1876.01.09 English

[1] SA: According to “wikipedia” it was Densmore who bought the patent that Sholes had received in 1867/68 for his typewriter like invention. This machine was then improved and went into production by the Remington factory I 1873. We know that RMH communicated with Mr. Densmore through many years, to try and sell him his own patent to start production of writing balls in USA, but unfortunately it never succeeded him to sell it. According to the letters from Densmore, RMH might have had much greater chance to succeed if he himself had travelled to USA to demonstrate the machine. Instead his brother-in-law, Johan Heiberg, who was a minister in Chicago was given the task, and he wasn’t familiar with the "ball", and used 10 minutes just to change the paper, and of course this made a very poor impression on the potential buyers. Many of their other questions about the writing ball could also very soon have been answered by RMH if he had been present himself. But RMH decided to use all his forces to succeed in the great exhibition in Paris in 1878, which he also did – he won a gold medal for his writing ball, while Densmore only received a silver medal. The judges considered the writing ball to have a better quality than the Remington typewriter, in other words. The gold medal from 1878 was unfortunately stolen during a break in many years ago, but the family still owns the medals from the exhibitions in 1872 and 1873