Her father had captained a topsail schooner brought down by a typhoon in the Andaman Sea, and her mother had been a founding principal of a venerable English college. But to Amelia Deering, orphaned at the age of ten, it was the legend of her uncle Henry that loomed largest in her imagination. For Henry J. Deering of Paternoster Row had been a junior clerk in the accounting department of Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green.

Longman, as they must be called, had been dictionary publishers since the time of Dr. Johnson, and Henry, by all accounts an intolerable bore, had become the most dedicated student of their company lore. He loved to breathlessly recount the tale of how they had reinvigorated their declining business by diversifying into specialty titles; what anecdote is not improved a mention of Watts’ Dictionary of Chemistry of 1869, and Trautwine’s Dictionary of Civil Engineering, 1875. Somehow, this account proved unforgettable to young Amelia, who in her thirties would share its fateful lesson with her husband Robert.

A latecomer to the industry, Robert established the R. L. Southwell & Bros. Typewriter Company of Buffalo, New York in 1900. The challenge posed by mature and well-financed competitors such as Smith (later Smith-Corona) and Remington demanded an innovative idea from the Southwells, and it was Amelia who provided it. In 1902, Southwell was the first to launch a collection of specialty typewriters, each attuned to the specific needs of a niche industry. Their prospectus strained with the catalog of professions for which they had a bespoke typewriter, including not only shopkeepers, opticians, translators and choirmasters, but daguerreotypists, mentalists, signalmen, and catchpoles. Had he succeeded, one wonders if there’d have been a Southwell model for the modern rat catcher, gandy dancer, or knockknobbler. In the end, there were not, and only these eight specialty inventions survive: the Southwell Specialty Typewriters for (fig. 1) coffee wholesalers, (fig. 2) ophthalmologists, (fig. 3) spirit mediums, (fig. 4) forensic scientists, (fig. 5) phlebotomists, (fig. 6) seamstresses, (fig. 7) croupiers, and (fig. 8) lighthouse keepers.

Published January 5, 2023. Copyright © 2023 Jonathan Hoefler.