Sholes Visible: native habitat redux

About 11 months ago I published this photo from Peter Weil's collection:



I'll repeat Peter's analysis of the photo:

Sholes Visible Typewriter #2 (1901); in the office of the shipping department of the W.R. McTurk Coal Company in the borough of Girardville (in Schuylkill County), Pennsylvania, in September 1910; subject is George W. Newton, a shipper who, perhaps with intended humor, is holding a rifle or shotgun; ironically, or maybe not, Girardville was called “Gun-Town” by locals; at that time, McTurk operated at least two mines in the area, about sixty miles northeast of Reading, PA; the mines were the Girard Bear Ridge and the Girard Mammoth; office is lighted by the shaded window in back behind the typewriter and the kerosene chandelier to the right; the Sholes Visible appears to be the second of the three models (carriage return lever but no decal, “Meiselbach” or otherwise) on the lower front of the frame, which also looks to be shaped differently than the same area of the frame on later examples; sitting on a desk that appears to be, at least in part, made out of a cotton spool thread cabinet; other office technology includes a stencil-based “mimeo” machine of indeterminate brand and a book press.

Now Peter has found a photo taken in the same office, with the same Sholes Visible, three years later.

Peter comments:

Amazingly, literally and figuratively, it's deja vu all over again. This small cabinet card showed up on eBay. It is the same office, three years later and re-arranged, as in the the first photograph I had ever found of a Sholes Visible typewriter in its natural habitat.  Here the Girardville (PA) Colliery has replaced the McTurk company, but the Sholes Visible is still there. The typewriter is now relocated to a central desk that now includes a candlestick telephone. Note that the Sholes Visible looks a bit bigger in this later picture. Of the men in this room, the one standing looks a lot like the man with the rifle in the September, 1910 photograph, but I may be wrong. The glare of the guy at the desk probably meant that no one messed with him. Now it is unclear just who George Newton is (see signs in photos). In the 1910 image, there was only one person, and I assumed that the name on the board was his. But now, I am not so sure. It is quite a group portrait of tough miners in a tough, often bloody time of the coal mining wars in Schuylkill County.

        It is dumbfounding luck to have found two related photographs that include so rare a typewriter taken three years apart and purchased by me from two dealers. By the way, this dealer is from a village north of Allentown, PA, only a few miles from Girardville. I think it must have been in the estate of some descendant of one of these miners. 


I figured readers of this blog would be interested. To see the whole story of my restoration of a Sholes Visible, just click on the "Sholes Visible" label below.

Sholes Visible restoration: getting started

Here are a few moments in my initial exploration of my new Sholes Visible. (See overall photos of it in my previous entry.)


I've gotten my worktable ready, with the typewriter resting on my lazy susan and a fresh length of white paper to help me see tiny parts and tools:


A glimpse of mysterious and filthy parts, which I began to dust off with toothbrush, Q-tips, and a wire brush:


The serial number looks like it's painted on. Very unusual. You can also see remnants of the gold-and-blue pinstripes typical of early typewriters. With fresh black paint and fresh pinstripes, a Sholes Visible is spectacular. (Check out Juan Ramón Gracia's completely restored example.)


A pretty little plaque from the front of the typewriter. You can check out the patents here, here, and here. The first two are clearly for this typewriter and were filed by George B. Sholes on behalf of his deceased father, the famous Christopher Latham Sholes. The third, oddly, is for a guard to protect people from pinching their fingers in doors. -- UPDATE: A resourceful reader has discovered that there's an error on the plaque. The correct third patent number is 474,533, filed by Christopher's son Frederick Sholes, in Frederick's own name.


I wanted to understand how the machine is put together and get access to some interesting parts of the mechanism -- in order to clean them, and in order to gawk at them. First I tried something easy, removing the ribbon cups.


More is coming off:


Naturally, it's very important to keep track of all parts, including screws. (The best thing is to screw them back where they belong immediately, when possible.)


Here's another part coming off, a thick cast-iron shelf. Under it there is the usual assortment of insect corpses.


Over a century ago, a worker scratched the serial number into the bottom of the cast iron shelf:


Now I know how Howard Carter felt when he discovered the tomb of King Tut. This is the magic mechanism! Completely different from any other typewriter, the Sholes Visible operates roughly as follows. Each horizontal rod forms a single piece with a projecting small rod and a typebar. When you depress a key, the rod slides toward the center, then pivots to swing the typebar to the platen. This motion is controlled by the guide plate which I've now removed.


