From 12-Year-Old ‘Violin Genius’ to Typewriter History Pathfinder: The Michael Adler Story

Typewriter historian Michael Adler as a 12-year-old

"violin genius", in Sydney in 1947.

When The Sydney Morning Herald reviewed Michael Adler’s first typewriter history, it said The Writing Machine was “an authoritative book on a subject on which surprisingly little information is available”. This was in February 1974, a time when manual typebasket machines were already well on the way toward being phased out, and the Herald was right to say Adler had filled many gaps in our knowledge of the machines which had once held such a dominant place in business and newspaper offices. Indeed. there had not been the general release of a serious, English-language typewriter history in 50 years, since the 1923 publication of A Condensed History of the Writing Machine: The Romance of Earlier Effort and the Realities of Present Day Accomplishment, put out by the trade magazine Typewriter Topics to mark the 50th anniversary of the US typewriter industry.

Little did the Herald know, however, that the same author, Michael Hugo Adler, had graced its pages many times before. From 1947 until 1951, Adler’s name appeared frequently in print, in notices and reviews, notably as part of the New South Wales Junior Symphony Orchestra under its founder and conductor, Carl Sauer, giving performances in the Sydney Town Hall. In these Adler was referred to as a “violin genius”.

In 1947 the Sydney Sun, a Herald stablemate, said Adler “has attracted considerable attention though he is only 12. This Parramatta boy will play de Beriot’s Concerto No 9 First Movement, with full orchestral accompaniments”. The Bulletin magazine said, “Young Michael Adler [is] a confident soloist who evoked quite a good tone, especially in the lower register, with some facile bowing.” A few months later Adler won an Australian Broadcasting Commission (as it was called then) radio eisteddfod Listeners’ Prize. A 1948 review, which appeared when Adler was still 13, said he “played with confidence in Beethoven’s Romance for Violin and Orchestra”. The Bulletin reported that Adler had played this piece with “considerable promise and poise”. Adler also won prizes as a viola soloist. Professor Sauer was an eminent violinist himself, as well as a composer, researcher and author on the history and philosophy of music. He was also a noted Hebrew Scholar.

Adler with his mother Bedriska in Sydney in the early 1950s.

In 1952-53 Adler spent a year in Israel on a Jewish Agency scholarship scheme, representing the Sydney Habonim youth organisation. Upon his return to Australia he became an active member of the Zionist Youth Movement and was an outspoken advocate for the policies of the Israeli Government and the Israel Defence Force. After a visit to his father in Brazil in 1954, Adler flew back to Australia from California to enrol at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the music school of the University of Sydney. He also studied English and history before permanently leaving Australia in 1956.

Adler was already very well travelled by the age of 22. In later life he claimed to have been conceived at Christmas 1933 and born in Prague after the “shotgun marriage” of his Czech parents, father Gerhard Hans “Jan” Adler (1907-1973) and Bedriska Koppová (1905-1969), also known as Frederica or Fritzi. Jan was a lawyer who in 1937 counted among his clients Leon Trotsky. The couple soon divorced and after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in October 1938, both moved to London - separately. Michael’s father went to Brazil in 1940 and remained in South America for the rest of his life. Bedriska had already re-married, to a much older man, a wealthy widower called Pavel (‘Paul’) Israel Kraus, in late March 1939.

Bedriska and Paul Kraus arrived in Australia with a five-year-old Michael Adler and Kraus’s 11-year-old son Werner aboard the Stratheden on October 1, 1939. Bedriska had left London on the P & O ship SS Maloja on August 19 and, on September 3, 1939, while they were at sea between Aden and Bombay, World War II was declared.  On September 11 the Maloja was requisitioned by the British Admiralty in Bombay and converted to an armed merchant cruiser. Adler was given a balloon as a fifth birthday present, in Bombay on September 20. Bedriska was reunited with Paul in Bombay and the family managed to get a passage to Sydney on the Stratheden.

For much of a decade from 1956, Adler backpacked around South America before settling in Caracas, Venezuela, and from 1963 in Panama. He worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent and, among other events, covered the golpes de estado of Venezuelan dictator Marcos Evangelista Pérez Jiménez, who was deposed in a coup d'état on January 23, 1958.

By 1967 Adler was living in Rome. He recalled for a family historian: “One day I found a fascinating old machine in a flea market from which an all-engulfing passion for early typewriters developed. I'm talking about machines that in no way looked like typewriters. No one was in the least interested in industrial archology in those days, so these old machines were being sold off virtually for their weight in scrap metal. That’s a slight exaggeration, but you get the drift.

