Cha-ching! A Splendid 1894 Cash Register

Susan reporting,

In these days of credit card scanner, swipers, and readers, I bet there are more than a few of our readers who won't know what this is. It's a cash register, and an extravagantly beautiful one at that.

Made in 1894 by the National Cash Register Company, this impressive nickel-plated register (Model 79) was an example of the latest in retail. By the end of the 19thc, Americans had more cash (and more credit) to spend, and stores had grown in size and splendor. Consumers were tempted with a wealth of increasingly mass-produced products, all presented in an elegant setting that encouraged the experience of shopping - itself a 19thc verb. This over-sized register, gleaming and ornamented like a piece of fine silver, would definitely have been part of the experience.

But cash registers were initially designed not for the sake of the customers, but to combat the petty thievery of clerks by keeping track of transactions. According to the museum's web site, the register "has three columns of keys for entering numbers, and a fourth column of function keys. The operating crank is on the right side, the cash drawer is below, and a receipt dispenser is on the left side. Pop-up indicators above the keys indicate the total purchase." High-tech, indeed.

The register is currently on display as part the "Art in Industry" exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.

Photograph ©2018 Susan Holloway Scott

Breakfast Links: Week of September 24, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Following the fashions: a basic American pastime.
• Paintings of unruly 19thc children by Andre Henri Dargelas (1828-1906)
• The history of surgical gloves includes a love story.
• Every night, the U.S. Constitution is lowered into an atomic-bomb-proof vault to protect it from thieves and terrorists.
• Image: Skulls of medieval soldiers, fused with the chain mail they'd been wearing when they died.
• A 17thc sailor's shameful confession discovered in his journal - though there's a kind-of happy ending.
• Stylish woman's hat c1880 cleverly uses pleated silk trim to replicate the feathers (or wings) of endangered birds.
• Teeth whitening in the Victorian era, from charcoal paste to sulfuric acid.
• Image: Road-trip beauties posing with a car (and some canoe paddles) c1920.
• Samuel Pepys was a 17thc visitor: the Cheesecake House in Hyde Park.
• Newly digitized online: 1,600 pre-1900 books on astrology, magic, alchemy, and the occult.
• Exercise for women in the early 19thc.
• A serial killer on the island of Jamaica, 1773.
• Image: The 18thc Shell Cottage, Carton House, County Kildare.
• Founded in London in 1875: the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants.
• How the Rolling Stones in 1968 ended up at 17thc Swarkestone Pavilion.
• While Europe's oldest intact book was found in the coffin of a saint.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Friday Video: Inside an 1885 Dinner Dress

Susan reporting,

This short but fascinating video features the work of the Costume Institute Conservation Laboratory of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The star of this video, however, is this c1885 silk dinner dress, right. Made by New York dressmaker Mme. Grapanche (her label is still stitched inside the dress), the dress represents the most extreme version of a bustle - that huge draped and constructed extension to the backside of the dress, that would have been worn over a cage-like or padded support tied around the wearer's waist. Of course, this was a high-fashion version, worn by an elite woman with a taste for drama (Madame Olenska!), but the bustle style in less exaggerated forms was popular among 1880s women of every class.

Here Jessica Regan, assistant curator in the Costume Institute, shows us what was sewn inside the dress to help support so much fabric and style. Of course, modern fashionistas might look at this in bewilderment: how does one sit in all that bustled splendor? We have the answer right here, in another Friday Video.

For another analysis of this dress, see this blog post from the Museum at FIT.

The Landau Carriage

1809 Landau

Loretta reports:

My characters get from here to there in various horse-drawn vehicles, but mainly I've posted about public transportation, like hackney cabs and coaches. Privately owned vehicles have been rather neglected, although I do offer images on my Pinterest page.

In A Duke in Shining Armor, the heroine arrives in a landau to collect her wayward duke. The landau was a coachman-driven vehicle, pulled by two to four horses. It carried four passengers, and was more luxurious than the curricles and cabriolets that dashing heroes tend to drive in our stories. The latter are more like sports cars. The former are more like luxury sedans.

Something to bear in mind: Unlike today, vehicles did not come off an assembly line. They were individually made, and the owner might have been closely involved in the design.* Consequently, not all landaus look alike. Earlier ones were often built on square lines, but not always, as the 1809 Ackermann illustration, above, shows. Some interesting aspects of the landau, as pointed out here, are the seating design, allowing the two pairs of passengers to face each other, and the two folding hoods. According to Discovering Horse-Drawn Carriages, “In the early days, the hoods were made of harness leather and fell back a mere forty-five degrees.” When these early hoods were up, the interior could be hot, stuffy, and smelly, thanks to the oil and blacking used to keep the leather nice and shiny. In later vehicles, the hoods folded back flat.

Square Landau

A much later and fancier vehicle, one of the royal family’s Ascot landaus, was the carriage the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (aka Harry & Meghan) used for their wedding.

Here’s a late Victorian landau from the Horse and Carriage Museum Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, France. And this is one you can buy.

You can read more about landaus here at All Things Georgian.

*This is why some vehicles, like the Stanhope gig, are named after people.

Images: Patent Landau, Ackermann’s Repository, February 1809; Square Landau, NEN Gallery, Luton Culture Museum Service.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed. And just so you know, if you order an item through one of my posts, I might get a small share of the sale.

Breakfast Links: Week of September 17, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• "Telling the bees": In 19thc New England, it was held to be essential to whisper to beehives of a loved one's death.
•Wynflaed and the price of fashion: a rare 11thc manuscript will describes one woman's wardrobe.
• Alexander Hamilton and the lacemaking industry of Ipswich, MA.
• Felix Nadar in the gondola of a balloon - and how this carte-de-viste was intended to help promote his costly ballooning ventures.
• Not for the shy: spectacular tartan Lord of the Isles suit worn by the Duke of Windsor.
• Image: Rose gathered between the trenches on the Western Front, 1918, and more on the 19-year-old soldier who sent it home to his sweetheart.
• Jane Austen's curious banking story makes her an apt face for the £10 note.
• Creole comforts and French connections: a case study in 18thc Caribbean dress.
• The 10thc teenaged English princess who defied a bishop over fashion.
• Ten vintage canes with amazing hidden features.
• Every picture tells a story - or does it? Examining two photos of romanticized train stations.
• A day in the life of a 19thc East India Company Director.
• The longest - and the shortest - reigns of the Middle Ages.
• Abraham Lincoln and the "sublime heroism" of British cotton workers.
• Old London landmarks: Fendall's Coffee House and Family Hotel.
• The story continues - much more about the Dido Elizabeth Belle portrait.
• The continuing power of literary relics: Shelley's ashes and Byron's hair.
• Rediscovering a missing evening dress worn by Queen Alexandra.
• Just for fun: the peekaboo cockatiel.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.