a machine gun belt feed for the French government and 50 caliber machine gun mounts for aircraft. In the same year a fatal blow was delivered to the company when George Blickensderfer died on August 15, 1917, after a short illness. With the brilliant chief engineer and designer gone, the company could not continue, and the heirs sold the company in 1919. After several unsuccessful years under different ownership, the Remington Typewriter Company acquired the assets, including tools, parts, drawings and intellectual rights from the bankrupt L.R. Roberts Company in 1926. Remington attempted to introduce a modified Blickensderfer 5 called the Rem-Blick to the market, but by the end of 1928 the model was discontinued. Design The Blickensderfer typewriter dramatically reduced the complexity of the typewriter design. A typical Blickensderfer contained only 250 parts, compared to the 2,500 parts of a standard typewriter. It was much smaller, lighter and cheaper than others. Some of the first aluminium typewriters, marketed as the Blickensderfer 6 and the Blickensderfer Featherweight, were made by Blickensderfer, as was the world's first fully electric typewriter, the Blickensderfer Electric. Instead of the common mechanism with letters on the end of individual type bars connected to the keys, the first Blickensderfer prototype used a cylindrical typewheel with four rows of characters; lower case, upper case, italics and short words embossed on it. It was later modified to three rows of characters: lower case, upper case and a row of numbers and symbols. Depressing a key caused the typewheel to turn so the correct letter was positioned over the paper. As the wheel turned it moved downward, contacting an ink roller prior to striking the paper. This allowed for greater speed in typing as there were no keys to become jammed or stuck together. The interchangeable typewheel principle is very similar to the IBM Selectric design introduced almost 70 years later in 1961. Like the Selectric, one could easily change the typeface or the font style on a Blickensderfer simply by changing the typewheel. Blickensderfers were also notable for their unique keyboard layout developed by George Blickensderfer after careful analysis of the English language. The home, or lowest row of keys, contained the most commonly used letters. Blickensderfer determined that 85% of words contained these letters, DHIATENSOR. This positioning allowed the typist to keep his hands on the home row as much as possible, minimizing extraneous hand movement and