— One of five extant Baldwin Arithmometers from 1874. Price $9,400.00.
Frank Baldwin is best known for his work perfecting the Monroe calculators.
Frank S. Baldwin’s adding- subtracting- machine was one of the first ever sold in the United States.
He was 36 years old when he was granted the patent for this machine which could add and subtract numbers between 0 and 999,999. His machine, he called The Arithmometer, was meant to “lessening the labor of adding long columns. The mental strain involved in long continued addition is exceedingly monotonous and fatiguing. Indeed, instances are not wanting where persons employed constantly on this work have become monomaniacs, or partially deranged in consequence,” read more>>
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— Exceedingly Rare Eberhard Faber International Letter Scale. Price $2,450.
First scale to work based on a parallelogram with a pointer or hand attached thereto and placed radially on the graduated arc or scale or dial; the functioning principle of which hundreds of thousands of small scales were built thereafter.
But that is not all, there is more!
This scale also did away with tables used to look up the price for a certain weight of a letter or other mail, whether it was mailed domestic or international.
It does not sound very smart to design a postal scale with the tariffs for different weights of a letter printed on the enamel face or dial of the scale. But this is just one of the inventions protected under the patent issued to Maurits J. Albracht back in 1881.
Unlike today when the price of a letter seems to change every year, back in the 19th and early 20st century, that was not the case. The price seemed to be a thing immutable as cut in stone, never to change.
For the next 38 years, this notion seemed to hold as the postage did actually never change; the postage for a letter up to half an ounce was two cents, and up to one ounce four cents.
However, in 1917, the rates changed and the price for a letter increased from two cents to three cents. That was not the only change and these scales became obsolete, hence its rarity!
This beautiful, back in 1881 ground breaking scale, stands 14-1/2 inches tall and is the first one to use a parallelogram with adjustable arm pointing to the radially graduated arc or dial to indicate the weight. It does not get any better than this! Hundreds of thousands of letter scales were eventually built on this idea or principal, read more>>
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—First Telephone, the Coffin Set manufct. by Charles Williams, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, for the National Bell Telephone Co. of 1878. Price $9,950.
Exceedingly rare historic Telephone, Bell´s first Telephone manufactured by Charles Williams, the telephone every museum and collector is looking for!
Both, his mother and his wife, were deaf. This profoundly influenced Bell's life.
He intensely researched acoustics, sound and human hearing and speech.
His interest and research on hearing devices eventually culminated in Bell being awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone on March 7, 1876. The patent had the title, “TELEGRAPHY”. The term telephone was not coined yet and Bell claimed his invention to be, “the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically, as herein described [...]”.
Bell considered his invention an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have a telephone in his study.
Two individuals, Thomas A. Watson and Charles Williams Jr., played an important role in Bell's success perfecting and manufacturing the first commercially successful Telephone, read more>>
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—The Adding Machine of Pierre Fardoil c. 1700. Price $73,500.
Very early machine for adding and subtracting numbers from 0-100 in the shape of an astrolabe. This antique adding machine - signed “Pierre Fardoil à Paris” is hand-crafted in steel and brass, measures 5-1/2 inches in height and is in perfect working condition.There are less than ten other models of calculators known which were invented or made before circa 1700.
Fardoil’s contribution to the development of mechanical calculating devices is the introduction of his mechanism which enables the operator to read the result without counting the dividing marks on a circular scale of a disc shaped antique adding machine. Fardoil achieved this improvement by utilizing a planetary gear turning two round scales underneath two stationary hands ten times over the entire range of the calculator. The two scales show the numbers from 0-9 for additions and for subtractions respectively. This simple use of a planetary gear enabled Fardoil to provide a read-out in the range of 0-100 without the need of a carry-over from 9 to 10, 20, 30, etc.
Unlike the very early calculators by Schickard, Leibniz, Pascal, Grillet, and others, Fardoil's antique calculator was a true “pocket calculator” as it is flat and would fit in any pocket. read more>>
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— One of only two known DUPLEX / Babcock Pencil Sharpeners patented in 1900. Sold!
Early pencil sharpeners were invented with many different mechanisms which makes them interesting to collect; some of them were successful as the price was right and they functioned well, some did not.
The DUPLEX pencil sharpener invented by Charles Babcock and patented on October 2, 1900, was definitely destined to fail.
While it is not known to me what the price of a DUPLEX was, it is clear that Babcock’s DUPLEX pencil sharpener was awkward, if not impossible, to operate with only two hands!
The instructions of the DUPLEX actually do not even suggests to tighten the chuck while sharpening the pencil, as the two hands of the operator are busy cranking the handle to turn the six knifes and holding the pencil sharpener with the other while pushing a rod to feed the pencil to the knifes!
The insert holding the six rotating knifes was made of pot-metal, which was a novelty casting technology at the time, of which was little know how durable it would be. The only other DUPLEX is already missing one of the six knifes and the entire pot-metal insert is falling apart, read more>>
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— One of only three known extant Frank S. Baldwin Calculators Patented in 1902. Sold!
