Death of a Braille Writer, the Brailler is Born: Why David Abraham's Perkins Brailler was innovative

In 1951, the Howe Press at Perkins School for the Blind released the Perkins Brailler, which became the dominant brailler globally. It was designed by David Abraham who directed the industrial arts program in the extensive basements underneath Howe Building. The English immigrant had an engineering and manufacturing background, even though he is most commonly described as a woodworking teacher. (I was briefly a woodworking teacher in a similar context, so you never know.) Sometimes people just end up doing a job that is needed at the moment. But, I digress. What makes the Perkins Brailler different from all the mechanical braille embossing machines that preceded it is that the whole embossing apparatus moves over the paper embossing as it goes, while all previous braille writers used a carriage (typewriter speak) to move the paper across a stationary embossing head. The Perkins Brailler eliminates the unifying feature of previous generations, the arched diebox, and provides a protected durable machine. Once you get inside it is pretty complicated and intricate. The feature that most puzzled me prior to opening it, was how the keys activated each dot, when the keys are stationary but the embossing apparatus is moving across the full width of the paper. The solution is very elegant. Each key is connected to a lever that rotates a rail that runs underneath the embossing head the entire width of the machine. As the rail is rotated it pushes up on the embossing apparatus raising the dot wherever it is. Pretty nifty. The other interesting mechanism that stood out was that the embossing apparatus is mounted on something similar to a bicycle chain with two equally sized cogs on either side. All of these features separate this device so much from a typewriter that I think it is fair to say that previous machines were Braille Writers, and David Abraham's machine was the first brailler. It is just a few steps further away from a typewriter than what had come before it. So much so that it is an entirely new breed of machine. That's my take for now. I'll make some more targeted videos on fixing the machine as I figure out what is causing the issues, besides the golden hairs of a guide dog.