PART 169
On this day (November 8) in 1948, Bill Gates applied for a US
patent for an “automatic character repeating mechanism for typewriters”. Gates
obviously saw windows of opportunity in the typewriter-making world. But his was a
crazy, mixed-up idea, generally speaking a PC (poor concept).
This William S. Gates Jr was from Springfield, Illinois, and he
assigned his design to his wife, Vauna Mary Brown Gates (nee Von Braunenburg).
This Bill Gates was born in Lake View, Chicago, in February
1899. the son of another Bill Gates, a doctor. The typewriter-inventing Bill
Gates grew up to be a valuation clerk and accountant for a railway company and
have a son called Bill Gates (William B.Gates).
The Bill Gates the reader might have been fooled into thinking
this about was born William Henry Gates III in Seattle on October 28, 1955, the
son of a lawyer.
Anyway, getting back to the typewriter-inventing Bill Gates, who
said of his invention that it required no change in the usual operating linkage
of typewriters and permitted a typewriter conveniently to be used as usual.
The
mechanism would be “conveniently adaptable by an operator to various exigencies
of character repetition with a minimum number of auxiliary operations to be
learned, said auxiliary operations being simple and foolproof; and the
provision of apparatus of this class which is rapid, reliable, simple and
economical in construction, and easy to adapt to present-day typewriter
designs.”
That design is very clumsy. I can only assume that he ended up being well of the mark. A bit of a vista mechanically.
ReplyDeleteHe was clearly no XP on design.
Thanks for the windows onto typewriter history ... seems like a lot of trouble just to make a character repeat mechanically!
ReplyDeleteBut now we have typers with some kind of repeat spacing mechanism, don't we?
ReplyDelete