Chronicles of the Commercial Visible, Part II of VI

The Index Visible Typewriter

In Part I of Chronicles of the Commercial Visible, we met the men who brought the Commercial Visible to life and the emporium in which it was first sold. In Part II, we will follow a side road along the journey to visit another typewriter, the Index Visible, and learn of the shared history between these very different machines.

Green's Invention

While the Siegel-Cooper Company had exclusive selling rights in 1898, it is hard to say for how long that agreement lasted. By July 1899, advertisements started to appear that showed the same Fountain typewriter branded as the Commercial Visible and sold by the Commercial Typewriter Company of 631 Walnut, Philadelphia, and 300 Broadway, New York, (“University Day”, 1899; “Commercial Visible”, 1899). At the same time, it seems that the Commercial Typewriter Company was looking to expand its offerings. A newspaper from September 1899 advertised that Uhlig was seeking funding for a new typewriter that they hoped to sell for $25 (Uhlig, 1899d). The article does not mention which typewriter this was, and it was unclear from the article if this new machine was one of Uhlig's own creation. Looking to answer this question, the article in Geyer’s Stationer that informed us that Baldwin had purchased the patents for Uhlig’s Commercial Visible, also indicated that he purchased patents for an invention by a man named John J. Green (Geyer, 1902a). Is it possible that Uhlig was looking for funding for Green's design? Uhlig was the Vice President of the company, and so it would be reasonable to consider that he could have been seeking funding for someone else's invention. But which typewriter did Green invent? Not much literature was posted on J. J. Green, so I had to do some digging.

One clue lay in the Commercial Visible itself. If the machines were to be produced in the same factory, it is likely that they shared at least a few parts. There happened to exist a typewriter of a completely different design, but that shared what looked like the same type cylinder (Clark, 1995) and the same rubber feet as the Commercial Visible. Coincidentally, that same machine was marketed at $25 in the early 1900s, the start date for manufacture was around the same time that the company was making improvements to the Commercial Visible (Geyer, 1902a). That machine was, you guessed it, the Index Visible typewriter. It so happened that two of four patents granted to John J. Green were, in fact, for the Index Visible typewriter (Green, 1901a; Green, 1901b), and these were likely the same patents that Baldwin had purchased. To top it off, for the Index Visible patents, Green had used the same attorney, H. A. Seymour, and witnesses, E. J. Nottingham and G. F. Downing, that Uhlig had used for the Commercial Visible patent (Uhlig, 1897). In case you were curious, one of the other two Green patents was for a clamp for electric wires granted several years earlier (Green & Brown, 1891), and the other was for a typewriter, but also granted several years earlier (Green, 1891), and as per Robert Messenger (Messenger, 2013), was likely never manufactured.

It is interesting to note that in June, September, and November of 1902, Green applied for six more patents that are all associated with the same typewriter. One was granted in May 1903 (Green, 1903a), and the rest on August 4, 1903 (Green, 1903b; Green, 1903c; Green, 1903d; Green, 1903e; Green, 1903f). Given the date and the proximity of both the application and grant dates for the patents, I wouldn’t be surprised if Green had used the money from the sale of his Index Visible patents to fund these next patent applications.

Commercial Visible Typewriter Company

It appears that the Index Visible typewriter was sold by an agent rather than directly from its manufacturing company. In 1900, an advertisement indicated that it was being sold by a man named Alex M. Fiske from his sales office at 132 Nassau St., New York (“Index Visible Typewriter”, 1900). Other advertisements indicate that the machine sold under a new legal entity called the Index Visible Typewriter Co. At the same time, the Commercial Typewriter was benefiting from the formation of yet another new legal entity, the Commercial Visible Typewriter Company. That entity was located first at 322 Broadway, New York City, and seems to have later moved to 300 Broadway, New York City. (See ads to the left from 1899 showing these two addresses, and indicating that the company was actively seeking agents to sell the Commercial Visible Typewriter.)

