Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 36, Number 140, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 December 1904 — The Latest Mechanical Wonder. [ARTICLE]

The Latest Mechanical Wonder.

Tho mechanical stenographer Is now promised. This is to be a machine which will take the sounds of the human voice and translate them into typewritten words. It is a promise of almost a miracle, but it may be dangerous to doubt its fulfillment. Many things that seemed quite as impossible have been brought about—among them the power to talk through wire over long distances and the ability to record the sound of the human voice and reproduce it accurately at will. Should the mechanical stenographer come, it would work great changes. It would make letter-writ-ing ns easy as speech. It w’ould rob play-writing for such master hands as Clyde Fitch of its last bugbear. The playwright then might rise up in the morning, talk a couple of hours to his machine and by ten o’clock have the type-written play in the hands of the manager. Our lightning novelists. too, could do wonders. Cyrus Townsend Brady could then write books as fast as any publishing house could produce them, and the entrnneed reader would have to retire from business to keep up. With such a machine, no thought In all the world need be lost. To ■peak It would be to record It and preserve It In pristine purity for coming generations. But what a tremendous reading Job those coming generations would have! —Columbus Dispatch.