He also invented the first successful mechanical point writer and developed major functions of modern day typography with kerning and tracking.

[3] During the American Civil War Hall served in the Union Army's Twenty-Third Maine Volunteers, as a hospital steward at Edward's Ferry.

Two years later he moved his family from Maine to Earlville, Illinois so Hall could advance his career in school administration.

While working for the Sugar Grove public schools, Hall owned and ran a general store, a lumberyard, a creamery, and held the political offices of postmaster, township treasurer, and clerk.

In 1866 he moved to Illinois, where he served as principal and teacher at public schools in Earlville, Aurora, Sugar Grove, Petersburg, Jacksonville, Waukegan, and Milwaukee.

[6] Hall traveled to Milwaukee, Wisconsin originally to take up a position as an academic administrator but soon detoured to continue his research in Braille and commercial typewriters.

He was introduced to Christopher Latham Sholes by Carlos Glidden and along with Samuel W. Soule began construction of what would be contested as the first commercial type writer in the United States.

Hall stood by the begin and overall function of the typewriter while Sholes, Soule, and Carlos Glidden soon disowned the machine and refused to use, or even to recommend it.

From 1893 to 1897, during the governorship of Democrat John Peter Altgeld, Hall served as superintendent of the Waukegan schools.

Hall created an instrument that adapted its stripping capabilities to produce a stereotyper, a metal plate from which multiple copies could be made.

His adaptions created a new precedent for blind education and information technology, it quickly spread around the country and was established on a global scale soon after.

[8] He also co-founded the stereo typewriter which produced copies faster and cheaper, a derivative of the inventions by Rasmus Malling-Hansen, in 1893.

[17] At the Chicago World Fair, Hall was displaying his latest invention, the stereotyper, when Helen Keller famously approached him and publicly hugged and kissed him, drawing gasps from the crowd as such an occurrence was against social structure at the time.

In the book Devil in the White City, Erick Larson retells the emotional story of Hall meeting Helen Keller at the Chicago World Fair in 1893.

According to Larson, when Helen Keller learned that Hall was the inventor of the Braille typewriter she used, she hugged and kissed him.

"[2] His main research focused on specialized machines with differentiated keys, one for each dot in the Braille cell.

[22] Hall has written approximately twenty widely circulated textbooks and publications on mathematics, structuralism, and educationalist policy.