A SYLLABIC TYPEWRITER

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue LXVIII, 13 July 1912, Page 10

A SYLLABIC TYPEWRITER

Ine craze for speed is not confined to travel, whether by land or sea. It infects everyday affairs. Take writing, lor instance. Handwriting gave place to tne typewriter, which prints, letters. i\o\v a Frenchman claims to have constructed a machine that will write '■'Hole syllables at a time. The problem involved m the production of a syllable machine has been under investigation Jor some time, and other machines, called syllabic, have been produced. These ivowever, merely have, besides the ordinary keyboard, a number of supplementary keys to print certain syllables frequently used. But the true syllabic typewriter would be something different -■''> u:::s, and a French journalist thinks iie has invented it. The working of the -.ac-i-amsm is too complicated to be ocsivibed fully here, but it may be said v-^ac the inventor considers every svli--Ax a-i n vowel preceded and followed 'V -x eercam number of consonants, the arrangement of these letters being regu■aterl by phonetic laws. ' He divides the letters into a number of grouns, and the result-is a. keyboard of 120 ke-- 3 , calculated to alarm the most selfpossessed typist. The principle of the machine seems to us so hard to folWr j that the difficulty of learning the keyboard would seem to be the greatest obstacle to the commercial success of the invention, but we are told that "a very short apprenticeship" suffices for efficiency. Three months' practice enables a young woman with no previous ex]>o; ip-i;-e of typewriting to exceed a speed of a hundred words a minute. To write a French word with an ordinary machine requires, on an- average, five movements, while with the syllabic keyboard it requires only one and a half. A typist capable of doing fifty words a minute on an ordinary machine could, with the same number of movements, write over 175 words a minute on the syllabic keyboard. The question will be whether the extra speed will be worth the extra cost, for judging by its appearance the new machine will be expensive.