“Within a few years I had literally hundreds and hundreds of different machines, all of which I restored to pristine condition, and researched through patent records and libraries. My first book kind of launched the passion for collecting old typewriters, until sure enough Sotheby’s and Christie’s in London (and elsewhere of course) were including them in appropriate sales.”

Adler wrote The Writing Machine: A History of the Typewriter (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1973) and Antique Typewriters: From Creed to QWERTY (Schiffer Publishing, Atglen, Pennsylvania, 1997). Given his own background in classical music, it was no surprise that the title of the second book referred to Adler’s discovery of Reverend William Creed, who, Adler suggested, made the first working typewriter in 1747. It was called the Melograph, an apparatus to be attached to a harpsichord or clavichord “whereby every note played was committed to paper”. Adler quoted from a letter written by John Freke and published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London, “so that Creed’s invention should not be ‘lost to Mankind’”.

It was no mere coincidence that following the publication of Adler’s second book, a worldwide interest in vintage typewriters grew enormously. Most notably, this included the collecting and restoring of early machines, and further research into the history of writing machines. Yet Adler gave no indication of being in any way interested or involved in these developments. Nonetheless, in November 2012 he used social media to comment on an index machine in the Haaretz Museum of Typewriters in Israel, saying, “Origins of the Ivriya are not at all unclear. The machine is a Hebrew version of a popular German machine manufactured by Gundka-Werk GmbH from 1924 which was called Gundka, marketed later under a multitude of names worldwide (G&K, Write Easy, Frolio, etc, etc.) See either of my books The Writing Machine or Typewriters from Creed to QWERTY.”  Ironically, it was finding in 1967 a Frolio at the Porta Portese flea market in Rome - for which he paid a princely 100 lira - that started Adler’s passion for typewriters in the first place.

Adler and his second wife, Linda Lee Adler, moved to Britain in 1976 and in 1991 they started an antiques store called Fernfold. Adler later settled in East Sussex. He died on July 4, 2025, aged 90, on the Greek Island of Mykonos.

Death of Michael Adler, The Great Typewriter Historian

The groundbreaking typewriter historian Michael Hugo Adler died on the Fourth of July this year, aged 90, on the Greek Island of Mykonos. At the time, the passing of a man who had made such a massive contribution to our knowledge of typewriter history went completely unnoticed.

Adler was inspired to collect and restore vintage typewriters and study the history of the writing machine after paying 100 lira for a Frolio 5 index machine at the Porta Portese flea market in Rome in 1967. It will come as no surprise to serious typewriter collectors that Adler’s first wife, Vittoria Bice Baroni, divorced him soon afterwards.

Adler, born in Prague, escaped Czechoslovakia with his mother after the German invasion and came to Australia as a five-year-old. While living at Neutral Bay he studied music at the Sydney Conservatorium.

Adler wrote The Writing Machine: A History of the Typewriter (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1973) and Antique Typewriters: From Creed to QWERTY (Schiffer Publishing, Atglen, Pennsylvania, 1997). Adler believed he was “blackmailed” by Schiffer into writing the later book, claiming Schiffer threatened to get “one of their hacks” to rewrite ‘The Writing Machine’ if he continued to refuse to bring out a second typewriter history.

The Writing Machine was the first English-language, serious, general typewriter history published in 50 years.

Vale Paul Auster (1947-2024)

 

Chipping Away for the Workers. Reg Bailey and his Imperial Good Companion Typewriter

Today, April 25, is Anzac Day, and many New Zealanders will be honouring their war dead. But one brave New Zealander, who died on Anzac Day in 1963, will not be remembered. All that remains to remind us of this man’s life is his Imperial Good Companion portable typewriter and its (appropriately) bright red case, which are in Te Papa Tongarewa (Museum of New Zealand). Reginald John “Chip” Bailey was the target of numerous police raids in the days of a “Red Scare” which mirrored McCarthyism in the United States. Bailey was a communist activist and trade unionist who used his Imperial to type daily clandestine news bulletins, leaflets and pamphlets in his home in Wellington during the 1951 waterfront lockout. It was an offence to print or publish anything that supported the workers. All means of communicating in a democratic society were forbidden – publications, news articles, picketing, marches, processions, meetings, posters. Police ransacked Bailey's home searching for the typewriter, but failed to find where it was hidden. It sat behind a false panel on top of the pantry. Historians have since estimated the typewriter helped produce 650,000 bulletins and 400,000 pamphlets and leaflets.

