Here’s a trivia question for your next cocktail party or happy hour: who invented the e-reader? True, today’s iPads, Nooks, and Kindles are descendents of earlier devices, but few of us would look back further than perhaps the 1990s—arguably the 1980s if we were charitable. But what about 1940s-era Spain?Via The Daily Mail, historians believe that the world’s first e-book reader was in fact the brainchild of a 54-year-old Spanish teacher named Ángela Ruiz Robles who, in 1949, invented the Mechanical Encyclopedia originally intended to lighten the loads of schoolkids’ bookbags. It sounds like something out of a steampunk novel, but:

The device worked with pressurized air, allowing readers to add different spools containing the pre-loaded content. ... Ruiz, who was at the time was 54-years-old, applied for a patent. Her rather concise application said: "It has some coils where you place the books that you want to learn in whatever language. By a movement of the same [COILS]it passes over all the topics, making it stop where you would like it to."

It had a zoom feature, and Ruiz intended to further develop the device to add a light, sound, and a slot to add a calculator. Alas, she could not secure any funding for her invention, so it languished at the prototype stage. If you’re in Spain, the prototype of the Mechanical Encyclopedia can be seen at National Museum of Science and Technology in La Coruña.