When Woodstock Illinois Changed the World

A Woodstock made Oliver Typewriter and one of the new class of women officer workers it helped make possible.

Note:  Running late today so here is a goody from the archives inspired by a post on Facebook of an old Oliver Typewriter ad.

I bet you didn’t know that Woodstock, Illinois was once the Silicon Valley of the first half of the Twentieth Century.  Just as previously obscure California towns boomed when the technological innovations fostered there blossomed into industries seemingly over night and changed forever the way we communicate with each other, so did this once sleepy county seat less than a two hour train ride from Chicago help transform the world a century ago.

Woodstock was once known as Typewriter City.  In 1922 nearly half the world’s typewriters were produced in two bustling factories here.  The machines produced in Woodstock were landing on business desks, in government offices, newspaper city rooms, schools and homes.  And they changed everything. 

Long rows of high clerks’ desks attended by young men in green eye shades and sleeve garters laboriously hand copying documents in fine Palmer Method script were replaced by mechanical devises and a few young women—both originally called “typewriters”—who could be hired at half the wages.  With the addition of carbon paper and tissue-like onion skin paper up to a half dozen perfectly identical copies of any document could be made at one time.  The machines could be used to cut a stencil for another new invention—the Mimeograph—and hundreds of copies could be made cheaply and quickly without having to send anything to a job printer.

The result was an explosion of paper—and of information.  Businesses and government ran smoother.  Productivity soared.

In 1894 a tinkering local Methodist minister, Rev. Thomas Oliver, started the Oliver Typewriter Company and produced a unique machine in which type bars were mounted to strike the platen from the top making the impressions on the page clearly visible to the typist.  Previously the type bars of most machines struck the platen from the rear and the typist could not see the result until the paper was removed. Talk about a technological breakthrough! Oliver machines were especially favored as stencil cutters for business and because of a unique marketing program became the first typewriters widely used in homes.  Production in Woodstock ended in 1928 and was shifted to Great Britain.  British Olivers of the same design as produced here became the backbone of the war effort with tens of thousands put to use by the military, government, and contractors during World War II.

Meanwhile, in 1910, the Emerson Typewriter Company relocated from Momence, Illinois into a state of the art factory building occupying a whole city block near the Woodstock railroad station.  When the Emerson company foundered it was acquired by its largest distributor and main creditor, Sears, Roebuck and Company.  Alvah C. Roebuck himself took over management of the firm.  By 1914 he had personally completely redesigned the typewriter into a sturdy machine on the modern model.  He retired the Emerson name and from then on Woodstock Typewriters were very successfully marketed by Sears.  Over the years Woodstock Typewriters introduced many innovations including the 1925 introduction of the first successful electric machine.

In 1950 the company was bought out by R. C. Allen and the machines re-branded and modernized. 

Allen already had a line of desk calculators and wanted to expand into a comprehensive office machine provider.  The new Allen electrics were among the most advanced machines available.  The company produced over a million and a half typewriters until the company closed operations in 1967 ending more than seventy years of typewriter production in Woodstock. 

Three generations of Woodstock working people responded to the whistles of these factories every morning.  Business was good.  Even during the Depression demand for typewriters remained high.  World War II sent demand through the roof as a complex world wide conflict required legions of typists pounding away in offices and Quonset huts from Washington, D.C. to the most obscure Pacific atoll.  Those workers considered their jobs as secure any in America.  After all, wasn’t business done on typewriters?  Wouldn’t it always be?

But marketing changes were challenging independent firms like R. C. Allen.  The introduction of innovations like the IBM Selectric machines with their easily interchangeable ball fonts made the Allen models passé. 

Today most people under the age of 40 have never even used a mechanical typewriter.  By the early 1980’s even the electric models were being replaced by new electronic “Word Processors.” By the ‘90’s computers were ubiquitous and only the most hidebound traditionalists clung to the old machines.

And some day, surely, those same computers, the whiz bang internet, and the industries that sustain them will fade, replaced by what we can only imagine.  Maybe it’s just as well to say that Silicone Valley may become the Woodstock of the future.

Unwanted Half-breed Immigrant Couldn’t Speak English—Shods a Nation

On May 19, 1885 Jan Ernst Matzeliger’s revolutionary Shoe Lasting Machine was introduced into production at a Lynn, Massachusetts factory.  Within a few years American production of factory made shoes exploded and costs per pair to consumers dropped more than 50% and Lynn became the center of a major industry. 

Matzeliger’s road to being an inventor was anything but ordinary.  He was born in 1852 in Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana (now Surinam) in South America of a Dutch engineer and a local Black woman.  Matzeliger inherited his father’s talent for machinery, working with him at his machine shop from the age of 10 and mastering the repair and maintenance of complicated machinery. 

But despite his talents, his future was clouded.  As a creole or mulatto he could not be sent to Holland for a professional education and he was not well accepted either among the white colonial elite or the mostly African and Indian local population. 

At the age of 20 he signed on a merchant vessel and spent two years as a seaman before deciding to settle in Philadelphia.  Knowing only rudimentary English, he had a hard time finding work until connecting to the local Black population through church.  They helped him find work repairing equipment of various kinds before he got a steady job in a small shoe maker’s shop. 

Local shops like the one in which he worked still made most of the shoes worn by Americans.  The introduction of heavy sewing machines and cutting equipment had increased the speed at which shoemakers could produce their wares since the “peg and awl” days of hand construction, but building finished shoes was still a laborious, hand operation.  Matzeliger took to his new trade, but recognized that tools could be improved. 

