This week in 1809, Louis Braille was born in a small French town called Coupvray. He’s known for creating the braille reading and writing system for the visually impaired. Louis lost his eyesight at age 5. At age 10, he enrolled in one of the first schools for blind children. The school used the “Haüy

This week in 1768, Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell of Scotland published the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. It had just 3 volumes—quite a contrast to the thirty-two volumes of the fifteenth and final edition, published in 2010. Despite small beginnings, Britannica quickly gained a reputation for excellence and was soon considered the most authoritative English language encyclopedia.

On this day in 1822, Jean-Francois Champollion announced that he had deciphered the Rosetta Stone, twenty-three years after its discovery. The Rosetta Stone records a 196 BC decree from the reign of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes of Egypt, and it’s written in 3 different languages. That made it the key to translating ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs,

Says Yoda things like: “Powerful have you become; the dark side I sense in you.” Sounds it like speaks he English from the olden days — Shakespeare’s English, maybe. Yet uses not Yoda “thou hast” or “erstwhile” or “thee” — or any other term found no longer in English. Old English does not speak Yoda,