Midsummer Night's Eve.
And yes, on June 23rd: the change to the Gregorian calendar shifted it four days - as with Guy Faux night (November 1st to 5th), and Michelmas (December 21st to 25th), so Midsummer Night moved from June 21st to 25th. But Midsummer Night (the "Night" is the give-away) was originally a lunar event, and so it began at evening on the 24th; and so the eve of the evening is the 23rd!)
Midsummer Night's Eve - "not long", according to the Swedish proverb, "but it sets the cradles rocking." For the same reason (see my notes to Devorah in "TheBibleNet" and you will see precisely what the reason is) it is also called St. John's Eve: St. John is the patron saint of beekeepers and this is the time of year when the hives are full, and honey is a-making. Surprisingly Shakespeare makes only limited use of this in the Dream, though he picks up the Mead Moon, which we now call the Honey Moon, and misapply, like all our pagan references.
I’ve used Courier here, but Courier New for the more important text on the left, which I think is as close as you can get. The machine looks nothing like the typewriters I used in the pre-digital age; more like the Morse Code machines my dad operated in the war.
definitely an improvement on the Gutenberg press
though you can also see that Sholes was looking for a way to mechanise the Gutenberg, where later typewriters got outside of that box, and sought a new methodology.
So the entire history of writing, from papyrus scrolls to digital blogs. Wouldn't it be fun if someone created a modern keyboard that allowed you to type in Ugaritic, the world's first alphabet, the one that sourced Phoenician, Greek, Hebrew, Roman and, yes, English? Wouldn't it be! Click here.
Slavery abolished in England, today in 1772 (see January 31 for a somewhat later United States equivalent)
Iceland celebrated the millennium of the Alting (written as Alþingi but pronounced Althing), today in 1930 - the world's oldest parliament, or so they claim. They only just beat the Tynwald on the Isle of Man, which started in 979, and were well ahead of the first English parliament, Simon de Montfort's in 1265. But what about the Basque parliament, or does a council of elders meeting under the sacred oak tree not count? And if it does, the Druids - or Derwidhs, to be pedantic - were meeting under their oak trees at least a thousand years even before that.
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