Frank Stephen Baldwin was in the truest sense an American Inventor; his inventions included a cement mixer, merry go round, a machine to measure lumber, and many other innovations he was holding patents for.
The most seminal work Baldwin is famous for is his work improving the machines we call calculators, adding machines, and computing machines.
Baldwin was granted not less than ten United States Patents for such mechanical marvels of technology.
The most important patent granted to Baldwin was the patent no. 159,244, granted February 2, 1875, with the title, “IMPROVEMENT IN CALCULATING MACHINES.”
Writing this description, a big effort was made into clarifying who the inventor of the so called “pinwheel” is, Odhner or Baldwin. I found a report written by the foremost expert in the filed at the time, L. Leland Locke, which will do away with any doubts of even the most difficult skeptic that Baldwin deserves the credit and not Odhner.
I also found a patent granted to Baldwin which I have never seen mentioned anywhere. It is the patent with the no. 641,065, applied for on August 3, 1899, granted January 9. 1900, with the title, “CALCULATING MACHINE.”
The machine offered here is the first machine with pinwheels Baldwin manufactured and sold in small numbers; read more>>
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— Only three other Sargent & Greenleaf Safe Time Looks like this are known to have survived! Sold!
This is an exceedingly rare Sargent & Greenleaf model 2.4 Safe Time Lock.
This lock has the unusual gravity rollerbolt and was only manufactured for one year. The lock offered here has serial number 496, and has two clock movements and a maximal run-time of 46 hours.
Most Safe Time Locks found do not come with provenance. The one offered here was protecting the funds of the most famous two evangelists of the 19th century, Dwight L. Moody & Ira D. Sankey. Read more>>
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—The only Sextuple Safe-Time-Lock extant. Sold!
Only 13 were ever built, none were believed to be extant till this Yale And Towne Sextuple or model EE Safe-Time-Lock was found! This is the only extant safe-time-lock with a redundancy of five clock movements!
This time-lock is based on Emory Stockwell’s patent with number 363’920, issued on May 31, 1887, read more>>
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— Sargent & Greenleaf model 4 Safe Time Lock of 1878. Sold!
Exceedingly rare Safe-Time-Lock manufactured by Sargent & Greenleaf in Rochester NY. On page 196, John Erroll states in his book, “American Genius, Nineteenth-Century Bank Locks and Time Locks,” that Sargent made 365 of the fourty-six-hour Model 4, of which fifteen are thought to remain today.
This early version was introduced in 1878 and has two forty-six-hour movements and had white enamel dials. read more>>
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—The only known extant Spencer Electric Co., Potbelly Candlestick Telephone (serial no. 32!) Sold!
Almost impossible to find, a telephone which is unknown to the large and very active community of telephone collectors, the Spencer Potbelly Candlestick Telephone. I could not find a picture or any record in any publication in the field of historic telephony, or on the Internet! The only records I could find are three patents issued to James H. Spencer and Malcolm S. Keyes, both of New York City, N.Y., a description in the Scientific American Supplement issue of January 29, 1898, and a description of the novel transmitter published in the Electrical World and Engineer, Volume 34, page 248.
There are many telphone related patents issued and no actual hardware was ever found; this was true about the US Patents with the numbers 596'834, issued on January 4, 1898, and the consecutive numbers 624'696, and 624'697, both issued on the same day, May 9, 1899, untill this telephone was found to prove that it was actually manufactured. The serial number of 32 is an indication that there where not many made.
This candlestick telephone with the novel form of transmitter patented by Spencer and Keyes was manufactured by the the Spencer Electrical Company, 163 Greenwich Street, New York City, N.Y.
A description of the novel transmitter, published in the Electrical World and Engineer, Volume 34, page 248, states: “The object of the invention is to avoid metallic vibrations, only the intended actual sound being properly transmitted. To accomplish this result, Mr. Spencer employs novel means of supporting the diaphragm,” read more>>
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—Peerless Whittler Pencil Sharpener, with three rotating knifes. Sold!
This is an exceedingly rare version with the three cutting knifes of the Peerless Pencil Pointer. If you are an experienced collector, you know that the last one of these showed up on eBay two years ago with a buy it now price of $950.00. The machine sold as soon as it was listed.
Whittler applied for a patent and started manufacturing before the patent issued. In short order, he first manufactured a machine with just one rotating knife, then two, and finally three. The patent never issued and Whittler had to seize production, hence, the machine is very scarce, read more>>
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—Early version (serial # 160!) of the 1921 three bank Noiseless Portable Typewriter in very good condition. Sold!
This rare machine has the second lowest serial number of any known Noiseless Portable Typewriter there is; the serial number is 160! In the first year of production in 1921, only 200 of these machines were manufactured and these machines are different than the machines builtin the following three years before Remington bought the company, read more>>
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