[John Lawson wrote]
> I believe that in actual fact, Burroughs, after a
few years of
> night-and-day work on his mechanical calculator design, including
> tossing one finished prototype out a second story window in
frustration,
> patented the *application* of a hydraulic damper
to the actuator crank.
[John Allain replied]
This is an interesting and worthy topic.
Just enter "William Seward Burroughs" into a search engine to
verify what John said. That's the name of both the calculator
inventor and the writer, but the writer seldom used his middle
name, making it a good search string.
I just did that and came up with this site
http://www.invent.org/book/book-text/17.html
which contradicts Mr. Lawson's "destructive jam" theory (no offense to John
L.) and supports the ideas I put forth in my previous post.
Glen -- William S. Burroughs fan since 1973
0/0