William Sprague Burditt (1811 - 1833)

Refresh this page to see various historical events that occurred during William's lifetime.

In 1811, in the year that William Sprague Burditt was born, on July 9th, British explorer, surveyor, and fur trader David Thompson posted a notice at the junction of the Columbia River and the Snake River - in modern-day Washington- claiming the area for the United Kingdom and stating the intention of the North West Company to build a trading post there. The trading post was built several years later.

In 1820, he was merely 9 years old when on March 4th, Maine became the 23rd state in the United States as the result of the Missouri Compromise. The Missouri Compromise allowed Maine to neither recognize nor permit slavery within the state while allowing the Missouri Territory to recognize and allow slavery.

In 1829, by the time he was 18 years old, on July 23rd, in the United States, William Burt obtained the first patent for a kind of typewriter - an earlier one had been made in Italy in 1808. The typographer, as it was called, was a rectangular wooden box 12 inches wide, 12 inches high, and 18 inches long. It worked by depressing a rotating lever so that an inked letter made contact with the paper.

In 1833, in the year of William Sprague Burditt's passing, on August 12th, Chicago was incorporated as a town at the estuary of the Chicago River by 350 settlers. Chicago’s first permanent resident was a trader named Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a free black man -perhaps from Haiti - who went there in the late 1770s. At first, it was simply a trading post but it grew quickly, going from trading post to town to city in 1837.