James Bartlett Hammond was an American journalist, inventor and businessman. He was president of the Hammond Typewriter Company.
Background
James Hammond was born on April23, 1838, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, the son of Thomas and Harriet W. (Trow) Hammond. He was descended from Benjamin Hammond who came to Boston from London in 1634 with his widowed mother Elizabeth, sister of Admiral Sir William Penn, and from Richard Swan who joined the First Church at Rowley, Massachusetts, in 1639.
Education
James attended the public schools and by his unusual scholarship won the Franklin medal at the Mather School when he was twelve years old. During the following period, from 1851 to 1857, he entered successively the Boston High School and Latin School, and then Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachusetts, where he prepared for college. He entered the University of Vermont in 1857 and was graduated in 1861. Here his scholarship won him Phi Beta Kappa honors. In 1861, he entered Union Theological Seminary, New York, but early in 1862 joined the New York Tribune and served as correspondent for that newspaper with the Army of the Potomac. As an avocation he continued to study philosophy and theology, and in 1863 reentered Union Theological Seminary, from which he was graduated in 1865. Later he pursued his theological studies, chiefly at the University of Halle, Germany.
Career
In his senior year James Hammond made full reports of a series of lectures given in Boston by George P. Marsh on “The Origin and Growth of the English Language and Its Literature, ” which were printed in the New York World. Journalism presumably appealed to Hammond, since upon his graduation he began to report Henry Ward Beecher’s sermons for the Boston Daily Traveller. In 1862 he joined the New York Tribune and served as correspondent for that newspaper with the Army of the Potomac. He then found employment in religious editorial work in New York and assisted in the translation from the German of J. P. Lange’s commentary on St. Luke. Upon the completion of this work he went to Germany. Two years later, however, his health was completely undermined and he returned to the United States a physical and mental wreck.
To regain his strength Hammond busied himself with improving some property in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, and then about 1871, at the request of former associates, began the independent translation of the Book of Psalms. This he did not complete on account of ill health, but instead turned to a business career. Writing manuscripts in longhand had always been irksome to Hammond, especially so since he was a master of shorthand, and from his college days he had from time to time considered the matter of designing some mechanical device to serve as a substitute for the pen. Once resolved to take up a business career, he focused his attention on the designing of a typewriter. For four years no material results attended his efforts. His basic idea was that of employing a typewheel carrying a full font of type instead of using, as in most present-day typewriters, a series of bars each carrying a single letter. When he started his work he knew of no other efforts being made in the field, but even when later he saw the typewriter invented by C. L. Sholes perfected by the Remington Company, he persevered with his own idea.
In 1876, at the invitation of the Remington organization, Hammond went to Ilion, New York, and worked for a year there, assisted by the skilled mechanics of that organization, in an effort to perfect his machine. The mechanical problems remained unsolved, however, and he returned again to New York. For two years more he worked alone and in 1879 so far succeeded that he applied for a patent, which was granted February 3, 1880. With, success practically assured, he organized a manufacturing company in New York City, of which he was president, and in the course of the succeeding twenty-five years he accumulated a large fortune. He died suddenly at St. Augustine, Florida, while on a yachting cruise, leaving his estate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Personality
In the later years of his life Hammond was extremely eccentric, and on two separate occasions a brother and a member of the Hammond Company tried unsuccessfully to have him legally declared insane.