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"There's no point in making a mistake unless you understand the mistake so that you don’t make it again."
- Alfred Bester
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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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| NYC/Dublin Portal Fails To Meet 'Guardian Of Forever' Standards |
| Holobox? Who Doesn't Want A Home Hologram? |
| EBS-260 Handjet Free Hand Dot Matrix Printer |
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'... the expressionless face before me was therefore that of the golem-wrestler, Rolem, a creature that could be set for five times the strength of a human being.'
'Waldo put his arms into the primary pair before him; all three pairs, including the secondary pair mounted before the machine, came to life.'
'... the glittering little rocket bolted to the black iron behind him.'
'The slender stalks of a sunshade-photocell collector...'
'The operation that had transformed half his body... had located the control switchboard in his teeth.'
