A look back to when Conn. was the Typewriter State
Mq8 Vb$p eqk Xqgwmkt8 x8j
No, it’s not Wordle, 2.0. That’s what the last sentence would read like if I touch-typed using a Blickensderfer typewriter with its “scientific keyboard,” which scorned the QWERTY model in favor of DHIATENSOR. (You speak QWERTY even if you don’t know it. Just look at your phone keyboard.)
My typing would probably be even more incomprehensible if I were using a typewriter made before “the Blick” was invented in Stamford 130 years ago, as it was among the first to let typists see their writing while they worked.
Those are just two of George Canfield Blickensderfer’s innovations. He was a pioneer of the electric typewriter and invented the first portable (the “fivepound private secretary”).
In Connecticut’s history, the Blick has been something of an asterisk (a symbol that’s not even on some models). The recent (successful) efforts by preservationists to spare the Blick factory in Stamford from the wrecking ball has given the company more attention than it’s gotten since it manufactured the best-selling typewriter in the world more than a century ago.
Developer Building & Land Technology, with a promise of $1 million in state funds to perform environmental remediation at the site, is planning to transform the old factory at 650 Atlantic St. into “mixed-used housing, transitoriented development ... (and) a focus on multi-family housing.”
A nod to history would add (what else?) character, even if it’s just unit numbers cast in Blick fonts. It’s a past worth striving to emulate, an era when innovation fueled the state’s economy.
The Blick also has a pretty quirky (if not QWERTY) back story, one worth revisiting during International Typewriter Appreciation Month.
The true location of the Blick’s creation is long gone. Blickensderfer molded his creation in a workshop at the rear of his home on Bedford Street, a stately stone edifice with a circular turret for an entrance, across from First Congregational Church.
The Stamford Advocate appears to have been scooped on history-in-themaking by the Norwalk Gazette, which reported in 1889 that Blickensderfer was in Washington, D.C., to secure a patent for his typewriter. Two years later, the Advocate devoted a Page 6 story to how he was moving his offices from Broadway to Stamford (to avoid the commute), and taking over a factory abandoned by the Eagle Bicycle Manufacturing Company.
His dream as a 10-year-old was to invent a flying machine. As an adult, he got his head out of the clouds and focused instead on streamlining the typewriter, which was only a couple decades old. They were too big, too bulky. He wanted to boil it down to its essentials so the owner could “put it in his overcoat pocket as though it was a fountain pen.” (People may have been smaller then, but pockets were bigger.)
“Here then in embryo is an industry,
During their peak in the first decade of the last century, Blicks were stolen from Connecticut homes about a frequently as today’s unlocked cars in New Canaan. In 1907, he presented a typewriter to the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association “for use in political equality work.”
purely a Stamford industry, which is likely to advance to the front of the important ones,” the unnamed Advocate reporter concluded of Blickensderfer’s aspirations.
Blickensderfer built his Atlantic Street factory in 1896 and continued to introduce innovations that forced others to follow.
He was a man of numbers as well as letters, developing his DHIATENSOR keyboard around his determination that 85 percent of words contained these letters.
Using a cylindrical typewheel rather than the traditional type bars not only prevented jamming, but allowed replacements that changed fonts and type styles. Blickensderfer adapted it to Arabic and Hebrew characters with carriages that moved from left to right and invented a keyboard for composers to type musical notes.
At a time when people wrote letters as often as they attend Zoom meetings today, typewriters were a luxury until the Blick came along. Selling them for $40 forced competitors to reduce $100 price tags.
Old typewriters are symbols of a black-and-white past, but Blickensderfer put the ink in the roller instead of ribbons, allowing the use of different colors.
A ruling device could form vertical, horizontal or oblique lines.
His electric typewriter was the hit of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, as it “enabled the operator to use all fingers and get what is called the piano touch.”
His design influenced the IBM Selectric that transformed the industry in the 1960s.
During their peak in the first decade of the last century, Blicks were stolen from Connecticut homes about as frequently as today’s unlocked cars in New Canaan. In 1907, he presented a typewriter to the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association “for use in political equality work.”
Connecticut became something of a typewriter capital. By 1913 seven companies employing one-third of the nation’s typewriter workers were in what should have been known as the Typewriter State.
The company’s success was largely due the overseas market, which also led to its undoing. World War I reduced the company’s foreign contracts. Blickensderfer signed a contract with Remington to produce tools. He enhanced a belt loading device to load cartridges into machine guns and invented a tripod to hoist guns.
The death of his wife, Nellie, in 1915 was front page news, which revealed that their only child, Elsie, had died 18 years earlier at 15. He remarried a year later, but died the following summer, mourned as “an impetuous genius.”
The Atlantic Street factory closed for the day as employees attended his funeral, covering his casket in roses. He remains were placed in the family mausoleum at Woodland Cemetery, a half mile walk from the factory. His invention might as well have been buried with him.
The company went through several new owners, but didn’t survive the Jazz Age.
“Evidently the old ‘Blick’ has gone into the discard,” the Advocate wrote to mark the occasion of the L.R. Roberts Typewriter Company buying it in 1921. “It seems to have had its day.”
A century later, the building and its history should remain on display in the city’s booming South End. After all, its greatest legacy may be this: It put words in full view.
Or, as a touch typist might mangle it on a Blick: Vb jvb xqgwp ve fgmm avkx.