This is the back of the guide plate. Made of copper (or brass?), it is a work of art in itself, reminiscent of some Frank Lloyd Wright creation.


When you wet and wipe the front of the guide plate, you can see not only that it's pinstriped, but also that the diagonal areas have been treated with bluing.


I put everything back together before calling it a day. Slowly, tentatively, the dignity and beauty of this typewriter are emerging.

Sholes Visible: With a little help from my friends

Some of the remaining gaps and flaws in my Sholes Visible are getting fixed, with a little help from my friends.

No more missing spacebar! My friend Peter Weil gave me a spacebar from a Remington 7, around the same age as this Sholes. Even the little wood screws in his spacebar worked perfectly to attach it to its new machine. You can see the depression where thumb hit wood a million times; it looks appropriate for this old typewriter with signs of wear and tear.



In the picture below you can see two new additions.

Master restorer Hermann Kerz of Germany sold me two Sholes Visible ribbon covers — one original, one reproduction, and both very nice. I expect Mr. Kerz is the only person in the world who could have supplied them (he's the man who restored Juan Ramón Gracia's Sholes Visible). By the way, by studying photos of other machines I now realize that this typewriter is not supposed to use metal ribbon spools at all, but wooden cores à la Oliver. That's something I can worry about later; for now, what matters is that the ribbon system works and is topped with appropriate  covers.

The other addition is a stopgap measure: I've slipped on a rubber foot to substitute, at least visually, for a missing platen knob.



Who can spot the other rubber substitute in the photo below? Everyone, of course. But it's better than nothing, and not too conspicuous if you're not looking for it (did you notice it in the first photo above?). Sooner or later I'll get a genuine black octagonal composite key, preferably reading "SHIFT KEY."



Finally, here's some help from my friends on eBay. I was missing a flat spring that does an important job: it's one of two springs that hold the feed rollers against the platen. I took a chance on a set of flat springs made for windows. It worked! With a little trimming, bending, and squeezing into place, the spring does its job and the paper feed system is now functional.




My loyal readers have been waiting a long time to see this typewriter actually do some typing. Guess what? It can. The next installment of the Sholes Visible saga will show you.

Sholes Visible: rust soup

First an update on the patents for the Sholes Visible. I wrote: "You can check out the patents here, here, and here. The first two are clearly for this typewriter and were filed by George B. Sholes on behalf of his deceased father, the famous Christopher Latham Sholes. The third, oddly, is for a guard to protect people from pinching their fingers in doors." A resourceful reader has discovered that there's an error on the plaque. The correct third patent number is 474,533, filed by Christopher's son Frederick Sholes, in Frederick's own name.


Now: do you see the new spring on the typewriter?


Tricked you! The spring is not new, it's 100 years old and it was as rusty as any other part on this typewriter. How do you remove rust from a spring? Using a product I've demonstrated here before, Evapo-Rust.

Eventually this typewriter may need a total Evapo-Rust bath, but for now I'm just taking a few parts at a time and de-rusting them.

The soup begins:


After a bath of several hours and a little cleaning up:

Sholes Visible: native habitat

So did anyone actually buy and use this strange invention, the Sholes visible typewriter, a century ago? We have ads from dates such as 1901 and 1905, but of much greater interest is this 1910 photo of a Sholes Visible in its original habitat. For all I know, this could be the very same machine that I'm now restoring.



This photo is reproduced with permission from Peter Weil's vast and wonderful collection of typewriter-related images, ads, stationery, and other cultural breccia (tip o' the hat to Dwayne F. for that phrase). Peter writes a quarterly "Ephemera" column for ETCetera, and he's a professor of anthropology at the University of Delaware. His notes on the image show us what an anthropologist can do with a photograph:

Sholes Visible Typewriter #2 (1901); in the office of the shipping department of the W.R. McTurk Coal Company in the borough of Girardville (in Schuylkill County), Pennsylvania, in September 1910; subject is George W. Newton, a shipper who, perhaps with intended humor, is holding a rifle or shotgun; ironically, or maybe not, Girardville was called “Gun-Town” by locals; at that time, McTurk operated at least two mines in the area, about sixty miles northeast of Reading, PA; the mines were the Girard Bear Ridge and the Girard Mammoth; office is lighted by the shaded window in back behind the typewriter and the kerosene chandelier to the right; the Sholes Visible appears to be the second of the three models (carriage return lever but no decal, “Meiselbach” or otherwise) on the lower front of the frame, which also looks to be shaped differently than the same area of the frame on later examples; sitting on a desk that appears to be, at least in part, made out of a cotton spool thread cabinet; other office technology includes a stencil-based “mimeo” machine of indeterminate brand and a book press.

