Franz Xaver Wagner (inventor)

Franz Xaver Wagner (born May 20, 1837 in Heimbach near Neuwied , † March 8, 1907 in New York City ) was a German designer and inventor .

biography

Memorial plaque for Franz Xaver Wagner in Heimbach-Weis

At the age of seven Wagner lost his mother Maria Wagner (née Wertgen), and at 12 his father Simon Wagner. At 18 he passed the journeyman's examination as a mechanic in Neuwied . He then went on a hike to deepen his knowledge. In Stuttgart he developed a sewing machine in 1860 , which he manufactured and sold in a factory.

In 1864 he emigrated to America , where he worked as a mechanic and developed a water flow meter, i.e. a water clock . He started his own business and worked in his workshop on mechanical improvements for the typewriters, which were still incomplete and complicated at the time .

He achieved his breakthrough in 1890: together with his son Hermann, he invented the so-called Wagner gear for a type lever typewriter. The Wagner gear transmits the force of the pressed key via an intermediate lever to a type lever suspended in a segment, which swings 90 ° from the horizontal to the vertical in order to hit the type on the platen. In professional circles, the Wagner gear is also called rocker arm gear.

Until the invention of the Wagner gearbox, the types of most models hit the paper from below, so that you couldn't read what had just been written and any errors could not be corrected immediately. In order to be able to check, the carriage had to be lifted with the platen.

In the following years, Wagner invented, among other things, line switching with step preselection, automatic key repetition and the line judge in its almost unchanged form. Wagner had most of his inventions patented. In 1898, however, he ran into financial difficulties and sold all of his patents and manufacturing rights to the Underwood Typewriter Company owned by John T. Underwood . All typewriters were built according to Wagner's system until the 1950s. After well over a century, this basic design is still relevant for mechanical typewriters with type levers.

Wagner had five children with his wife Sophia: Annie (* 1866), Hermann (* 1870), William (* 1871), Frank (* 1874) and Sophia (* 1876).

In 1904 Wagner visited his home country one last time before he died in New York in 1907. His son Hermann died a year later. His ingenious ideas brought him neither fame nor profit. His grave is lost and any descendants cannot be found. Thanks to his numerous visionary and imaginative inventions, Franz Xaver Wagner can, however, be called one of the most ingenious mechanics of his time.

In Heimbach-Weis , a plaque in Hauptstrasse 92 reminds of the house where he was born. Due to the regional connection to Neuwied Heimbach-Weis, the Landesmuseum Koblenz has set itself the task of building a collection that deals with the development of the typewriter as a technical device.

Overview of the most important inventions

patent	Submitted	Granted	invention
364556	January 28, 1880	06/07/1887	Pointer typewriter with a type drum
454692	12/19/1889	06/23/1891	Typewriter where the guys still hit from below
497560	06/27/1892	05/16/1893	Typewriter with a round segment, types stop from below
523698	04/27/1893	07/31/1894	Typewriter with segment basket, the types are struck from the front
559345	04.10.1894	04/28/1896	Improvement of the typewriter through the rocker arm gear (Wagner gear)
633672	07/07/1897	09/26/1899	Improvement of the typewriter through a ribbon drive with reversing and a movable ribbon fork

Web links

• Patents from Franz X. Wagner

Individual evidence

1. ↑ [1] Anniversary of birth and death from book title "Franz Xaver Wagner, 20 May 1837-8 Mar. 1907, typewriter inventor" by Uwe Breker, 1982
2. ↑ ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: data set from the Family Group Record on [http://www.familysearch.org Familysearch.org ])
3. ↑  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Dataset of the household survey in the USA from 1880 on Familysearch.org