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leisure time to devote to his inventions.
Later, he joined the business staff of the
Chicago "Mail," under the management
of Assistant Postmaster General Frank
Hatton, and during the two years of his
connection with that paper he completed
his model for a new and improved ma-
chine. Severing his connection with the
Chicago "Mail," he traveled for a time
for the "Farm, Field and Fireside" magazine,
of Chicago. All this commercial
labor was to a purpose, and in 1887, hav-
ing acquired a moderate surplus of cap-
ital, he again set himself to assiduous
labor on his inventions, and undertook
the construction of a machine that was
wholly automatic, controlled by perforated
copy which would set, justify, and
distribute not less than twenty thousand
ems per hour. He had the financial backing
of William H. Rand, of Rand, Mc-
Nally & Company, and had almost completed
the erection of the machine when,
on November 30, 1891, the Arc Light
building in which he worked was de-
stroyed by fire, his plant and his almost
completed machine adding to the result-
ing debris. Such a misfortune should
have crushed his spirit, but it is by such
trials that greatness in man is demon-
strated ; those who succeed do so despite
handicaps. But all are not called upon
to bear such extreme misfortune as that
then experienced by Mr. Des Jardins, and
he proved himself worthy of inclusion
among men of achievement by his opti-
mistic continuance after the disaster of
1891, and his sanguine spirit eventually
carried him beyond the reach of failure.
Mr. Rand continued to have confidence
in Des Jardins's ability, and so the in-
ventor set to work again to create the
perfect machine, locating, for the purpose,
at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1892. In ad-
dition to the type-setting and distributing
machine, Mr. Des Jardins planned also
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BIOGRAPHY
100
to construct an automatic justifier, for
which there was a promising market.
His first Connecticut machine was built
in Manchester in 1893-94, and was com-
plete in every detail, in the form of the
present successful devices ; the original
model of his new type-justifier was the
second of two machines constructed at
the Dwight Slate Machine Company's
works in Hartford. It went through va-
rious evolutions, such as are continually
being devised to further enhance the per-
fection of mechanical inventions of in-
ternational import, and at the Paris Ex-
position of 1900 the Des Jardins inven-
tions received notable recognition, their
excellence bringing Mr. Des Jardins three
diplomas from the International Jury of
Award—a gold medal, a silver medal, and
honorable mention.
Many have been the inventions Mr.
Des Jardins has since successfully de-
vised, many of them of almost equal im-
portance to those of his early efforts :
his
typewriter computing machines, two distinct
types of which he built in 1900, have
become invaluable clerical aids, and have
had wide sale, though marketed by others
under licenses secured from the Des Jar-
dins companies ; his ingenious crypto-
graph, which in reality is a typewriter for
secret correspondence for office use, an
intermediate displacing device between
two typewriters, such as the Underwood,
by w r hich a communication written on
one of them is automatically written on
the other, but with each character con-
tinuously displaced and arbitrarily spaced
so that the cryptogram appears in appar-
ent words or groups of five letters which,
when copied on the first machine, re-
writes the original message on the second—and
for army use the same device
points out, or prints, and is sufficiently
small to go readily into a coat pocket of
average size, and its mechanism so de-