What else do you see in this photo?

Sholes Visible: details, details

When you're restoring a typewriter it seems that there's always another little detail to be fixed. Every detail is both a frustrating delay in getting the typewriter ready and (potentially) a satisfying little experience in problem solving. Here are five examples.

(1) The Sholes Visible had no ribbon or ribbon spools when I got it, and it won't take any standard typewriter ribbon spool. It needs spools with relatively small diameters but large central holes. I took a ribbon spool cup and shaft from the typewriter down to Spitzfaden's Office Supply on Cincinnati's Typewriter Row with high hopes, but one spool after another failed to fit. Finally, in the last remaining drawer, I found the #64 spools, for Monroe 200 series adding machines. They're funny looking, with the square hole, but they fit!

Here are two spools. They came with red and black ribbons, but since the Sholes Visible doesn't have bicolor ribbon capability, I've put a black ribbon on them. That ribbon was new old stock, but dried out, so I rejuvenated it with WD-40 (almost the only acceptable use of WD-40 on a typewriter ... read on).



(2) Another problem was that the rubber had long ago crumbled off the feed rollers on this typewriter. I thought I found a solution at my local auto parts store:



But no, that hose was too thick, so the feed rollers wouldn't fit properly on the typewriter. Next, I looked around my local Ace Hardware store and found some latex tubing that you can buy by the foot.



This tubing is just barely stretchy enough to fit over the feed rollers. (Lubing up the feed rollers is the second legitimate use for WD-40.)



Note from 2020: I just looked at these feed rollers and see that the latex is coming apart. I can't recommend it as a long-term solution.

(3) I keep a large collection of photos of typewriters that I've seen on the Internet over the years, and sometimes they're helpful references. For instance, in a photo of the underside of another Sholes Visible I noticed a spring that was missing on mine. This spring works very simply, but is essential to the shift lock. For several years I'd had an appropriately strong spring lying around, but it was about twice as long as it should be, so I used my Dremel tool to cut it in half and I put it in place.



(4) I inferred the need for another spring by the presence of two little holes on the platen advance mechanism. (If there's a hole somewhere in a typewriter, there's probably a reason for that hole, and if it's a tiny hole, there's a good chance that a spring belongs there.) Sure enough, in some of my reference photos I could barely see a spring in that position. I turned to an Olympia SM3 parts machine and harvested a spring that fit (the one on the left in the photo below). Now the mechanism works very smoothly with this bit of added assistance.



(5) Finally today I'll mention the most daunting detail I've faced on this typewriter so far. The platen slides up and down in the carriage when you shift: the vertical rectangle you see in the photo above is an end of the frame that holds the platen, and that frame is supposed to slide up and down in two slots such as the one marked with an arrow in the photo below. (You can also easily remove the platen by moving a couple of hooks aside and lifting it out.) But the platen wasn't sliding smoothly, and it was particularly resistant to going all the way down in the slot. This was going to make proper shifting impossible.

I tried every non-invasive measure I could think of, with no result. Then I tried bending the platen frame, using clamps, so that it would take up a little less room. That sounds insane, I know, but you might be surprised at how many typewriter repairs officially involve “forming” some part into the right shape. Well, it didn't work and it clearly wasn't a good idea in this case. I was able to bend the platen frame back into shape by using toothbrushes as levers. (You'll have to make up your own picture for that one!)

I tried to think as logically as I could, and concluded that the remaining possibility was to make more room for the platen frame by grinding away some of the cast iron of the slot.


Why would such a drastic measure be needed? I'm not sure in this case, but metals can sometimes expand over the years, and I'm guessing that's what happened here.

I put the grinder attachment on the Dremel as shown above, and as carefully as possible, ground away at the left and right slots. Through trial and error, I finally found exactly where the platen frame was sticking. And when I finished grinding, the platen slid up and down in those slots as smoothly as you could wish. What a relief!

These little Mr. Fix-It moments give me pleasure. As you can see, I am making up lots of this stuff as I go along. I hope my experiences will help me, and maybe you, solve similar problems in the future. I'll also add that I was not born with mechanical aptitude. But I've learned that many mechanical problems, at least on typewriters, can be solved with a little courage, close observation, patience, reasoning, and yes, a touch of luck.

