Found in Tangible Typography, or how the blind read, published in England in 1853.
The Typograph was invented in 1851 by William Hughes, head of the Blind Institution at Manchester. It was demonstrated at one of the Crystal Palace exhibitions of new inventions, and was produced and used in small quantities.
Several of the earliest pre-Sholes typewriters were meant for blind use and later adapted for printing with ink. Most reading material for the blind was formed by embossing ordinary letters, so it was ‘backwards compatible’. Braille was one of several non-letter alternatives at that time but hadn’t yet taken over as the universal method.
The Hughes machine had a dial containing 44 characters, all the UC letters plus numbers and punctuation. The writer would dial up a letter and punch it to produce an embossed text on paper.
Here’s the action from the side. Pull up the main lever to kick the gear forward and move the whole mechanism to the right. Turn the wheel to select a letter. Push the main lever down to clamp male and female dies together around the paper and emboss one letter.
The gear looks like it should turn the top shaft, but in fact the top shaft stands still, and the gear digs into very slow threads on the shaft to pull the main mechanism sideways for the next letter.
Does the action look familiar? We’ll let the Typograph christen its grandchild:
DYMO! The Dymo tapewriter worked exactly the same way. Turn the wheel to select a pair of male/female dies, then pull the trigger to move the tape and clamp the dies and emboss the tape.
I used the Dymo at work for a while in the 70s. I remember that the sequence of the dial became familiar so I would look to set the first letter, then find the rest by counting clicks. Blind folks tend to be good at sequencing, so they would have done the same thing more easily with the Hughes. Feel the first letter by hand, then count.
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See also:
Polistra's Mill 