Abraham Lincoln Filed a Patent for "Facebook' in 1845..?

EDIT: Bah, apparetly it is a hoax. I should have read the comments along with the original post.


Interesting title, no? Well it's not that far from the apparent truth actually. I came across this blog and it has a pretty cool personal story to share, including some rather interesting historical info on Abraham Lincoln. Here is a snippet of content for context:

Lincoln was requesting a patent for “The Gazette,” a system to “keep People aware of Others in the Town.” He laid out a plan where every town would have its own Gazette, named after the town itself. He listed the Springfield Gazette as his Visual Appendix, an example of the system he was talking about. Lincoln was proposing that each town build a centrally located collection of documents where “every Man may have his own page, where he might discuss his Family, his Work, and his Various Endeavors.”

He went on to propose that “each Man may decide if he shall make his page Available to the entire Town, or only to those with whom he has established Family or Friendship.” Evidently there was to be someone overseeing this collection of documents, and he would somehow know which pages anyone could look at, and which ones only certain people could see (it wasn’t quite clear in the application). Lincoln stated that these documents could be updated “at any time deemed Fit or Necessary,” so that anyone in town could know what was going on in their friends’ lives “without being Present in Body.”

The full blog write-up can be read HERE

I find it simply amazing that Lincoln had such visionary insight of the nature of people.

A man ahead of his time. And an Aquarian, of course! Now if he was left handed also, we might be related!

Very interesting find, by the way.

So HOAX already. Disregard above comments.

Originally posted by SunnyDee
A man ahead of his time. And an Aquarian, of course! Now if he was left handed also, we might be related!

Very interesting find, by the way.

So HOAX already. Disregard above comments.

edit on 8-5-2012 by SunnyDee because: (no reason given)

Sorry man, I just was so excited to post it up, I did not give it its just once over...

And then Lincoln said:

"In my appendix of faces that I have invented for the town hall, I wish that others may poke each other by leaving a rosie thorn on the pictures of others"

"And I shall call my appendix of faces, the face news paper... or facepaper to start. I do believe one day we will have so many faces that we ought create a book out of it."

Because clearly Yankees back 150 years ago were speaking and spelling in Shakespearean dialect. I don't mean anything bad towards the op, but towards the person who created the hoax in the first place. That kind of English was 200 years old and outdated outdated 150 years ago.

Originally posted by Mkoll
Because clearly Yankees back 150 years ago were speaking and spelling in Shakespearean dialect. I don't mean anything bad towards the op, but towards the person who created the hoax in the first place. That kind of English was 200 years old and outdated outdated 150 years ago.

edit on 8-5-2012 by Mkoll because: (no reason given)

Doth thou mock Abraham Linkedin?