Sholes Visible: varnish

Previous installments in this restoration saga have shown how I remove rust with Evapo-Rust, remove dirt using Soft Scrub and remove hardened old grease from bare metal with steel wool. But a more challenging job faces me, a challenge you'll often have to deal with if you're restoring a typewriter that's over a century old.

Early typewriter factories usually applied varnish over their black paint, to create a deep shine. (I originally used the term "lacquer" here, but consulted Paul Lippman's American Typewriters: A Collector's Encyclopedia, where he writes that the underlying color is lacquer, applied in several layers, but the top surface is varnish.)

The varnish has often yellowed and cracked, creating a very ugly surface.

I haven't found a perfect solution, but Soft Scrub is helpful again. Here's the paper table of the Sholes Visible; I've rubbed the bottom half with Soft Scrub until most of the yellowed old varnish is gone.



Here's a closeup; you can see the cracks in the varnish, and you may also notice that there are still fine cracks in the cleaner, blacker surface below. The Soft Scrub has removed the bumpier, brittler, yellower level of varnish, but you still won't have a perfectly smooth and glossy surface. Applying polish such as Renaissance Wax will improve the appearance.



When removing varnish, you want to avoid removing decals and pinstripes (you can see in the photo above that the pinstripes were applied to the black paint and then the varnish was applied over the pinstripes). This is easier said than done. The best approach is the tedious one—applying the Soft Scrub with something like a Q-Tip, carefully working around the edges of the decorations you want to preserve, and applying Soft Scrub directly to the decorations only if it's really necessary to get the varnish off them.

Working around the edges of that "Sholes" decal (which was applied crooked at the factory) is going to be a job of many hours!

More little-known typewriters (M-O)

What is a Marilla? All I knew until today was this partial photo of a dirty machine, with a QWERTZ keyboard and a shift key reading "Dole [?] Litery."



Then I decided to check the Typewriter Lexicon in the members' area of IFHB. Bingo! Thomas Fürtig added this machine to his vast collection, and it is a name variant of the Senta 1. (Serious collectors should join this organization. Its predominant language is German, but yours truly translates the monthly newsletter into English, and the website is bilingual.)
 

Eccentric typewriter inventors dream up new keyboard arrangements. Hard-core eccentrics go farther and change the shape of the keys. Claude Marsan was one of those idealists. His life project was to develop a new kind of keyboard for the French language, and a few Marsanized typewriters exist. Here we see a Hermes standard and what I believe is a Facit portable.



Marx is a familiar name in toy typewriters, but have you seen a Marx "Valentine" before?



The Maskelyne Victoria is a thing of great beauty and mystery. This one (the only one?) belongs to London's Science Museum. Story in ETCetera No. 100.



Another British invention is this Matrix Model G Braille writer (#237).

This Mima is a cute little Italian plaything.



Our next Italian machine is much more impressive. It's not obscure to informed collectors, but it's the only one known, and it is such a work of art that I have to include it here: the Minerva, from the collection of the MTE museum in Catalonia.




Back to basics: the Minitype.



Another peculiar Italian machine is the Montana Media, also known as the model 102/A. Montana is generally known for producing clones of the Hermes Baby, but this is a very different design that's either a very good children's typewriter or a very lightweight serious typewriter.


What's this? I have it as "Morse typewriter?" but it really belongs in my Mystery folder.



The following object caused a stir among collectors in 2004. The Ingersoll, one of the simplest and most ridiculous "typewriters" ever, was reportedly also marketed as the Nason. This "Nason" turned up on eBay, excited suspicion, and disappeared. Many collectors believed that it was a fake, built in order to turn a buck. But who knows?


Here's another one of these keyboard devices that aren't strictly typewriters but that fascinate me: The National Telegraph Transmitter, #113.




This monstrous 1960s (?) NCR typewriter/bookkeeping machine may be a descendant of the Ellis.



This New Sholes shows that the Sholes family kept trying to produce successful typewriters—without success. I don't recall which Mr. Sholes created this one.



The Nototyp, also known as the Notoscript, is among the more obscure music typewriters.



Here's a more modern machine, complete with its '90s teal plastic: the Ntouch D.I.T. (Digital Inkjet Typewriter), marketed for "Children 6 and over." This was actually a pretty innovative way for a keyboard device to get ink onto paper. It's an interesting hybrid of printer and typewriter technology.



This imposing Japanese typewriter is an Ohtani from 1928 (#5199).



Finally, the Osma was a very shortlived postwar German portable. This specimen from the collection of the late Tilman Elster is now in my own collection.