science · 14 September 1886 · 138 years ago
In 1886, the first U.S. patent for a typewriter ribbon was issued to George Kerr Anderson of Memphis, Tennessee (No. 349,026). His invention was to provide portions near the ends of a ribbon with a colour contrasting from that of the body of the ribbon. This was intended to notify the operator of the machine to manually change the direction of the ribbon feed. Although the typed result near the end of a ribbon would be in a different colour, it was not lost. Before, in uses such as stenographic work, if a ribbon stopped at the end of its reel, the result gave a rapidly fading imprint while there may still be a need to finish a line before stopping to reverse the ribbon.
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