THE WRITING MACHINE.

Evening Star, Issue 4081, 25 March 1876, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE WRITING MACHINE.

The American papers describe and announce for sale an ingenious but apparently somewhat complicated substitute for that much abused instrument —the pen. It does all in the way of writing that the pen can do, and does it more quickly and more legibly. It is as superior, indeed, for executive purposes to the pen as is a field-gun of the latest pattern to the “ harmless, necessary sword” with which the pen is so often contrasted. It costs, according to the advertisement, no more than a sewing machine —which, however, since sewing machines are of various prices, gives but a vague idea as to its selling value. Its action is compared to that of the piano, and a writer who has once learned the use of the new apparatus may, with moderate dexterity, throw off from it his thirty or forty words a minute, while a literary Liszt or Leopold de Meyer can turn out as many as sixty. At this latter rate a brilliant performer on the writing machine would produce sufficient matter to occupy a column of the newspaper in twenty minutes, and might, with patience and perseverance, furnish enough (as regards the mere question of space) to fill the entire number in a very few hours. Writing is thus made at least as rapid a process as speaking; and writers who have something to say, and are prepared to say it without hesitation, will be able by employing machinery to lighten their labors very materially. Printers, too, will profit by the new invention if it should ever be generally adopted. The writing machine gives forth not the familiar scrawl which the French call pattes de mouche, but printed characters as unmistakeable, right or wrong, as notes from a keyed instrument. The rapid performer whose phrasing is imperfect, or who makes faults of a more rudimentary kind, has his errors recorded against him—a fate which the overimpulsive but not sufficiently correct pianist escapes. There is at first sight something very astonishing in the idea of a writing machine doing its work in printed characters. But all our foreign telegrams arrive printed; and if a correspondent at Paris can telegraph to London several columns of printed matter, it is easy to imagine some similar, but more simple, apparatus with which a writer working in his own room might attain like results. At present more than one of the morning papers have their correspondents’ letters written in Paris and delivered printed, word for word as the telegraph has transmitted it, in London. The new writing apparatus does the printing without the telegraphing.-—* Pall Mall Gazette.’