In 1877 he moved to Lynn, where nearly 50% of the nation’s shoes were being produced in local factories.  The Civil War had stimulated the need for hundreds of thousands of pairs of shoes and boots to be manufactured quickly to meet the needs of the Army.  Using the same mechanical equipment that Matzeliger found in the local Philadelphia shop, companies were able to produce more by installing many cutting and sewing machines. 

But shaping the tops and attaching them to the bottoms could not be mechanized and was done by highly skilled hand lasters who stretched and shaped leather over wood or stone molds called lasts and attached them to the soles.  Even the most skilled artisan could produce no more than 50 pair of shoes in a ten hour day.  The lasters were organized into a craft union which was able to demand high wages. 

After trying for months, Matzeliger was finally able to get work in one of the local factories and began studying how the master lasters manipulated the leather and began sketching ideas.  He knew that he had to educate himself in English to read and master technical information, so he attended night school after his ten hour shifts.  He lived a lonely, isolated life as one of the few people of color in Lynn shunned by his fellow workers.  He lived in a cramped room and found his only comfort in the fellowship of the local Congregational Church, the only one in town that accepted Black members. 

Slowly, Matzeliger began to find solutions to the complicated puzzle and began to make models of a new machine from what ever meager materials he had at hand—scrap wood, wire, a cigar box, bits of metal he laboriously hand shaped.  By the early 1880’s he knew he was onto something, but needed money to get the materials needed to build a full scale working model. 

Word of his tinkering got out, despite his efforts at secrecy and he was pressured, if not threatened, by the skilled hand lasters to abandon his project.  But it was also attracting interested potential buyers.  He was offered first $50,000 and eventually $1.5 million for the rights to his as yet unpatented machine. 

Knowing its true value he would not sell.  He held out until he got the money to finish his model in exchange for a two-thirds share in the machine. 

After completing his third model in 1883 he applied for a patent.  Patent Office officials in Washington at first refused to believe that a machine could actually do all of the complicated actions of a laster as many failed patents attested.  They sent an inspector to witness the machine in action.  Astonishingly, it worked as advertized and Matzeliger’s patent was granted. 

His perfected machine held a shoe on a last, gripped and pulled the leather down around the heel, set and drove in the nails, and then discharged the completed shoe. It could produce up to 700 pair of shoes a day. 

After the 1885 introduction into production, demand for Matzeliger’s machines soared.  In 1889 the Consolidated Lasting Machine Company was formed with Matzeliger a substantial minority owner.  His future seemed bright.  He continued to work on other improvements for shoe production and submitted five more patent applications. 

But before reaping the benefits of his inventions, still living alone in a single room, Matzeliger died of tuberculosis the same year.  He left his models and his stock in the new company to the congregation that took him in, First Church in Lynn. 

Lynn and near-by communities thrived for generations as the center of the American shoe industry until the 1970s when changing fashions to rubber-soled athletic style shoes and competition from foreign manufactures decimated the industry.  By the early 21st Century the American shoe industry made possible by Matzeliger was defunct. 

Matzeliger himself slipped into obscurity until “rediscovered” by Black history researchers.  He was honored on a postage stamp on September 15, 1991.

Something Mechanical to Eat the God Dam Lawn

On May 18, 1830 an English textile worker and tinkerer Edwin Beard Budding patented the first mechanical lawn mower.  He based his design on a velvet sheering device at his mill.  Blade mounted on a cylinder rotated as the machine was pushed sheering grass against a stationary blade.  It could be pushed by a strong man and also had an auxiliary handle so it could be pulled by a second.

While functional, his device was cumbersome and heavy, too expensive for the middling classes and not worth the investment by the grand owners of those country estates who could rely on legions of gardeners with scythes and sheep to keep their sweeping lawns under control. 

Forty years later American Elwood McGuire patented a simpler, lighter weight reel machine that could be mass produced and sold at reasonable prices.  By 1885 50,000 push mowers were being sold annually in the United States.  This caused a revolution in home landscaping.

Previously front yards had often been small, weedy and often simply trampled ground apt to turn seasonally to mud or dust while back yards were reserved for home gardens and live stock.  Both were typically surrounded by high wooden fences so the neighbors couldn’t complain.  First front yards, then rear ones were transformed into lawns in imitation of the estates of the wealthy but on a much more modest scale. 

Stockade fences came down to be replaced with picturesque pickets or decorative iron.  As long as husbands, sons or help could be relied on for a couple of hours a week, middle class women could enjoy a new feeling of enhanced status.  But lawns in cities, small towns and the emerging suburbs alike continued to be modest in size because pushing the mower was still a lot of work. 

Enter the back yard tinkerers again who spent decades trying to effectively mount an engine on the mower.  Most tried mounting heavy steam or gasoline powered motors to existing reel machines. 

The breakthrough came in 1919 when Colonel Edwin George mounted a new light 2-cycle engine perfected during the First World War on a platform directly driving a rotating blade spinning parallel to the ground. 

The new power machines did not really catch on in large numbers until the explosion of suburbia after World War II.  In fact a good argument can be made that the leap to large lots that characterized the post-war suburban boon would have been impossible without them. 

Now power mowers are a major source of air pollution in many areas and modernized push mowers have made a modest comeback among the ecologically minded and mindless fitness enthusiasts. 

But this writer, whose muscles still ache from the memory of doing the quarter acre lot on Cheshire Drive in Cheyenne with a cranky push mower, still uses Col. George’s improvement—and tries to find a grandson or son-in-law to do the job.