The Marvelous Voice Typewriter 



Talk to It and It Writes 



By Lloyd Darling 



CONCEIVE an ordinary machine 

 resemljling the machines in com- 

 mon office use — full of the cus- 

 tomary' cog-wheels and crooked levers 

 and variegated 

 springs. It 

 might be an 

 adding ma- 

 chine so far as 

 one can judge 

 by external 

 appearances or 

 a dictaphone 

 or a new- 

 fangled cash- 

 register. 



But 



Speak to it! 



It becomes 

 alive. It hears 

 you. It vibrates 

 with action. 

 Somewhere 

 inside, type- 

 writer bars go 

 ' 'clickety- 

 click-click." 

 At the top of 

 the machine 

 a sheet of paper 

 unwinds from 

 a roller. 



The machine has written down what 

 you have spoken! 



If you said "cat" it wrote down "cat". 

 If 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 that 

 same thing down. 



An odd feature about the machine is 

 that it spells words as they sound and 

 not according to some fat dictionary. 

 Indeed it would have to be a phonetic 

 speller. How else could it distinguish 

 "dough" and "tough?" But if you are 

 considerate, and mindful of its feelings 

 enough to spell out words correctly in 

 cases where it might be iikeh' to err, 



the machine will very obediently follow 

 you and make the resultant letter 

 strictly orthodox so far as spelling is con- 

 cerned. It faithfully tries to do its best. 



Does the 

 machine think, 

 as well as hear? 

 How else can 

 it perform all 

 these feats if 

 it doesn't 

 reason? 



Unfortunate- 

 \y, the machine 

 doesn't think, 

 howe\-er much 

 it may ai)pear 

 to approach 

 that desirable 

 attribute. One 

 reason is that 

 at present the 

 machine is 

 brainless. But, 

 even if it had 

 a brain, that 

 organ would be 

 of no use in 

 controlling 

 parts com- 

 pletely separa- 

 ted. Thus far 

 the imenlor of this contri\-ance, Mr. 

 John B. Flowers of Brooklyn, N.V.,has 

 succeeded only in getting the various 

 parts to operate, alone and by them- 

 selves — in itself no mean achievement. 

 The machine as we ha\'e depicted it is 

 the concejjlion toward which he is 

 working. It opens up a wide vista for 

 the imagination. Think what it means 

 for the office of the future to have an 

 almost human machine at hand to 

 perform the routine drudgery of type- 

 writing and letter-writing! 



Unlike most projected in\entions of 

 the kind this machine was not conceived 

 as an idle dream. It is based upon sound 

 technical reasoning and researches as 



The largest camera in the 

 world, used by Mr. Flowers 

 in experiments for record- 

 ing rapid sound vibrations 



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