1867 | Communications, Media
Communications, Media
Journalist Nathaniel Parker Willis dies at Washington, D.C., January 20 on his 66th birthday.
The George P. Rowell Co. founded April 1 at New York by Vermont-born advertising-space salesman George Presbury Rowell, 28, is a pioneer advertising agency and gains immediate success. Rowell has gained a reputation for prompt payment to publishers, they are happy to give him the responsibility of collecting from advertisers, and although he will later campaign for "truth in advertising" his initial clients are for the most part promoters of lotteries and patent medicines, notably an expensive dry form of rhubarb and soda sold under the name Ripans Tabules (see 1869).
Pennsylvania-born Milwaukee printer Christopher L. (Latham) Sholes, 48, invents the first practical "writing machine" while seeking a way to inscribe braille-like characters for use by the blind (see Braille, 1834). Asked to test the machine's efficiency, court reporter Charles Weller types, "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party." Sholes will call his machine a "typewriter" (see 1868).
Philadelphia-born inventor Benjamin Chew Tilghman, 46, devises the sulfite process for producing wood pulp for papermaking (see 1870; Burgess, 1854).
The Minneapolis Tribune begins publication to serve a town of about 7,000 people, half the size of neighboring St. Paul. The town has no municipal water system, no fire department, no sewage system. The Tribune competes with the 9-year-old evening paper the Minneapolis Journal, William J. Murphy will acquire it in 1891, and his family will run it for more than 40 years.
Turin's La Stampa (The Press) has its beginnings in the Gazette Piedmontese (see 1895).
The Prussian government acquires the postal monopoly that has been controlled since 1505 by Thurn und Taxis family, which receives vast tracts of land in exchange.