It bothered me that, around 1900, as multiple companies and agents seemed to have been popping up to sell these machines, I still had no idea where these typewriters were actually manufactured since the lease of the factory was up. Recall that there was also some indication that they had planned to move to Brooklyn, but no solid evidence of having done so. An article implicating both the Index Visible Typwr Co. and the Commercial Visible Typwr Co. in potential New Jersey charter fraud could point to some weak evidence that they moved to New York. Apparently these companies' New Jersey charters had listed one Mr. Ryan as the resident director and agent, the same Mr. Ryan who had made a statement that he had been paid to put his name on various company charters and then immediately resigned his position (“Industrial Commission”, 1899). The need to list a dummy manager on their New Jersey charters could support a hypothesis that no one was actually in New Jersey to support the companies’ formation, and that their manufacturing facilities were located in another place. But where? One article mentioned that, at some point before 1903, the Commercial Visible Typewriter Co. was located at 277 Broadway and 56 Warren St. (“Into New Quarters”, 1903),  but after some searching, it seems that neither location would have been a factory; in 1902, an associated business had been relocated from 300 Broadway to 277 Broadway, and clearly mentioned that the factory of that company was “still at the old address” (Geyer, 1902b), and another article mentioned that an office, not a factory, had been opened at Warren St. (Geyer, 1902d). If the factory was in New York, it could have been on Williams St.; we find the Commercial Typewriter Company located at 257 and 259 Williams in 1904 and 1905 (“Commercial Visible”, 1904; Beach, 1905), and it is unclear whether they moved to this office, or if this address had always been the company’s address. If the latter, it could potentially have been the site for the factory, but given the previous findings, Williams was also most likely a sales office. After almost giving up on the notion that I would find the new site, I finally came across one solid piece of evidence in an article from The American Stationer. It stated that the Index Visible typewriter's manufacturing facility was to move from Carlstadt, NJ, to Richmond Valley, Staten Island (Redman & Kenny, 1900). Although only the Index Visible was mentioned, it is most likely that this would be the new facility for both the Index and the Commercial Visible typewriters.

One original hypothesis that was later disproved was that the Commercial Visible Typewriter Company had been formed to be the new factory location. William Bell Baldwin had been named president and treasurer of the company when they incorporated in July 1901 (Geyer, 1902a), and was found in The Electrical Age stating that he was looking for a motor to run a generator for his company. He wanted to implement cutting edge technology, (i.e., our products are of such quality that we implement only the best equipment to both create the machines, and to run the factory). In the article, Baldwin indicated that his superintendent (who I assume was Uhlig) had looked into the Secor Oil Motor, which was more novel than the more commonly used steam or gas motor, and ran arc lighting, which would not only be novel, but also cheaper than incandescent lighting commonly used elsewhere (“Secor Oil Motor”, 1900). It’s hard to say why, if the Commercial Visible Typewriter Co. was only a sales office, this was needed, but perhaps even Baldwin considered all the entities associated with the Commercial Visible as one and the same, and therefore signed for this new legal entity to advertise the name. They did, in fact, share sales offices at the very least.

Index Visible Typewriter Company

With Baldwin managing the Commercial Visible Typewriter Company, the Index Visible typewriter started to find its own path as it was sold by what seems to have been three primary agents. You are already familiar with one sales agent, Alex Fisk. Another outlet, the Buckeye Writing Machine Company of Ohio, had sold the Index Visible to the State Agency of Ohio, and seems to have primarily sold the machine within the state of Ohio (“Personal and Local”, 1900; Buckeye, 1900). The third was the obvious primary selling agent, the Index Visible Typewriter Company. The Age of Steel (Iron and Machinery World) announced the founding of the Index Visible Typwr. Co. in Jersey City, NJ, in 1899, by Peter Whitney, Ferd von Kuserow, and Daniel M. Bressler (Barnes, 1899). We start to see the shallow nature of this company when we pair the previous knowledge of the charter fraud accusation with the fact that these men played a role in incorporating at least seven other businesses that same year, including Ascot Vehicle Company (which manufactured electric vehicles), McElroy-Grunow Electric Railway System, Gurney Street Sweeping Machine Company, Tubular Bed Company, Lowe Medicine Company, The Heat Controlling Radiator Company, and Incandescent Lamp Company (Electricity Newspaper Company, 1899; “New Companies Formed”, 1899; “New Drug Company”, 1899; “Certificate of Incorporation”, 1899; “Nine New Companies”, 1899; “New Incorporations”, 1899). You can see by the varied nature of these businesses that these men were venture capitalists. The money for these ventures from von Kuserow seems to have come from a combination of his background (he supposedly came from a well-to-do German family) and his primary dealings as a diamond broker (“He “Touched” a Sheriff”, 1899; “Items from Everywhere”, 1899). Note that, although these men funded the incorporation of the Index Visible Typewriter Company, the main sales office continued to be maintained at the location shared with the Commercial Visible Typewriter Company, 300 Broadway, New York City (Miner & Healey, 1900).

Sadly, the life of Green’s index machine was short-lived. Advertisements ran in the papers and trade journals for about two years, and then in 1902, the New York offices of the Index Visible Typewriter were dissolved (Smythe, 1911). In 1903 the New Jersey charter for the Index Visible Typewriter Company was also dissolved (State of New Jersey, 1903).

Summary of Part II: The Index Visible Typewriter

In Part II we met the brother of the Commercial Visible, the Index Visible typewriter, and walked through his short life from invention to the final sales ads. In Part III we will return to the main road and pick up the Commercial Visible in a time of great change for the machine, her manufacturing companies, and her sales offices.

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References

Due to the length of the reference list for this six part series, it has been posted separately. Please see the article titled "Chronicles of the Commercial Visible, References" for a complete list of all sources you will encounter in the text, and from which the pictures were pulled.