Biography of richard carlisle vending machine

In 1819 the English publisher, bookseller, and radical Richard Carlisle was sentenced to three years in prison for blasphemy and seditious libel. Carlisle's imprisonment was partly due to his publication of pamphlets exposing what's now known as the Peterloo Massacre, in which a cavalry brigade attacked tens of thousands of protesters who had gathered to call for reforms to Parliament, and partly because he published the banned works of enlightenment figures such as Thomas Paine.

In his quirky book, "Vending Machines: Coined Consumerism" (Mark Batty), Christopher D.

Salyers notes that upon his release from prison, Carlisle thought he could skirt laws banning controversial books by constructing a machine that "dropped a customer's desired book after money was inserted and a dial positioned to a corresponding number." Carlisle was rearrested anyway, but the liberating potential he saw in the anonymity of automated vending has certainly been validated.

For nearly a century before