Interesting information about Wilbert Lewis Smith
https://books.google.com/books?id=kpoMAQAAMAAJ&pg=PP51&lpgWhen Wilbert Lewis Smith was quite young, the family moved from Forestport, New York, to Lisle, New York. There he attended the common schools, later becoming a student at the State Normal School, in Cortland, New York. His first employment was in the gun manufactory of his brother, the late L. C. Smith, of Syracuse, whither he came to live in 1879. With this plant he worked his way upward to the
superintendency.
It was about 1885 that Wilbert L. Smith became interested in typewriters, taking from his brother's employ a man named
A. T. Brown, who was a designer and inventor and who had an idea for a "writing machine." Mr. Smith financed the building of a hand-made model of the first "Smith Premier" typewriter, which did its printing on the bottom of the roll. Two years later, in 1887, they manufactured the first machine, which amalgamated in a practical way the inventions and ideas of several mechanics.
Eventually, he induced his brother, L. C. Smith, to devote his time and capital to the making of typewriters. It was in 1890, however, that L. C. and W. L. Smith formed the Smith Premier Typewriter Company. Three years later, in 1893, came the merger of several typewriter companies—the Smith-Premier, the Remington, the Monarch, the Caligraph and the Densmore—into the new Union Typewriter Company. Wilbert L. Smith became an officer and a director of that enterprise, and he signed a five-year contract to stay with this corporation and not to engage in the building of any other machine for ten years.
Wilbert & L.C.'s father was Lewis Stevens Smith but I can't find his business.
W.H. Baker was in Lisle starting in 1867. The W.H. Baker & Co. was formed in 1877 in Syracuse, financed by L. C. Smith and his brother Leroy, and the partnership lasted until 1880.
