| | Hansen Writing Ball Typewriter 142 years ago = Using your Sidekick to order in a restaurant today.Your Sidekick (or Blackberry or Treo) is so useful for jotting notes quickly, and sharing fast text communication with others. Let's go back to 1865 and see how some deaf people may have done it long ago.
The first manual typewriter in the world came about because of Deaf students at a residential school in Copenhagen in the late 1800s. According to Neatorama, "Rev. Rasmus Hansen (1835 - 1890) created this "writing ball", the
world’s first commercially produced typewriter, so his deaf students
can "speak with their fingers."
The most striking feature of the writing ball is the
semi-sphere on top of the machine, with 52 keys sticking out like a
giant pin cushion. At the lower end of each stem is a character, cast
in exactly the right angle to create a perfectly even print on the
central printing point under the ball. The escapement mechanism moved
the paper frame that held the paper one space until the end of the line
was reached. By pushing the button on the left in front of the ball all
the way down, the carriage was turned concentrically back to the
beginning of the line and moved one line to the left.
Read all about the Hansen Writing Ball and other amazing typewriters at the Virtual Typewriter Museum."
Manual typewriter.... Looks like a manual pager to me! 
How did people type on it? Here's how a guy from the Virtual Typewriter Museum did it:
  
Hansen claimed
that you could type 12 letters a second on his machine, compared to
only 4 letters per second in normal handwriting. How fast can you type
on your pager??
Hansen's Role in Deaf Education
Rasmus Hans Malling Johan Hansen (1835-1890) worked as a teacher and as
director of Det Kongelige Døvstummeinstitut i København (The Royal Institute for Deaf-Mutes in Copenhagen, Denmark). From what I have read, it seems that the school was a signing-based school, but a generation before the Milan Conference of 1880, Hansen was influenced by German educators to start adding oral methods. He also was among the first to group students according to their cognitive levels (i.e., average vs. developmentally delayed) and whether they were deaf, late deafened, or hard of hearing. This was a new idea, and up to that point all students were taught in one classroom with one methodology.
(Note that the International Rasmus Malling-Hansen Society web site says students were grouped by their "hearing and spiritual abilities," this is probably a mistranslation of Danish or German where the word for spirit is also used to refer to cognition. In German, Geisteswissenschaft looks like it means ghost/spirit science, but it really means cognitive science.) Hansen was also one of the first educators to recognize stages of development in children.
More about Hansen:
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| | Posted 7/2/2007 2:08 PM - 1099 Views - 2 eProps - 4 comments
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