Nyctograph

Maybe you know Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Or maybe do you remember at least the white rabbit in Matrix movie: that was a reference to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Well… it turns out that Lewis Carroll was also a mathematician and inventor.

What did he invent? Nyctography, a card containing a grid of cells to guide the writing of notes in the dark, using a peculiar alphabet.

“Why not invent a square alphabet, using only dots at the corners, and lines along the sides?’ I soon found that, to make the writing easy to read, it was necessary to know where each square began. This I secured by the rule that every square-letter should contain a large black dot in the N.W. corner. … [I] succeeded in getting 23 of [the square letters] to have a distinct resemblance to the letters they were to represent.”