Christopher
Latham Sholes (February 14, 1819–February 17, 1890)
was an American inventor who invented the first practical typewriter and the QWERTY keyboard still in use today. He
was also a newspaper publisher and Wisconsin politician. Typewriters had been invented as early as 1714
by Henry Mill and reinvented in various forms
throughout the 1800s. It was to be Sholes,
however, who invented the first one to be commercially successful. Sholes had moved to Milwaukee and became the editor of a newspaper. Following a strike by compositors at his printing
press, he tried building a machine for typesetting, but this was a failure and he quickly abandoned the idea. He arrived at the typewriter through a
different route. His initial goal was to create a machine to number pages of a
book, tickets, and so on. He began work
on this at Kleinsteubers machine shop in Milwaukee, together with a fellow
printer Samuel W. Soule, and they patented a numbering machine on November 13,
1866. Sholes and Soule showed their
machine to Carlos Glidden, a lawyer and amateur inventor
at the machine shop working on a mechanical plow, who wondered if the machine
could not be made to produce letters and words as well. Further inspiration came in July 1867, when
Sholes came across a short note in Scientific American describing
the "Pterotype", a prototype typewriter that had been invented by John
Pratt. From the description,
Sholes decided that the Pterotype was too complex and set out to make his own
machine, whose name he got from the article: the typewriting machine, or typewriter. For this project, Soule was again enlisted,
and Glidden joined them as a third partner who provided the funds. The Scientific American article
(unillustrated) had figuratively used the phrase "literary piano"; the
first model that the trio built had a keyboard literally resembling a piano. It had black keys and white keys, laid out in
two rows. It did not contain keys for
the numerals 0 or 1 because the letters O and I were deemed sufficient. The first row was made of ivory and the second
of ebony,
the rest of the framework was wooden.
At one time in America, there was a distinction between short sauce and long
sauce. The Dictionary of
American Regional English (DARE) contains a 1859 quote that details
this distinction, with short sauce as radishes, potatoes,
turnips, onions, and pumpkins and long sauce as beets,
carrots, and parsnips. And we find info about this long/short sauce
distinction mentioned in theOxford English Dictionary (OED) as
well. But, DARE also has a quote from
1825 that also names round sauce (or “sarse”) as an option.
Round sauce remained undefined, though DARE does have an
entry for round squash, also called round sauce squash,
round white squash, orwhite round squash, all of which refer to
summer squash (and especially pattypan squash. Garden truck is an American term
for “garden vegetables”. These are not, in case you were wondering,
vegetables grown in the bed of a pickup (which I have seen). The use
of truck here is much older, harkening back to its original
sense as a verb meaning “to give in exchange for”. Following from the
verb, truck the noun comes to mean the “action or practice of
trucking; trading by exchange of commodities” and then comes to denote the
things being traded. This is why we can
(still) run across a saying such as to have no truck with someone
to mean that you “don’t want to have anything to do with them” (a saying that’s
been around since at least 1625). http://homewords99.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/vegetables/ Homewords is a blog about words, history and
culture written by Allison Burkette
January 31, 2014 "Librarians
have suffered enough", according to Lemony Snicket, who is setting up
a new annual US prize "honouring a librarian who has faced adversity with
integrity and dignity intact". Snicket,
the pen name of American author Daniel Handler, is the chronicler of the
"travails" of orphans Violet, Klaus and Sonny in the
multi-million-selling A Series of Unfortunate Events books. He is, he said in his announcement, often
"falsely accused of crimes and sought by his enemies as well as the
police", and he believes that, "in much the same spirit, librarians
have suffered enough" and thus deserve to be rewarded. Together with the American Library
Association, he is therefore setting up a new $3,000 (£1,800) award, The Lemony
Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced With Adversity. "The Snicket prize will remind readers
everywhere of the joyous importance of librarians and the trouble that is all
too frequently unleashed upon them," said Snicket, who is funding the
prize from his own "disreputable gains". One way in which librarians have been
challenged in the US over the last year is through attempts to ban books: late in 2013, the Kids'
Right to Read Project reported 49 censorship attempts
in 29 states, a 53% increase in activity on 2012. One incident involved a vote to ban Stephen
Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower from middle-school classroom libraries.
With support from Judy Blume, and
two months of negotiations, the book was reinstated. In 2006, the Katy Intermediate School
District in Texas placed Snicket's books in "restricted use" –
meaning children were not allowed to check out any of his work from school
libraries. Snicket's books, which have won numerous children's awards and been
nominated for such prizes as the Children's Choice and Nickelodeon Kids' Choice
awards, was restricted on grounds of excessive "violence and horror". Snicket's new Noble Librarians prize will be
judged by members of the American Library Association, including at least one
member from its Intellectual Freedom Committee.
