The quaint wording of this description has a pleasant flavor of the old days. Moreover, as a description of the typewriter, it sounds promising, but unfortunately this is all we know of the invention of Henry Mill. He was an engineer of prominence in his day, but even engineers sometimes dream, and this perhaps was not much more. No model, drawing or description of the machine is known to exist, there is no record to show that they ever did exist, and the secret, if there was one, died with the inventor. But Henry Mill, unknown to himself, accomplished one thing. In a single sentence he wrote himself down in history as the first man who is known to have conceived the great idea. Throughout the remainder of the eighteenth century only one other attempt is recorded. This was a machine, said to have been invented in the year 1784, for embossing printed characters for the blind. Of this machine nothing is now known; nevertheless this early association of the typewriter with the blind is a point worth noting. We shall presently see how prominently the blind have figured in typewriter history; how much they have received from the writing machine and how much they have given in return. The first American patent on a typewriter was granted in 1829 to William Austin Burt of Detroit, afterwards better known as the inventor of the solar compass. The only model of this machine was destroyed by a fire at the Washington Patent Office in 1836. Many years later, however, the Patent Office, working from a parchment copy of the original patent and other papers in the possession of Burt's family, was able to produce a replica of this machine, which was exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Burt's typewriter, as revealed in this patent, carried the type, not on individual bars, but on the segment of a circle, which makes it the ancestor of the present-day, type-wheel machines. Although Burt's machine was never manufactured he at least succeeded in getting it talked about. A letter from a correspondent, published in the New York Commercial Advertiser of May, 1829, calls it "a simple, cheap and pretty machine for printing letters," and the editorial comment speaks highly of its possibilities, "should it be found to fully answer the description given of it." Both editor and correspondent confess themselves "stumped" in finding an appropriate name for the new invention, a point on which Burt had solicited advice. "Burt's Family Letter Press" was one of the bright ideas suggested. It seems that the honor of naming the "typewriter" was being reserved by destiny for the inventor of the first practical machine.