And weak beginnings lie intreasured.
Such things become the hatch and brood of time:
... Henry IV., Part II, iii, 1.
With my feet planted on the one thousand eight hundred and ninety-third step in that part of time’s imperishable edifice which has risen since the birth of Jesus, the Blessed Nazarene, and my head above the clouds of five decades which hover above it, I, Roger Brathwaite, read as upon a printed scroll the yet-unwritten records of the year 1943. These I have reduced to writing as an earnest of what may come when my system of verifying and completing history and of anticipating the future shall have been carried out as fully for five hundred years as for fifty years to come.
I see around me the millions of this year 1943 as people of the time in which I live—or rather find myself so transported mentally that the events of fifty years from 1893 onwards are as of the past. I see the households and the nations of 1943, and with them hold plain converse in the universal tongue of the Electric Age; for the language written, and to a great extent spoken all over the civilized world, is everywhere the same; having been prepared by a committee of philologists of all countries, and formally adopted at a congress held in Paris in 1915. It combines the soft liquid beauty of the Italian, the dignity of the Spanish, and the majesty of the Greek; the adaptability to new ideas of the German, the delicate shadings of the French, and the business-like exactness of the English. Its spelling is phonetic; and phonetic printing is as common as phonographic writing.
The written language has been greatly enriched by characters to represent signs which in the year 1900 could not be expressed in writing or in printing; as, for instance, whistling, clucking and kissing, barking, howling, groaning, laughter, etc. In fact, every sound which can be imitated by the human voice may be so recorded upon paper that it can be read and reproduced by any one (not dumb) who can read and write.
The theatre is the great preservative of the purity of spoken language, both in grammar and in pronunciation; each great actor being an arbiter elegantiarum in matters of speech. Censors hold all public speakers to a high standard of pronunciation and diction; and the study of grammar, while pursued by the more highly educated, has been largely done away with by reason of purity of speech being attained by force of example and criticism.
The use of the typewriting machine is universal, the machines printing phonetic characters exactly the same as those used in book and newspaper work, with variable spacing, and justifying perfectly. These machines are so arranged that they may be connected with the telegraphic system; so that a letter may be written in New York or in Paris by a person in Chicago and Melbourne; and all books of record are written in by machine only.
Writing is phonographic or phonetic, only; each word being composed of as many characters as there are sounds therein; no two sounds having the same character, and each sound having but one letter.
Printing has become one of the most noble of the fine arts. Photographs in half tones are printed by every daily, and printing in natural colors (for many years a common feature of the book trade), is beginning to be adopted by the more enterprising. The boundaries between lithographic and relief printing have been largely broken down by zincographic and other processes; the speed of impression more than quadrupled, while the sharpness of fine lines and the blackness of masses are as perfect as formerly in etching and line engraving. In these latter branches great progress has been made, both in speed of production of the plate and in the rapidity of printing therefrom.