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"In science fiction one can say a great many things that are unpalatable, … because it's expressed as science fiction you can slip it past their defenses."
- Frederik Pohl
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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
Sound-Transposing Machine-related
news articles:
- K-NFB Portable Text To Speech
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| Holobox? Who Doesn't Want A Home Hologram? |
| EBS-260 Handjet Free Hand Dot Matrix Printer |
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'The operation that had transformed half his body... had located the control switchboard in his teeth.'
'Bill blinked at his own face under the plumed helmet...'
'...a robot detector circuit closed, activating a bell."
'Alex did not find it surprising that people... were electronically minting their own cash.'
'I had determined that my first attempt should be a visit to Mars.'
