Lucien Stephen Crandall - Career

Career

In 1873 Crandall was employed as a salesman by James Densmore and George W. Yost of New York. Densmore and Yost had licenced Christopher Sholes and Carlos Glidden's patents and had established a contract with E. Remington and Sons to manufacture them. They gave Crandall the necessary tools and set him to work to perfect the typewriter. Crandall soon worked out an oscillating typebar which he obtained a patent for; this prints capital and lowercase characters by shifting the platen, and was later used in Remington typewriters.

Crandall assigned half of his patent to Densmore and Yost. After leaving the company and inventing his own typewriter, he started negotiations with E. Remington and Sons for the sale of the other half of his patent. Densmore learned of this, and wrote a letter to Remington denouncing Crandall as a "liar, scoundrel, a dishonest and immoral man". Crandall then brought an action against Densmore for defamation of character, claiming $100,000 in damages, saying that the letter had caused his negotiations with Remington to fail. Densmore's defense was that the charges made in his letter were all true.

In 1875 Crandall received a patent for a typewriter for blind users and in 1879 was granted a patent for a downstrike typesleeve machine, much like the one that he introduced in 1884 and set up the Crandall Typewriting Company.