On This Day in Typewriter History (III)

MAY 23

(Countdown to TYPEWRITER DAY:

One month from today)

American poet Jane Kenyon was born on this day in 1947, 64 years ago. She was was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Kenyon was New Hampshire's poet laureate when she died on April 22, 1995, from leukemia. Four collections of Kenyon's poems were published during her lifetime: Constance (1993), Let Evening Come (1990), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), and From Room to Room (1978). She spent some years translating the poems of Anna Akhmatova from Russian into English (Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, 1985).

On this day in 1950, 61 years ago, Harrison Morton Von Duyke, of Wilmington, Delaware, was awarded a US patent for a typewriter ribbon mechanism. The patent was assigned to the New Dictatype Company of Wilmington. The claims for the invention were that it would provide “improved mechanism for feeding an ink ribbon, with a step by step movement, between the type bars and the platen over which the paper is fed … [an] improved means for supplying ink to the ribbon from a reservoir … the ribbon is of endless form … improved means for maintaining the ribbon at a proper tension and for automatically taking up any slack therein …” Harrison Von Duyke was born in Huntington, Ohio, on November 12, 1888, and died in March 1977.