriters, at $35 one fifth the price, and had just 250 parts, one 10th of the number in other machines. Little wonder English typewriter historian Richard Milton says Blickensderfer was “a brilliantly original American engineer ... a revolutionary” whose machine was “almost shocking in its simplicity”.

 

The Blick 5 was so good that 35 years after it first appeared, Remington bought the tools and dies and marketed through Sears an exact replica. Think of any other machine to which that sort of tribute has ever been made.

Since hardly anyone ever uses typewriters anymore – that is, apart from a few great writers, like David McCullough, Larry McMurtry and Paul Auster (and if you haven’t read them, it’s time to get your nose out of Harry Potter)- the name Blickensderfer and what it once stood for has long been lost.

Ninety years ago this week, though, the Stamford Advocate was able to declare, “Typewriters Made His Name Familiar Throughout the World”. And it was true, oh so very true.