January 13, 1934 Saturday. I wanted to go to Hartland to-day but didn’t. The Vermont Journal (area newspaper first published in Windsor in 1783- Edwin read a lot there) says that the diamond-toothed saws of large diameter are used to cut stone. Earnest English’s father built such a saw 50 or 60 years ago. The diamonds were set staggered like pins in a music box. It was tried out at a marble quarry over Rutland way and was a partial success. Like about everything else he ever invented he dropped it before it was perfected, as everything else seemed more promising. Come to think of it he got it up about the time of Lamson-Wardwell suit over stone channeling machines (Fred was involved in the legal proceedings. See Analdo’s letter mentioned in the 3rd to last paragraph below.)
April 25, 1934 Thursday. I was in the mill gorge later. (located in Hartland, today the site of my hydroelectric power plant). I walked from there to the Englishes. He threaded the piece I turned up for a pin screw to keep the collet in my jeweler’s lathe from turning. I was under the ridge pole of the shop looking over patterns. (They are generally wooden forms in the shape of an object that is to be reproduced in a sand-casting process. The Englishes were the masters of this trade, their house and shops adjacent to the foundry in Hartland’s village of Foundryville.) There are patterns for about everything, all kinds of lathes, steam engines, mill gearing, water wheels, grinders and all their parts, shoe machinery patterns, model machine parts etc. I got a pattern for a small “C” clamp, part of a dividing head (the horizontal swivel), offset tool block for a lathe and a 4” 3 spoke handwheel. I must look up more later. I went over by the old Hendricks place and out on the old County Road at Craig’s where nothing would do but I must eat dinner.
As a reminder to you the reader, the above 14 diary entries are a sampling of the 12,000 or so that Edwin wrote.
I have not yet written about Fred’s youngest son Euler who moved to Minneapolis in 1888. His 1934 obituary describes his own extraordinary inventive abilities. Euler was also the pilot of Fred’s first attempt at human powered flight, "flying" the family’s ornithopter from their home’s upper story to the foundry shop across the road.
Benjamin Livermore and Fred English died before Edwin was born, but their influence on him, as he told me, was immense. Here is an example.
Benjamin Livermore was as good a mechanic as his brother-in-law Fred was a machinist. They collaborated on some inventions, sharing tools and ideas, an easy thing to do as they lived a short walk from each other. Their projects ran a broad spectrum: boot lasting machines, cement drains, wire thread for sewing leather, photographic apparatus, quarry stone cutter and more.
But there was one ingenious object conceived by Benjamin that sets him aside, the first manual typing machine, a Typograph or Pocket Printing Machine. It is the precursor to the typewriter. It’s a permutation style device, meaning that letters and number don’t have specific keys. It uses only 8 keys that form the structure of those characters. Using one hand the typist presses a combination of keys to form a single letter or number that then imprints that character on a narrow roll of paper. After a key is released, the “print head” shifts over one position, ready for the next character in a word. The mechanism made of little tabs of bent sheet metal, wire linkages and springs, is complex. Including the keys. It is not much bigger than a cigarette package. The first model was made in 1854, the 11th and final one in 1873.
Benjamin’s nephew, Analdo, mastered its writing style, sometimes using it to write letters home. One letter written to his father Fred congratulates him on the quarry machine mentioned above, as well as a witty comment on the cold and windy weather in Rhode Island.