This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. More than 60 years before Kindles, Nooks, iPads and other electronic devices revolutionized reading, there was a gadget 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 corporation 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 box about the size of a textbook with an intricate interior, allowed a user to read words in any language and on any topic, and was intended to lighten a student’s book load. Today it is seen by many as an analog ancestor of the e-reader.

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Persons: Ángela Ruiz Robles Organizations: Enciclopedia, Apple Locations: Times, Spain