The one thing that prevents an unlimited use of the telephone is the expensive wires and the still more expensive work of putting them underground or stringing them overhead. So the capping of the climax of the wonders of the telephone would be wireless telephony, each instrument being so attuned that the undulations would respond only to the corresponding instrument. This is one of the problems that inventors are even now working upon, and it may be that wireless telephones will be in actual operation not many years after this appears in print.
A MACHINE THAT THINKS
A Typesetting Machine That Makes Mathematical Calculations
For many years it was thought impossible to find a short cut from author's manuscript to printing press—that is, to substitute a machine for the skilled hands that set the type from which a book or magazine is printed. Inventors have worked at this problem, and a number have solved it in various ways. To one who has seen the slow work of hand typesetting as the compositor builds up a long column of metal piece by piece, letter by letter, picking up each character from its allotted space in the case and placing it in its proper order and position, and then realises that much of the printed matter he sees is so produced, the wonder is how the enormous amount of it is ever accomplished.
In a page of this size there are more than a thousand separate pieces of type, which, if set by hand, would have to be taken one by one and placed in the compositor's "stick"; then when the line is nearly set it would have to be spaced out, or "justified," to fill out the line exactly. Then when the compositor's "stick" is full, or two and a half inches have been set, the type has to be taken out and placed in a long channel, or "galley." Each of these three operations requires considerable time and close application, and with each change there is the possibility of error. It is a long, expensive process.
A perfect typesetting machine should take the place of the hand compositor, setting the type letter by letter automatically in proper order at a maximum speed and with a minimum chance of error.
These three steps of hand composition, slow, expensive, open to many chances of mistake, have been covered at one stride at five times the speed, at one-third the cost, and much more accurately by a machine invented by Mr. Tolbert Lanston.
The operator of the Lanston machine sits at a keyboard, much like a typewriter in appearance, containing every character in common use (225 in all), and at a speed limited only by his dexterity he plays on the keys exactly as a typewriter works his machine. This is the sum total of human effort expended. The machine does all the rest of the work; makes the calculations and delivers the product in clean, shining new type, each piece perfect, each in its place, each line of exactly the right length, and each space between the words mathematically equal—absolutely "justified." It is practically hand composition with the human possibility of error, of weariness, of inattention, of ignorance, eliminated, and all accomplished with a celerity that is astonishing.