The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the 71st birthday of best-selling, major prize-winning Canadian author Margaret Atwood, (books by this author) born in Ottawa, Canada, on this day in 1939. She's written more than 35 books of poetry, nonfiction, children's stories, and novels. Her best-known works include the novels The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and Oryx and Crake (2003). She's been short-listed for the Booker Prize five times, and won the award in 2000 for The Blind Assassin (2000). Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages.

All of these successful books entailed grueling promotional book tours, and a few years ago she decided she'd had enough. She said: "As I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, getting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, 'There must be a better way of doing this.'"

And so she invented something that would allow her to sign books for people without being physically present. It's called the LongPen. She announced the invention in 2004, at the age of 66, and people thought it was a joke. But she got some technically-minded people to create it, and then she unveiled the device a year and a half later at the London Book Fair.

It works like this: There's a book promotional event at a local bookstore in, for example, Des Moines. Fans of Margaret Atwood show up at the Des Moines bookstore, where on a desk there's perched a sinewy metal robotic arm holding on to a regular old-fashioned ballpoint pen. The fan walks up to the desk and places his Atwood novel on the desk under the robot-controlled pen.

The bookstore is set up for live video chat with Margaret Atwood, who is at her home in Toronto. Atwood chats with the fan over the webcam. And then she writes an inscription and her signature into a touchpad, which is located there at her Toronto home. The touchpad is kind of like one of those devices used in signature-required package deliveries or at supermarket checkout lines. Her touchpad is connected to the Internet, which is remotely controlling the robotic arm holding the ballpoint pen in Des Moines. The pen scrawls out the message Atwood has just written in her touchpad into the fan's book on the desk in Des Moines, an exact reproduction of her handwriting.

Margaret Atwood's recent works include a volume of poetry, The Door (2007), and a nonfiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008). Her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood (2009), came out just last year. It begins:
"In the early morning Toby climbs up to the rooftop to watch the sunrise. She uses a mop handle for balance: the elevator stopped working some time ago and the back stairs are slick with damp, so if she slips and topples there won't be anyone to pick her up.

"As the first heat hits, mist rises from among the swath of trees between her and the derelict city. The air smells faintly of burning, a smell of caramel and tar and rancid barbecues, and the ashy but greasy smell of a garbage-dump fire after it’s been raining."

It's the birthday of playwright and humorist W.S. (William Schwenk) Gilbert, (books by this author) of Gilbert and Sullivan, born in London (1836). He was a writer of humorous verse when he met composer Arthur Sullivan in 1870, and they went on to write 14 comic operas in the 25-year period from 1871 to 1896, including H.M.S. Pinafore (1878) and The Pirates of Penzance (1879). W.S. Gilbert, who wrote, "Life's a pudding full of plums; / Care's a canker that benumbs, / Wherefore waste our elocution / On impossible solution? / Life's a pleasant institution, / Let us take it as it comes."

It's the birthday of the man who helped invent the art of photography, Louis Daguerre, born just outside of Paris, France (1789), who started out as a theater designer, using hand-painted translucent screens and elaborate lighting effects to create the illusion of a sunrise or a sudden storm onstage. But in 1829, he learned about a new technology that made it possible to use light to capture an image on a metal plate, though the quality of the image was poor. Daguerre set out to improve the process, and he came up with a combination of copper plate coated with silver salts that could be developed with the application of mercury vapor and table salt.

He first used this process to capture a series of images of Paris, including pictures of the Louvre and Notre Dame. The camera needed about 15 minutes exposure time to capture an image, so most of Daguerre's early pictures don't show any people. The one exception is a picture of a boulevard that shows a man in the foreground who has stopped to shine his shoes. He was the first human being ever caught on film. Daguerre announced his invention in 1839, and the images he produced became known as daguerreotypes.