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Albany local history photography

First Church, Albany

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First Church, Albany, originally uploaded by carljohnson.

First Church, the Dutch Reformed Church in Albany, dates to 1642, making it the oldest church in upstate and one of the very oldest in the country. This building dates to 1799, when the congregation moved from the stone church at Broadway and State Street to the outskirts of town, at Clinton and Pearl.

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Remington Noiseless

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Remington 267, originally uploaded by carljohnson.

“It became evident in the spring of 1875 that a machine printing capitals alone would not grow rapidly in the popular esteem, and Byron A. Brooks, of New York, who had begun as early as 1867 to solve the problem of mechanical writing, devised a plan for using two alphabets, capitals and small letters, with one key-board. Mr. Brooks was a professor of mathematics, noticing that the type-bar became at the moment of contact a tangent to the circumference of the printing platen, and that by moving the platen slightly forward or back the tangency no longer existed but a new center was created, devised a double-headed type-bar containing both a capital and a lower-case letter. . . The new machine was called the Remington No. 2.”

(This picture is of the No. 6, which took the concept to another extreme and put two sets of characters on each type-bar.)

More on the history of those fantastic typing machines.

Albany local history photography Schenectady

Corruption at the Capitol, 1910-style

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Lewis Hine Schdy newsies 1910 halfton
Tne New International Year Book, “A Compendium of the World’s Progress for the Year 1910,” provides a neat little summary of the complicated dealings of Senator Allds, highlighted yesterday when I wondered about the headlines being displayed by Lewis Wickes Hine’s Schenectady Newsies of 1910. The Allds scandal had it all: bribery, bridge and sugar beet interests, thousands stuffed into envelopes, uncovering of additional corruption, and guilty legislators who had the good grace to die before all this came to light. So, from precisely a century ago, the New International Year Book’s summary of the Trial of Senator Allds:

The death of Senator John Raines in 1909 made it necessary to choose a new leader of the Republican majority in the Senate. This leader, according to custom, is made president pro tempore of the body. In January the Republican caucus selected Senator Jotham P. Allds from Chenango county in the middle of the State. A small group of Republican Senators refused to act with the caucus on the ground of personal objection to Mr. Allds. The caucus selection was, however, duly chosen and installed. Shortly afterwards, a highly sensational statement appeared in the New York Evening Post charging Senator Allds with having received bribes, the statement being based upon accusations made by another Senator, Mr. Conger. The latter was connected with bridge companies . . .

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