This evening, the Rachel Maddow show starts now. Early for a change. I have something to spend this time doing. Exactly. Thanks, my friend, appreciate it. Thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. Very happy to have you here tonight. Who here is old enough to have ever used a typewriter . I took typing class and it was on a typewriter. Im that old. Typewriters started off with a mechanism that looked like this. You pressed a button on a keyboard for a specific letter, but then a little arm, a little bar would swing up from the guts of the keyboard and smack that letter into the inked typewriter ribbon, and thereby pressed the imprint of that letter on to the paper, right . So that was the mechanism. Each keystroke on the typewriter would cause a piece of metal to fling itself up toward the paper. A different little bar with a different letter on it for each keystroke. That was how they started out. But then in 1961, ibm changed all of that. Ibm invented a whole new kind of elect
But then in 1961, ibm changed all of that. Ibm invented a whole new kind of electric typewriter, where instead of each letter, each number, each character having its own little type bar that would swing up and on to the paper every time you hit a keyboard a stroke on the keyboard, instead, iselectric typewriters just have this little ball, like a key wee or a golf ball. They called it the font element, and you could change out that ball for a different ball if you wanted to have a different font to type with. And the innovation here was that with the selectric, instead of a distinct and different piece of individual piece of metal, flinging itself up at the paper for every letter that you typed, now it was just this one piece of metal. This little ball that would rotate and pivot to position the appropriate letter or number or character in line with the ribbon to make its mark on the page. It was a big engineering advance in terms of the way typewriters worked. And it definitely change
today. ford rowan has the details. the russian kgb agents operated out of an apartment building just across the street from the american embassy. they used a cable which ran from the listening post through a secret tunnel under the street into the embassy basement and up a ventilating shaft to the seventh floor. american personnel found surveillance equipment in the shaft, including a disc-shaped antenna-like device. during the search, the americans surprised a russian agent who fled from his listening post. so in 1969, nixon had agreed with the russians that they would get to build a new embassy here. and that we would get to build a new embassy there. and all through the 70s, we continued to discover the russians bugging our existing embassy in our kbloediplomatic facilities in russia, including them having a secret tunnel under the street into our embassy as late as 1978. but then in 1979, we started building our new embassy in moscow. and it s now clear in retrospect
always made public, but this one, discovered on may 25th, was disclosed by american officials today. ford rowan has the details. the russian kgb agents operated out of an apartment building just across the street from the american embassy. they used a cable which ran from the listening post through a secret tunnel under the street into the embassy basement and up a ventilating shaft to the seventh floor. american personnel found surveillance equipment in the shaft, including a disc-shaped antenna-like device. during the search, the americans surprised a russian agent who fled from his listening post. so in 1969, nixon had agreed with the russians that they would get to build a new embassy here. and that we would get to build a new embassy there. and all through the 70s, we continued to discover the russians bugging our existing embassy in our diplomatic facilities in russia, including them having a secret tunnel under the street into our embassy as late as 1978. but then in 1979,