Today in History: June 24

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Whatever it was that pilot Kenneth Arnold saw out the window of his CallAir A-2 two-seat plane near Mt. Rainier in Washington on this date in 1947, he did not keep his mystification private. He told the staff and management at the Yakima airport what he thought he saw upon landing.

Word got out. He was interviewed about what he saw by a reporter for the East Oregonian newspaper the next day. By June 26, it was a national story, and he was starting to regret telling anyone, but he also felt that what he saw was too important to be kept secret.
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Awesome. Just Awesome.

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One can not, or ought not, nickname oneself. This is not a hard-and-fast social rule, but it is similar to the unspoken rule about not declaring oneself humble. The person who volunteers that he or she is humble often is not at all humble. An exception comes when the humble person is speaking self-deprecatingly.

Every once in a while, I have desired a cool nickname, a moniker that precedes me wherever I roam. “Lefty” is a great nickname—Steve Carlton and Phil Mickelson both carry that name with distinction, but I am right-handed. No one goes by the name “Righty.” “Write-y”? No. No one needs a nickname that is a pun, a rhyme no less, and would always need a follow-up explanation: “‘Cause he calls himself a writer, get it?”

“No. No, I don’t.”
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Today in History: June 23

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The typewriter is one of those devices whose need had been obvious for decades, even a century before a practical one was produced. In 1714, one Henry Mill of England was awarded patent number 395 on January 7, 1714, for a device whose description sounds like nothing less than a typewriter, even though that word had not yet been coined. The 1714 English patent reads:

He hath by his great study and paines & expence invented and brought to perfection an artificial machine or method for impressing or transcribing of letters, one after another, as in writing, whereby all writing whatsoever may be engrossed in paper or parchment so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print; that the said machine or method may be of great use in settlements and publick records, the impression being deeper and more lasting than any other writing, and not to be erased or counterfeited without manifest discovery.

(Patents did not need to be very scientific in their language in 1714.) No device was produced, and no wonder: none was described. Mill’s idea, which described a possible solution to the perceived need, is what was patented, and it is now considered to be the first mention of the idea of a typewriter.

A century and a half later, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, necessity and invention met up. On June 23, 1868, U.S. Patent Number 79265 was granted to three men for their “Improvement in type-writing machines.” A design for an actual working machine resulted.
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