“A small printer for the peculiar alphabet invented to write in the dark by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Maybe you know Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Or maybe do you remember at least the white rabbit in Matrix movie: that was a reference to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Well… it turns out that Lewis Carroll was also a mathematician and inventor.
What did he invent? Nyctography, a card containing a grid of cells to guide the writing of notes in the dark, using a peculiar alphabet.
“Why not invent a square alphabet, using only dots at the corners, and lines along the sides?’ I soon found that, to make the writing easy to read, it was necessary to know where each square began. This I secured by the rule that every square-letter should contain a large black dot in the N.W. corner. … [I] succeeded in getting 23 of [the square letters] to have a distinct resemblance to the letters they were to represent.”
Nowadays, of course you can easily write in the dark with your phone or even use text to speech but I like (almost) useless machines and inventions that combine literature and technology - Rayuelomatic, The Klausner Machine, Haiku Reader and Jorge Luis Borges Animatronic -so I’ve decided to make the Nyctograph Machine, which is a small device, capable to translating from our alphabet to nyctography in order to print banners.”