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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
 |
| Vibrowriter | ||
| A device that translated speech and typed it out for you. |
This is a very early use of the idea of a machine transcriptionist. Note that good pronunciation was required.
| There was a man there, Henry Jordan, who had gained international renown by his work with vibrations. He was the inventor of the vibrowriter, the new typewriter that could be talked to, and which transposed the spoken sound into typed words, a contrivance which made perfect spelling possible, provided the words were perfectly pronounced. |
| From The Lost Language,
by David H. Keller. Published by Teck Publications in 1934 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the telescribe from A Question of Salvage (1939) by Malcom Jameson, the speakwrite from 1984 (1948) by George Orwell, the transcriber from Second Foundation (1953) by Isaac Asimov and the electrosecretary from A Fall of Moondust (1961) by Arthur C. Clarke.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Lost Language
More Ideas
and Technology by David H. Keller
Tech news articles related to The Lost Language
Tech news articles related to works by David H. Keller
Vibrowriter-related
news articles:
- NTT Real-Time Voice Transcriber
| Mouth Haptics Invented By Frederik Pohl In 1965, CMU Now Has Prototype |
| True Crime Live Podcasting In Fiction |
| Zoom Adds Real-Time, Live Translation |
| Will The Super Bowl Go To Pay Per View? |
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Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
1900-1939
1940's 1950's
1960's 1970's
1980's 1990's
2000's 2010's
'... iron tubes... the ends of the tubes were joined to each other...to preserve it from the action of the seawater.'
'Mr. Garden, you are in no condition to drive....'
'A cable, here, from the controller to the interface plug... wires from that to the brain.'
'The slender stalks of a sunshade-photocell collector...'
'Holodeck 4 was waiting to be programmed...'
'... he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'I stood in line for half an hour for this, and it's just a blob!'
