COURT REPORTING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 November 1938, Page 6

COURT REPORTING

INTERESTING EXPERIMENT IN WELLINGTON RECORDING OF EVIDENCE. MACHINE ON DICTAPHONE PRINCIPLE. (By Telegraph—Press Association.) WELLINGTON, This Day. In the Supreme Court here today, in keeping with the ideas of the Minister for Justice, Mr H. G. R. Mason, on law reform and facilitation of litigation. use was made for the first time in the world in a court of justice of a special recording machine, based on the dictaphone principle. It is purely in the way of an experiment, evidence being taken in the usual way by the Judge’s associate at the same time. A non-directional microphone was suspended approximately equally distant from the Bench, the counsels’ tables and the jury seats, and another microphone stood near the Court Registrar. Wires led from the microphones to an upstairs room, where a machine, specially devised to preserve continuity of speech, was operated. The taking of evidence in shorthand has been used in England and some Australian States, but even that system, although involving less delay than the typewriter, has its limitations, and today’s experiment is designed to go a step funner and enable cases to be conducted with efficiency.