Bailey was born on March 16, 1921, in Blenheim. Because of his independence of mind he was expelled from the Communist Party in the late 1940s. He was an avid sports fan but strongly opposed sporting contact with South Africa. He died of a brain tumour in Dunedin Hospital, aged 42. Bailey’s death robbed the trade union movement of one of its most able leaders. Contemporaries described him as an outstanding intellectual who was ahead of his time.

 

Julia Talledge in The Black Hills with her Oliver No 9 Typewriter

Further to my post yesterday, today I received from Laurie Cox of the Stroppel Hotel and Mineral Baths in Midland, South Dakota, these images of Julia Talledge at her Oliver No 9 typewriter. It was yet another happy consequence of family members getting in touch with me following an ozTypewriter post. In this case, it was a post titled "Calamity-less Julia, Her Typewriter and The Black Hills of Dakota" which was published on February 4 last year. The post included a newspaper image showing Julia at the Wilge Nursing Home in Mitchell, 175 miles east of her beloved Midland. She died there in June 1978, aged 95. In the clipping, she looked just like she does here, so these photos may have been taken at late as 1975.

In July last year Julia's great-niece by marriage, Jinny Talledge, commented on the post. A few days later, another great niece, Rhonda Talledge Mataczynski, got in touch to say, "Aunt Julia was my father’s aunt and a fun lady to visit. I remember her being a tall imposing woman with a very sharp wit. We often took her brothers - my grandfather Ben and brother Roy - out to Midland to see her. My father was a pastor and history teacher and was a favourite of hers. Thank you for all this info. Some of it I remember. I know that my father was extremely proud of his Aunt Julia and they corresponded right up to her death."

Last month Laurie Cox wrote "Thank you for this posting. My husband and I own the Stroppel Hotel and Mineral Baths in Midland, SD. I am working on the application to put the hotel on the national registry. Julia Talledge has repeatedly come up. I had a niece of Julia's come visit the hotel. At that time I did not have the information to know how influential and how strong of a woman that Julia Talledge was. I wish I had that personal visit back with her niece. I plan to do themed historical rooms here in the hotel and you can bet that Julia Talledge will be on the list of Midland's most influential people." Laurie then offered to send me pictures of Julia’s typewriter from an exhibit in the Midland Museum.

In 1907 the adventurous Julia settled in a shack at Mitchell Creek outside Midland, a small rural town in the south-eastern corner of Haakon County. The Oliver No 9 was first made in 1915.

For 'KL': The Boy With The Green Hair

Of the 2937 posts on this blog, one that I am most proud of was published on March 13, 2019, under the heading, “Betsy Beaton, The Boy With Green Hair and the Underwood 6 Typewriter”. There wasn’t a lot in it about typewriters, but it took many, many hours of research to identify the lady in the photo with the Underwood standard – and her achievements. The end result was satisfying to say the least. The post opened, “On the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web, I went through an exhaustive exercise of exploring the Internet’s many failings, its virtues and the boundless opportunities it offers.” My old friend Bill MacLane commented, “Congratulations on another fine investigative report on someone new to me. I'm always amazed at how good you are at finding information on relatively unknown (at least to me) people and such detail you are able to post.”

Earlier this year I had cause to comment on Instagram and Facebook, “One of the best things about [blogging] is making contact, through comments, with descendants of people who have featured in past posts … [including] the grand-daughter of Betsy Beaton, who wrote 'The Boy With the Green Hair' … There was almost nothing online about Betsy Beaton until I researched her life story, and now I notice the IMDb, which previously had no details, has updated its entry on Betsy using info from ozTypewriter - without, of course, any acknowledgement. But, then, that goes for images I see almost daily on Instagram. I suppose I should be glad to be of service!”

This was in response to a message on Instagram from Susan Forman, saying, "Hello Robert, I cannot thank you enough for your wonderful piece entitled, 'Betsy Beaton, The Boy With Green Hair and the Underwood 6 Typewriter'. If possible, I would love to have your email address. 'Wendy', Betsy's daughter, is my mother, technically mother-in-law, but we are very close and this article has meant the world to her. She too, would love to contact you." Needless to say, I've heard no more.

But this week I received another comment on the Betsy Beaton post. “KL” wrote, “This is incredible! Your post was exactly what I'd been searching for regarding the life of Betsy Beaton. I was wondering ... do you know where I can get a copy of her short story, ‘The Boy with Green Hair’? I was trying to locate it online with no luck. I see you have an excerpt here. I'd really like to read it all. I just found a copy of ‘Another Man's Shoes’ online and I'm tempted to buy it. I'm curious to read it as well.” The line I liked best was, "Thanks for taking the time to recognize a woman writer who was obviously undervalued at the time (and still is)."

