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"I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'Science Fiction' and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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| Sound-Transposing Machine | ||
| A device that scans a printed page and reads it out loud. |
In this fascinating story, a child is lost within his own world. However, he makes symbols. Does he have his own secret language? And how can you hear it?
A great scientist is put to the test.
| "I have done it," he said simply, "and you do not owe me a cent... In a month's time, tired people will be placing pages of a book in their machine and hear it read to them..."
Then an entire page of the lad's typing was run through the sound-transposing machine, purposely slowed so that the sounds could be differentiated. |
| Technovelgy from The Lost Language,
by David H. Keller. Published by Teck Publications in 1934 Additional resources -
|
Note the additional feature of being able to vary the speed at which the device reads the text.
Machine translation of foreign language was not theorized until the late 1940's, and was not tried until the late 1950's. As anyone who has ever used an OCR (optical character recognition) system in combination with a program that translates text into speech knows, we're still working on it.
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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
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news articles:
- K-NFB Portable Text To Speech
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Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
1900-1939
1940's 1950's
1960's 1970's
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'He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors...'
'The robant and the tiny old woman entered the control room slowly...'
'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?'
'It is as you thought when you constructed the time crystal, my master Vaylan.'
'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
