Popular science monthly . e machines in com-mon office use—full of the cus-tomary cog-wheels and crooked leversand variegatedsprings. Itmight be anadding ma-chine so far asone can judgeby externalappearances ora dictaphoneor a new-fangled cash-register. But Speak to it! It becomesalive. It hearsyou. It vibrateswith , type-writer bars go the top ofthe machinea sheet of paperunwinds froma roller. The machine has written down whatyou have spoken! If you said cat it wrote down you said Dear Sir: Your favor of recent date received and , as though
Popular science monthly . e machines in com-mon office use—full of the cus-tomary cog-wheels and crooked leversand variegatedsprings. Itmight be anadding ma-chine so far asone can judgeby externalappearances ora dictaphoneor a new-fangled cash-register. But Speak to it! It becomesalive. It hearsyou. It vibrateswith , type-writer bars go the top ofthe machinea sheet of paperunwinds froma roller. The machine has written down whatyou have spoken! If you said cat it wrote down you said Dear Sir: Your favor of recent date received and , as though you were starting out an ordinary,time-worn business letter, it wrote thatsame thing down. An odd feature about the machine isthat it spells words as they sound andnot according to some fat it would have to be a phoneticspeller. How else could it distinguishdough and tough? But if you areconsiderate, and mindful of its feelingsenough to spell out words correctly incases where it might be iikeh to err,. the machine will very obediently followyou and make the resultant letterstrictly orthodox so far as spelling is con-cerned. It faithfully tries to do its best. Does themachine think,as well as hear?How else canit perform allthese feats ifit doesntreason? Unfortunate-\y, the machinedoesnt think,howe\-er muchit may ai)pearto approachthat desirableattribute. Onereason is thatat present themachine isbrainless. But,even if it hada brain, thatorgan would beof no use incontrollingparts com-pletely separa-ted. Thus farthe imenlor of this contri\-ance, B. Flowers of Brooklyn, ,hassucceeded only in getting the variousparts to operate, alone and by them-selves—in itself no mean machine as we ha\e depicted it isthe concejjlion toward which he isworking. It opens up a wide vista forthe imagination. Think what it meansfor the office of the future to have analmost human machine at hand toperform the routine drudgery of type-writing and letter-w
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, booksubjectscience, bookyear1872
