Interesting! I'd be inclined to think that all of these uses are secondary, to an extent - the typist could have used at least one or more other characters in each case. The “$” is clever, but perhaps a happy accident...?
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Yeah, I wonder how much of this was planned for. Although here’s a new idea: what if there were no primary uses? What if this was just some sort of a universal weird unclaimed character you could mold to do your bidding?
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Replying to @mwichary @shadychars and
(I don’t buy it myself, since every key was so expensive...)
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Replying to @mwichary @shadychars and
BTW I don’t know what other character could be used for a paren – but then again tricolon was eventually replaced by $ or £ without any other changes, so maybe parents were not that useful.
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A dash?
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But dash exists as a dash already. :·) Or do you mean underscore?
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Sorry - I was thinking more about two hyojens/dashes as a parenthetical em-dash.
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Any thoughts on how to find more text written on this typewriter? Any kind of text? This is so hard. This is literally only the third example I found.
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Yes! jaems O. Clephane was a court reporter who offered his typewriter services even before it was officially on sale. I've wondered if the courthouse where he worked would have records on hand that he typed in 1872-3.
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Ooooh, that’s a good lead, too.
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