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This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, were not reported in The Times.
More than sixty years before Kindles, Nooks, iPads and other electronic devices revolutionized reading, a gadget was invented in a village in Spain that had the potential to do the same.
The Enciclopedia Mecanica, or Mechanical Encyclopedia, as it was known, was not the brainchild of a multinational company like Apple or Amazon; it was invented in 1948 by Ángela Ruiz Robles, a widowed teacher who wanted to make learning easier for her students and her three daughters.
Her invention, a pale green textbook-sized box with an intricate interior, allowed a user to read words in any language and on any subject, and was intended to lighten a student’s book load. Nowadays it is seen by many as an analogue predecessor of the e-reader.
“What she invented has continued into the future,” her grandson Daniel Gonzalez de la Rivera said by telephone from his home in Madrid.
He added: “Every time I see one I think of my grandmother.”
Inside the covers of the Mechanical Encyclopedia were three horizontal reels of scrolls, each of which could be exchanged for another on a different subject. The scrolls could contain text, elaborate line drawings, or sketches of decorative figures, and the battery-powered encyclopedia included a small light bulb so users could read in the dark. Ruiz Robles created the device and its accompanying scrolls “to obtain maximum knowledge with minimum effort,” as she told the Pueblo newspaper. in 1958.
The machine, which Ruiz Robles called “a mechanical, electrical and air pressure procedure for reading books,” received Spanish patent 190,698 in 1949. A prototype received another patent, 276,346, when it was assembled at the Ferrol shipyard in 1962, under Robles’ supervision. work.
Decades later, in November 2007, Amazon introduced the Kindle, with a 6-inch electronic ink screen that allowed users to download and read some 88,000 books and magazines. The devices sold out within six hours. This year, wordsrated.com, a research organization focused on the publishing industry, reported that 15.92 million ebooks were produced every month.
However, during her time, Ruiz Robles could not muster much production support. Despite repeated attempts, she was unable to convince financiers to fund her creation, and it was never widely produced.
Today, the prototype of Ruiz Robles’ Mechanical Encyclopedia is on display at the National Museum of Science and Technology in A Coruña, Spain, a source of pride for her country and a testament to what could have been.
Ángela Ruiz Robles was born on March 28, 1895 in Villamanín, a small town in the province of León in northwestern Spain. Her father, Feliciano Ruiz, a wealthy pharmacist, and mother, Elena Robles, a homemaker, ensured that she received a first-class education. She graduated from a teacher training college in Leon and taught there until 1916.
In 1918, Ruiz Robles moved to Santa Eugenia de Mandia, a village in Galicia near the coast, where she worked as a teacher until 1928. She then moved to nearby Ferrol and founded the Academia Elmaca.
The school, located in her home and named after her three daughters, Elena, Elvira and Maria Carmen, offered classes during the day and served as a training ground for under-resourced students at night. She also developed effective teaching methods for students with disabilities, sometimes coming to their homes to provide additional assistance.
In 1934, Ruiz Robles became manager of the Escuela Nacional de Niñas del Hospicio, a national school for orphans in Ferrol, where she helped girls who would otherwise be disadvantaged to thrive in society.
She felt it was important to work for others.
“We come to this world not only to live our lives as comfortably as possible,” she told Pueblo in 1958, “but to worry about others so that they may benefit from something offered by us.”
Between 1938 and 1946, Ruiz Robles published 16 textbooks, including tutorials on spelling, grammar, syntax, shorthand, and phonetics. But in 1946 her husband, Andres Grandal, a merchant marine, died of a heart attack, leaving her to raise her three daughters alone.
Despite her significant domestic and teaching responsibilities, Ruiz Robles spent what free time she had devising a modern, interactive approach to education.
Gonzalez de la Rivera described his grandmother as driven, noting that she preferred the solitude of her office and tapping the keys of her typewriter to sitting in cafes or playing cards with friends.
“She never wasted time,” he said. ‘She didn’t look at the birds. She was always working.”
“Can a good inventor be a good housewife at the same time? Yes, yes, but it is necessary that the servants or the people around her do not force her into extensive conversations about ordinary things,” she told Pueblo. “Silence is essential because it facilitates the development of ideas that then promote the progress of the world.”
In 1947, Ruiz Robles received the Cross of Alphonso X the Wise for her innovations in education, research and social work. In 1952 she received a gold medal at an exhibition for Spanish inventors.
She spent the last years of her life in Madrid with her daughter Maria Carmen, and she never gave up on having her invention manufactured. Ruiz Robles had offers to produce it in the United States, but she shunned them and said her creation had to be made in Spain.
“I went with her to different organizations and lawyers to push her mechanical book,” Gonzalez de la Rivera said. “I explained how the product worked and how you could make the book less heavy. We made the rounds without success. But my grandmother was never frustrated. I don’t remember her saying to me, ‘What a shame’ or ‘What a disaster.’ She was never afraid.”
Ruiz Robles died on October 27, 1975. She was 80 years old.
In 2018, Madrid’s city council approved the naming of a street for her in that city.
“She was a lady with three daughters and no husband,” said Gonzalez de la Rivera, her grandson, adding, “It’s incredible what she did.”
This article will appear in a new book, “Overlooked,” a compilation of 66 obituaries to be published this fall.
