Today in History: July 25

From July 25, 1946, to July 25, 1956, the two men built one of the hottest acts in show business: Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis became a top nightclub attraction, and the two were television stars, radio stars, and they made 17 movies together in those 10 years.

They started out as show business acquaintances. Seventy years ago tonight, a singer booked to work with Jerry Lewis at the 500 Club in Atlantic City, New Jersey, bailed out, and Lewis suggested Martin as a replacement. Martin was a decade older than Lewis, smooth on stage, a professional who had not yet found his audience. The two tried a standard “comedy and music” formula with no meaningful interaction, and the audience was memorably unmoved. The club owner threatened to fire them.
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Today in History: July 24

Machu Picchu, the ancient Incan settlement high in the Peruvian mountains, was (re)discovered by American Hiram Bingham (who was later a U.S. Senator) on this date in 1911.

Only the locals knew that something had been there once upon a time, and they had continued to use the agricultural terraces the Incans had started to use in the 1400s, but the buildings had been forgotten and overtaken by the jungle.
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Today in History: July 23

U.S. Patent Number 5581X was awarded to William Austin Burt on this date in 1829 for his “typographer” (seen above). It was the first device that can be called a typewriter, although that term (with a hyphen) was not in use until the 1860s.

Burt’s invention was large: 12 inches tall by 12 inches wide by 18 inches long, and it did not utilize a keyboard. It worked via a wheel on the front, which one used to dial up the desired letter and line it up where one wanted it, and then one pushed an attached lever to make contact with the paper. (It must have been like composing a text on an old cell phone via a number pad, one letter at a time, except with a giant wooden box.)
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