Machines Cannot Directly Imitate Hands: A Task Must be “Coded.”
Only a few machines deal with writing or its duplication, most machines perform quite other tasks at first wrought by the hands. Inventors have always gone astray when they have sought to imitate a hand process with anything like precision. On this point Sir John Fletcher Moulton, of London, says:—“Doubtless you have often had to send a message by telegraph to some distant country to which the rate charged per word is high. You write your message as tersely as may be, but even thus its length is formidable. You resort to your telegraphic code. It tells you that if you will change the phraseology of your message you can by a single code-word represent a whole phrase. You thereupon set to work to recast your message so as to make it capable of being expressed in code-words. When you have done so, you have not improved it as a message. It is less terse and less naturally expressed. If you were writing and not telegraphing, you would prefer to use it in its original form. But as now expressed, each of the phrases of which it is composed can be sent over the wires in the form and at the price of a single word, and the cost of the whole is but a fraction of what would have been the cost of the message as originally framed. It has been cast in a form suitable for cheap telegraphing. Just so with the inventor. He has to find a series of operations which, in their totality, are equivalent to the series of the hand worker. But each of these operations in itself need not be such as would in hand labor be suitable or even practicable.
“It is necessary and sufficient for him that they are suited to the new conditions, so that they can be well and easily done by mechanism, and that, taken as a whole, they produce the same result as the series which he is paralleling. He is re-writing the series in terms suited to mechanism just as the message was rewritten in terms suited for telegraphing. The meaning of the message must remain the same, but the terms used to express it are no longer those most naturally used in writing or speaking, but are those which can be telegraphed at least cost.