A REMARKABLE MACHINE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXX, Issue 4812, 22 February 1936, Page 2

A REMARKABLE MACHINE

MICROSCOPIC WRITING. EXTRAORDINARY RESULTS. About the year 1847, a London banker, named Peters, conceived the idea of producing a machine which, by a system of levers, could reduce one’s handwriting to microscopic size. With such a machine, he thought, cheques and banknotes could be endorsed in a way that no forger could copy. The idea was not quite original (writes Rupert Gould, in the new magazine, Mine). Long before, the famous French watchmaker, A. L. Breguet, had used a similar “reducing pantagraph” to protect himself from the flood of forged watches bearing his name, but not made by his firm, produced by his unscrupulous competitors. He managed to defeat them by engraving a “secret signature” on the dials of his watches —with a watchmaker’s eyeglass you can just read the name “Breguet” engraved in tiny script characters a little below the XII. But Peters 1 plan was not equally successful. There are limits to the fineness of writing that can be produced with pen and ink; and Peters found that any writing turned out by the machine could, .if it were legible, be copied by hand —and that if he made it smaller still the letters ran together and formed a line of tiny blots. . Although this showed that the machine could never be of any commercial value, Peters was fascinated by the idea of producing writing so small that it could only be read with a high-powered microscope; and so he altered his machine to write, with a sharp diamond point, on a glass plate. On this plan there is practically no limit to the fineness of the writing that—if you have sufficient patience—you can produce and some of the results were most extraordinary. Astounding Feats. The machine still exists. Peters presented it to the Royal Microscopical Society, and about a year ago it allowed Mr. Gould to see specimens of its work. One was a microscope slide almost covered with gummed paper, in the centime of which a small opening, about one-thirtieth of an inch square, had been left. To the naked eye the aperture seemed to be clear glass and nothing more. With a watchmaker’s eyeglass you could just see a few faint lines running across it. Under a microscope

(magnifying 850 times) they became seven lines of .perfectly clear copperplate handwriting with the old-fash-ioned long “s” (it was written .in 1854). It was the full text of the Lord’s Prayer. On the same scale, the whole Bible —the whole 3,566,480 letters —could have been written in a space slightly less than one square inch.

This, however, is far from being the limit of what the Peters machine can do. The Lord’s Prayer has been written with it in the space of one three Hundred and fifty-six thousandth part of a square inch. On that scale the whole Bible could be written 22 times in one square inch.