Candidates – who must describe an
"adverse incident" they faced and "their response, result and
resources utilised" – need to be nominated by 1 May this year. Alison Flood
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/31/lemony-snicket-prize-librarians-book-bans
Feb. 7, 2014 Mamoru
Samuragochi’s original claim to fame lay in composing video game
soundtracks. The recording of his first
symphony, subtitled “Hiroshima” and lasting well over an hour, sold more than
100,000 copies in Japan after its 2011 premiere. He was said to be deaf. This week, his professional identity was
exploded when a music teacher named Takashi Niigaki revealed that for the past
18 years he had in fact been writing Samuragochi’s putative works. And by the way, Samuragochi wasn’t deaf at
all. Samuragochi’s CDs are being pulled from the
shelves of Japanese record stores; his publisher is ceasing printing his
scores. The issue even touches the
Olympic Games; Daisuke Takahashi, the men’s ice skating bronze medalist in
2010, is skating his short program to music that was supposed to be by
Samuragochi. He has often been asked
over the last couple of days whether he will change his program. Fraud, and plagiarism, and copyright
violation, and intellectual property rights, represent a conglomerate of
hot-button topics in the digital universe. Artistic fraud, of course, is not a phenomenon
of the digital age; far from it. Forgeries have been a staple and scourge of
the visual-arts world throughout art history, from Han van Meegeren’s Vermeers to Courbet’s imitators back
to the time when Michelangelo allegedly made a statue of Cupid and buried it to
artificially age it so it would look like an actual Roman or Greek artifact,
which would mean he could sell it for more money. The trope of a man asking someone else to
write music in his name is not new, either. A famous predecessor of Samuragochi is Franz von Walsegg, an Austrian nobleman who
used to commission works from composers and pass them off as his own (Mozart’s
final Requiem being the most famous example).
Between these examples lies a key difference that gets obscured in the
dust-cloud of cries of “fraud” and “cheating” and “inauthenticity” that has
risen up around the story, as it always rises up when such topics come up
today. It’s one thing to paint or write
or compose something and pass it off as the work of an established, famous
artist, like the fake Jackson Pollocks the
Knoedler gallery sold to well-heeled buyers. That’s fraud. It’s another thing to create a work of art
that is destined to enter the world under false premises, like the Mozart
Requiem. There’s a qualitative
difference. One is real art under an
assumed name. And one is a counterfeit. You can debate this point; you can say that
some forgeries are better than others, or that forgeries represent a valid
artistic statement of their own. The fact remains that Van Meegeren’s
counterfeit “Vermeers” make us chuckle today, while Mozart’s Requiem moves us
profoundly, and von Walsegg’s name is nearly forgotten. Anne Midgette
Feedback to the Great Molasses Flood There was an
interesting article in Scientific American recently that referred to the Great
Molasses Flood. The people were killed mostly because molasses is so
viscous (compared, for example, to water) that they could not move in it and
were trapped below the surface. I remember from my engineering
background that the Reynolds number is the ratio of the inertial forces to the
viscous forces. Protozoa and such critters have a Reynolds number in
water similar to the Reynolds number of humans in molasses, and it was an
interesting article on what techniques microscopic creatures use to be able to
move through water. Thanks, David
Reynolds number
explained by NASA http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/BGH/reynolds.html
Shirley Temple Black (April 23, 1928-February 10, 2014) made her first movie appearances in
“Baby Burlesks,” a series of one-reel shorts that parodied movies and movie
stars of the day. In her autobiography,
“Child Star,” Mrs. Black wrote that she once asked for an accounting of her
investments. She said she discovered
that, of more than $3 million she had made since childhood, only $44,000
remained in her name. Half her earnings
had gone to her parents and much of the rest paid the living expenses of other
family members and a dozen household workers, she said. Her father had ignored a court order and had
failed to deposit money in her trust account. She became interested in world affairs and
turned down acting offers, until her return in “Shirley Temple's Storybook” on
NBC-TV in 1958. Ms. Temple Black’s last
foray into television was in January 1965, when she shot a situation comedy
pilot, “Go Fight City Hall,” in which she played a social worker. It was made on the 20th Century-Fox lot. Her first day on the set, there was a banner
and party in the commissary. “If there had
not been a Shirley Temple, there would not be a 20th Century-Fox,” a spokesman
said. Claudia Levy See much more plus list of her films from
1932-1949 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/shirley-temple-black-actress-and-diplomat-dies-at-85/2014/02/11/03b99f88-930c-11e3-83b9-1f024193bb84_story.html?hpid=z1
Issue 1109
February 12, 2014 On this date in
1914, the first stone of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. was put in
place.
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