Shorthand by Machinery.

Progress, Volume III, Issue 10, 1 August 1908, Page 356

Shorthand by Machinery.

11l yet another field of activity mere manual dexterity is threatened with dispossession by mechanical ingenuity. At last a machine has been devised for writing shorthand — a machine so simple that anyone can master it, and so efficient that even the highly-trained stenographer cannot hope to do more than rival it. The ' ' Stenotyper, ' ' as this wonderful contrivance is called, is in bulk and weight a mere fraction of the standard typewriter and can readily be worked on the operator 's knees. It has just six keys, and by permutations and combinations of these six keys, taken two 01 three together, a complete alphabet is built up — an alphabet of dot and dash, similar in kind to that of the Morse code. The learner has simply to commit this alphabet to memory, and the machine will do the rest. With less diligence than is often devoted to the acquisition of a mere par-lour-game, an ordinary person should be able to write " stenotypy " at quite a serviceable speed. This new shorthand is not based on phonetics. Its units are not single sounds, but syllables, many of which can be formed by one touch of the hand on the keyboard. As if playing the piano, the operator simply strikes a chord and imprints a character decipherable to the trained eye at a glance. Unessential vowels and consonants can be dropped out, for the grouping of the symbols indicates how they are to be read. Thus the second conspicuous advantage of the Stenotyper is attained — that the "note" which it wiites is legible, not only to the operator, but to any one else who has mastered the alphabet. There have been shorthand writers in the old way who could not always read their own notes; and few have been those who could read the notes of others, for the reason that the stenographer invariably ' ' adapts his system, until it becomes a mass of more or less arbitrary and corrupt outlines meaningless to any eye but his own. Wilful idiosyncracies and accidentally imperfect outlines can not be introduced into stenotypy. ' ' The note is necessarily correct in form and. therefore, legible to all stenotypists and at any distance of time. The third great advantage of the machine is that it can be used with equal facility for any language — provided that the operator knows that language. At a private demonstration the other day, the same stenotypist correctly reported unfamiliar or improvised passages dictated in English, French German, Latin, and Hebjrew. With pain and travail the ordinary phonography can be adapted to other tongues; but this machine is, so to speak, a natural polyglot. Even a debate on Macedonia or the Kia-chau railway would have, for the stenotypist, neither terror nor difficulty. The construction is of admirable simplicity. The keys print on paper that is self-feeding from an endless ioll. A spring-lever and a few cogwheels make up the essential working parts. There is none of the mechanical intricacy of the typewriter and, therefore, there is nothing to go wrong. The machine is so easily portable and works so silently that there is no reason why it should not be used in ordinary reporting work; but for commercial pur poses its usefulness is still greater; for the notes taken by one operator can be distributed for transcription among any number of clerks. After witnessing a demonstration of the Stenotyper 's capacity, no one who has learnt and practised shoitha'nd in the old way can help wishing that, for the comfort of his days he had been born a little later into the world. It is distressing to think of the time, now lost for ever, which might have been profitably devoted to the cultivation of ' ' Shakespeare and the musical glasses. ' '