E. Remington and Sons

E. Remington and Sons of Ilion, New York, made rifles. After the Civil War the rifle business slumped, and in 1873 the firm agreed to manufacture a machine Christopher Latham Sholes and others had been tinkering with: a typewriter.

The Remington No. 1 reached the market in 1874. It was heavy, expensive, and wrote in capital letters only. It was also the first typewriter a buyer could order from a company that knew how to build machines in quantity. The typist, as a paid occupation, begins with this object.

A factory teaching an office

Remington had to invent the customers. It hired demonstrators, often women, to show the machine in offices that had always used male clerks and a pen. The QWERTY layout, inherited from Sholes, was there to keep the typebars from colliding, and it became the thing every later typist had to learn. Mechanics in Ilion built the machines. The new job was somewhere else, in the office that bought one.

Bankruptcy and a sold name

The company overextended and went bankrupt in 1886. The typewriter business was sold and continued as the Remington Typewriter Company, a different firm. The armory returned to firearms under other owners. Ilion kept making guns, under Remington Arms, until that company's own later bankruptcies. The 1816 firm that first shipped a commercial typewriter did not survive the decade in which the machine succeeded.

A factory teaching an office

Bankruptcy and a sold name

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