History of the Typewriter

—180— paper, but nothing of any real value was discovered for many years. About the time that the Sholes-Glidden typewriter was being introduced a decided effort was being made to popularise a wonderfully simple system of embossed writing invented by Louis Braille, in which six dots, arranged three high and two wide •• were so grouped as to compose a complete alphabet. Early in the eighteen-nineties, Prof. Hall, of the Illinois Institution for the Blind, invented the Hall Blind Typewriter, which embossed the Braille characters on a sheet of paper. The construction of the Hall machine was very simple indeed, since it provided only six keys and a spacer, the three left-hand keys em- bossing the first column of dots, and the right-hand key the second column. As in the case of the shorthand machines just mentioned, it made no difference how complex a particular group of signs might be, since one, or two, or all six of the keys could be depressed simultaneously. The size of the machine is nine by ten inches and five inches high, and weighs nine and a-half pounds. It is simple and very strong and durable. Ihere are but six keys to manipulate. Dots are embossed in the paper as in the Braille system, but with the machine the letters can be made very rapidly. Heretofore the blind have been able to carry mathematical calculations only as far as was possible by a mental process or by the use of the “ octagon slate,” which has not been found practicable in this country. Now they can solve all problems as other pupils do, and even music is within their reach. The npidity with which the typewriter can be manipulated is surprising. Fig. 136. A pupil, a pianist, after a few hours’ practice, wrote a sentence of sixteen words in seventeen seconds, and a sentence written at random at a rate of thirty words a minute. But the development did not stop there, for at last a