Thursday, January 31, 2013

Spanish teacher invented Kindle-style tablet in 1949


While Blaise Pascal and Charles Babbage are associated with the invention of computer much before we came to know of this modern invention in the 1950s, there has been something of a Kindle style tablet that was invented by a school teacher in 1949.

Ángela Ruiz Robles holds the Mechanical Encyclopedia she developed in 1949

54 year Spanish Ángela Ruiz Robles is said to have  invented the 'Mechanical Encyclopedia' which looks much like an e-reader of today or something similar to the Kindle like tablet.

Forward-thinking Ángela Ruiz Robles who invented her Mechanical Encyclopedia in 1949 - more than half a century before the advent of Kindles, Kobos and Nooks - had her main goal to reduce the weight of books in students' school bags. She firmly believed the gadget would make reading more accessible to all.

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The device worked with pressurised air, allowing readers to add different spools containing the pre-loaded content. It may be well away from the current format of downloading books from the internet, but in a world without the web it was deemed revolutionary.

'By a movement of the same [the coils] it passes over all the topics, making it stop where you would like it to.' It also reportedly had a 'zoom' function where readers could focus in on a particular area of the text.

Read more about it at: Mail Online

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