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Thursday, June 23, 2011

It's typewriter anniversary!

143 years ago, a gadget called the Type-Writer was patented

There were great maritime events, too.

On June 23, 1501, Pedro Cabral returned to Portugal from a voyage where he had claimed Brazil for Portugal.  Which is why Brazil is the largest Portuguese-speaking nation, though it isn't even in Europe, but attached to Spanish-speaking South America.

On the same day in 1611, the extremely unfortunate Henry Hudson was set adrift in a small boat in Hudson Bay by mutineers on his ship Discovery. All he wanted to do was find the fabled Northwest passage from Europe to Asia (a quest that was to foil and fell many explorers), but his crew were not so keen on the idea.  Henry was never seen again -- but at least he had a river and a bay named after him.

On this day in 1868, an American inventor by the name of Christopher Latham Scholes received a patent for a machine he called the Type-Writer.

Four years later, on June 23, the first PRACTICAL typewriter was patented by the same Christopher Scholes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Who knows what kind of fine-tuning and tinkering had gone on, in the meantime?

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