https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/typewri...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/typewri...
> He (Martin Tytell) spent much of his time assigned to the Army’s Morale Services Division, at 165 Broadway, which dealt in information and propaganda. There he received his hardest job of the war—a rush request to convert typewriters to twenty-one different languages of Asia and the South Pacific. Many of the languages he had never heard of before…. Morale Services found native speakers and scholars to help with the languages. Martin obtained the type and did the soldering and the keyboards. The implications of the work and its difficulty brought him to near collapse, but he completed it with only one mistake: on the Burmese typewriter he put a letter on upside down. Years later, after he had discovered his error, he told the language professor he had worked with that he would fix that letter on the professor’s Burmese typewriter. The professor said not to bother; in the intervening years, as a result of typewriters copied from Martin’s original, that upside-down letter had been accepted in Burma as proper typewriter style.
If I don't return before the reply window closes for this thread, check Wikipedia for those who encounter this thread in the future.
Regardless, thanks for the post, I really enjoyed a peak into Pearl and Martin’s work, and yours.
Glad you like the stuff; always up for people having the specific link.