The Hammond Typewriter Company changed their ribbon spools several times. In the beginning, the company employed the use of a celluloid ring with a hollow center reinforced with a brass collar. The ribbon attached to the center column by means of a C-shaped metal clip, and a new ribbon was typically purchased loose and affixed […]

Want to find out more about your Hammond typewriter? Check out the Hammond serial number database!

Original patent approval letter for number 224,088. The typewriter as a machine was still quite new at the time which may explain the handwritten nature of the patent application.

The latest addition to the Hammond ephemera archive is this wonderful receipt from London, December 16th, 1902. A properly completed receipt is a gold mine of information and gives us another piece of the Hammond DNA network. On October 31st something was done, and the number 27,328 likely refers to the machine’s serial number. Eighteen […]

I was looking through our file on salesmen for the Hammond company and recalled this photo of Mr. Howard T. Reynolds at the Philadelphia Branch, in 1922. From a letter to his wife, he writes that Philadelphia was a “fine office.. just as nice as Detroit, Three Salesmen, Two repair men, one book keeper, and […]

Some advertisements found on eBay and around the web

One of the puzzling aspects of Hammond’s life was that there was no death certificate. After searching through the New York state death archives, I finally put down cold hard cash and paid the state of Florida to look into their records. Turns out they didn’t have anything either. The State of Florida did not start requiring death certificates […]

I was eating a ham-and-cheese sandwich today gazing at some Hammond’s when I noticed something interesting about two of them. The first is from around 1887-1890 with a serial number in the 12,000 range, and the second is from the 18,000 serial era. There are quite a few differences, can you spot them all? If […]