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Romance of the Typewriter 181 tions of the blind, and in such a manner that they could read and write at will. At the York meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in 1844, Mr. Littledale, who was a resident of that city, exhibited a machine for emboss- ing characters. His types were made of wood and arranged in a slide. The requisite letter was brought to the required position upon the paper, and the smart tap of a hammer caused the character to be embossed. Then the paper moved along to allow the next character to be recorded. Six years later another inventor, Mr. G. A. Hughes, governor of the Manchester Blind Asylum, animated by the motives which had prompted Mr. Littledale, produced a machine for accomplishing a similar end —to enable those deprived of sight to “record their thoughts on paper.” It was designed essentially for embossing purposes, but subsequently legible charac- ters or printing was carried out by the use of carbon paper. For this machine the inventor was awarded medals at the Great Exhibitions of 1851 and of 1862. The news of the success achieved by Littledale and Hughes in the interests of the blind appear to have reached America, because we find Mr. Alfred E. Beach, of New York, diligently evolving typewriters lor the blind and giving embossed characters. In one of the early machines devised by Beach, in which the type-bars were revived, the latter were disposed in a circle, and each, when depressed, came to the common centre. In the later machine a more com- plicated system was introduced, the levers being double and in pairs, so as to form a die. The pair