Well, for that “KL”, here it is in full:

On This Day 120 Years Ago: The Underwood 5 Standard Typewriter Shift-Lock

I’ve been asked to service before sale this 1903 (serial #302981) Underwood 5. It’s history includes a thorough rebuild in the 1920s or 30s by an Elizabeth Street, Sydney, outfit called Typewriter Trading Co.

The Underwood is pretty close to being immaculate for its age, but I’m intrigued by the lack of a shift lock key. The right shift key automatically activates the lock, which is a lever with a small black knob on top.

I’ve looked at a 1908 Underwood 5 (#231413) on Ted Munk’s database and it appears to have the same arrangement. I also looked into Underwood 5 patents and noted that 120 years ago on this day, July 28, 1903, Edward Manning and Oscar Kavle were granted a patent for “an improved shift-key mechanism [which] has particular reference to the device for locking the platen in its upper position …”

This is clearly for the shift-lock key with which most of us are more familiar. So I'm guessing the earliest Underwood 5s didn't have a shift-lock key, but the lever instead. There are also one or two other tiny differences from the later model Underwood 5s I’m more used the working with.

Jefferson Moody Clough, The Unsung "Typewriter Maker of Ilion"

World Typewriter Day was marked yesterday and merely acted as a reminder that Latham Sholes’s earliest patents were barely practical and needed a lot of work before a fully functioning typewriter could emerge. One man responsible for much of that work was Jefferson Moody Clough (1829-1908). The 1916 Encyclopedia of Massachusetts states Clough was also “paid handsomely” to perfect the Hammond and Yōst typewriters.

Above is the only known photograph of Clough, the man who deserves as much credit as anyone for the successful launch of the typewriter on July 1, 1874. It was under Clough’s supervision that E. Remington & Sons of Ilion, New York, was able to mass produce a marketable machine from the crudely-made early versions of the Sholes & Glidden. Outside of Latham Sholes and Carlos Glidden themselves, Clough was one of only two people who were paid royalties in the typewriter’s earliest years – in Clough’s case 50 cents for every machine sold. Sholes and Glidden got a dollar each. A third dollar went to Charles Ames Washburn for his carriage movement patent - the royalties came from each $125 typewriter sale, but the $3.50 was to be paid from just $12 a machine which flowed through to James Densmore and George Yōst's Type-Writer Company from Remington. 

At the time of his retirement from the Winchester Repeating Arms Company in New Haven, Connecticut, on September 1, 1892, Clough was nationally known as “The Gunmaker of Ilion”. His work on the Sholes & Glidden, Remington 1 and 2 and Hammond and Yōst typewriters had all but been forgotten. Newspapers reported he had been “intimately associated all his life with the development of the two best American rifles, the Remington and Winchester”. In 1904 he perfected a Clough Mauser Gun, the rights to which were bought to stop it going into production and competing in the marketplace with the like of Remington and Winchester.

Clough left Remington at the most important period in China’s so-called “Self-Strengthening Movement” (1861-1895) - its development of military industries and the construction of arsenals sponsored by the central government. Qing dynasty statesman and general Li Hongzhang wanted the Jiangnan Arsenal to produce breech loading rifles of the Remington type but the few local products made were more costly and far inferior to the imported rifles. During the Ili crisis, when Qing China threatened to go to war against Russia over the Russian occupation of Ili, China bought 260,260 modern rifles from Europe and offered Jefferson Clough a vast amount of money to oversee its arsenals.

Clough declined the Chinese offer and instead accepted $7500 a year ($250,000 in today’s money) to work for Winchester in New Haven. Ill health forced his retirement in 1892 and Clough retired to the 500-acre Phelps farm at Belchertown, Massachusetts. He began to recover his health in 1894 but died of bowel cancer at Belchertown on January 16, 1908, aged 78.

In The Name of the Father of the Typewriter

The Nizzoli Triumvirate and the Vision of Treasure in Raymond Chandler's Olivetti Studio 44 Typewriter

Now is the Time for all Good Typewriter Men (and Women) to Come to the Aid of the Olivetti Studio 44

RIP Barbara Walters (1929-2022)

Barbara Jill Walters (September 25, 1929 – December 30, 2022) was an American broadcast journalist known for her interviewing ability. Walters appeared as a host of numerous television programs, including Today, the ABC Evening News, 20/20 and The View. Walters was a working journalist from 1951 until her retirement in 2015. She died at her home in Manhattan on Friday, aged 93.