Double significance

Today is Braille Day and also Dimpled Chad Day.

Braille is interesting since I’m in the middle of adapting courseware for blind students. After I finish the required but dubious verbal descriptions, I’ll run up a far more useful braille version, making the images directly tactile. There is a (somewhat) standard coding method to feed braille printers.

Dimpled chads are interesting since the Bush dynasty is mounting yet another genocidal invasion of a country that didn’t attack us.

The two official Days are linked in an obvious way: the dimpled chad that “justified” the “election” of Bush in 2000 was a tactile symbol.

= = = = =

Here’s my earlier salute to braille itself, written in March 2020 as Bush’s greatest genocidal achievement was starting. We couldn’t yet foresee the three-year world torture chamber that Bush planned and Trump implemented.

= = = = = START 2020 REPRINT:

I’ll finish the series of Early Typewriters with a braille machine. This one isn’t especially interesting or unique by the standards of the time.

The most interesting aspect of braille machines is that they CAME BEFORE regular typewriters. Inventors working for the blind, including some blind inventors, were ahead of the curve.

Among those blind inventors, the story of Lizzie Sthreshley is especially astonishing. Read her 1889 patent. Just imagine, if only the feminist movement and ADA had been around back then, she could have invented and sold a complex machine. Oops, she did invent and sell a complex machine LONG BEFORE the feminist movement and ADA, and made a nice pile of money. Are there any female blind inventors AFTER feminism and ADA? I doubt it. We keep setting up new “cures” for problems, and our new “cures” always make the problems worse. Hint, hint, SHUTDOWNS, hint, hint.

[2026 note: I didn’t know at that time that three years of strangulation would follow the shutdowns.]

After regular typewriters were practical, blind folks led the way again by developing the touch system of fingering. Sighted typists caught on and started using it instead of hunt and peck.

The machine I’ve “drawn” is based on the 1897 Swindler patent. Like the first Hammond, it stores a roll of paper inside the carriage. The six puncher keys directly drive punching rods through the paper into a ‘die’ mounted on the gooseneck above the carriage.

This machine came after Remington had turned the piano keys into circular keys. For brailling the piano style is better because there’s only one row and each finger remains on its own key. Modern braillers are essentially the same as this machine, except that they reverted to the piano style.

I won’t bother to animate this one, since the function is obvious.