Slashdot Mirror
The iPad's Progenitor — 123 Years Ago
scurtis writes "All technology evolves from cruder predecessors, and tablets are no different. People have been playing with some of the technologies underlying tablet PCs for over a century: In July 1888, for example, inventor Elisha Gray received a US patent for an electrical stylus device that captured handwriting. According to his original application, this 'telautograph' leveraged telegraph technology to send a handwritten message between a sending and receiving station."
Except the fax was invented even earlier, 1843 by Scottish physicist Alexander Bain. It had a light-sensitive element on pendulum for sending on telegraph line, and printer for receiving.
Am I the only one annoyed that it's obvious from the summary that this device is nothing even remotely like an iPad? How is this even news?
Till the Ark of the Covenant turns up that prior art can't be proven.
We have top people looking into it. Top people
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The iPad doesn't do anything with handwriting.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
Pretty sure "looking into it" is what got all those people's faces melted off.
Well, Telautograph (the company that made these) was bought out by OMNIFax (which later became part of Danka). I used to fix these machines. And they were in use at least to the mid 1990's. Hospitals used them to send prescriptions from the ER to the pharmacy. This allowed a doctor to write out a prescription and have it simultaneously written out in the pharmacy in their own handwriting. The machines were pure analog and were a pain to adjust and maintain. A pair of rheostats encoded the pen position and a switch sensed when it was pressed to the paper. The signal was encoded and sent to the receiver where a pair of servo solenoids replicated the movement of the pen.
And I'll be damned if this isn't the very device!