AN ITEM FOR PRESSMEN.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2547, 20 May 1881, Page 3

AN ITEM FOR PRESSMEN.

A trial at the Palais Bourbon of the shorthand machine invented by Signor Michaels, which is in use in both Houses of the Italian Parliament, has proved it equal to all that has been said of its advantages. It is (a portable instrument, like a small piano, with twenty keys, each of which on being struck produces a particular sign, and the combinations of these marks may be made to extend to 2,000,000! They are impressed on an endless tape of paper, like that used in telegraph machines. Eeach sign represents a sound —that is to say, the system is akin to Pitman’s—so that a speech in any language can be “ taken down ” by the operator, who in Paris was the inventor’s daughter. She registered a long speech on the Ous toms Tariff, read rapidly in the “Tribune” by M. Gambelta, which he had selected from the back reports of the chamber on account of the difficulties presented the technical nature of the terms used in it. The official shorthand writers who had come to vie with this new opponent had to admit, themselves defeated by it. Verbatim note-taking will become an extinct profession if Signor Michaela’s invention be really what it is said to be, or rather reporters will have to go about with a little hurdy-gurdy under their arm. The difficulty of mastering the two million signs sufficiently to read them for transcription must, however, be enormous, but of course that number is only the maximum, and the marks ordinarily used do not probably exceed those employed in other systems of shorthand.