To make the record, we now push a pencil or tap a typewriter.
Then comes the process of digestion and correction, followed
by an intricate process of typesetting, printing, and distribution.
To consider the first stage of the procedure, will the author of
the future cease writing by hand or typewriter and talk directly
to the record? He does so indirectly, by talking to a
stenographer or a wax cylinder; but the elements are all present
if he wishes to have his talk directly produce a typed record.
All he needs to do is to take advantage of existing mechanisms
and to alter his language.

At a recent World Fair a machine called a Voder was shown.
A girl stroked its keys and it emitted recognizable speech. No
human vocal chords entered into the procedure at any point;
the keys simply combined some electrically produced
vibrations and passed these on to a loud-speaker. In the Bell
Laboratories there is the converse of this machine, called a
Vocoder. The loudspeaker is replaced by a microphone, which
picks up sound. Speak to it, and the corresponding keys move.
This may be one element of the postulated system.

The other element is found in the stenotype, that somewhat
disconcerting device encountered usually at public meetings. A
girl strokes its keys languidly and looks about the room and
sometimes at the speaker with a disquieting gaze. From it
emerges a typed strip which records in a phonetically simplified
language a record of what the speaker is supposed to have
said. Later this strip is retyped into ordinary language, for in its
nascent form it is intelligible only to the initiated. Combine these
two elements, let the Vocoder run the stenotype, and the result
is a machine which types when talked to.

Our present languages are not especially adapted to this sort of
mechanization, it is true. It is strange that the inventors of
universal languages have not seized upon the idea of producing
one which better fitted the technique for transmitting and
recording speech. Mechanization may yet force the issue,
especially in the scientific field; whereupon scientific jargon
would become still less intelligible to the layman.

One can now picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His
hands are free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and
observes, he photographs and comments. Time is automatically
recorded to tie the two records together. If he goes into the
field, he may be connected by radio to his recorder. As he
ponders over his notes in the evening, he again talks his
comments into the record. His typed record, as well as his
photographs, may both be in miniature, so that he projects
them for examination.

Much needs to occur, however, between the collection of data
and observations, the extraction of parallel material from the
existing record, and the final insertion of new material into the
general body of the common record. For mature thought there
is no mechanical substitute. But creative thought and essentially
repetitive thought are very different things. For the latter there
are, and may be, powerful mechanical aids.

Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and
it was long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the
machine is sometimes controlled by a keyboard, and thought of
a sort enters in reading the figures and poking the
corresponding keys, but even this is avoidable. Machines have
been made which will read typed figures by photocells and then
depress the corresponding keys; these are combinations of
photocells for scanning the type, electric circuits for sorting the
consequent variations, and relay circuits for interpreting the
result into the action of solenoids to pull the keys down.

All this complication is needed because of the clumsy way in
which we have learned to write figures. If we recorded them
positionally, simply by the configuration of a set of dots on a
card, the automatic reading mechanism would become
comparatively simple. In fact if the dots are holes, we have the
punched-card machine long ago produced by Hollorith for the
purposes of the census, and now used throughout business.
Some types of complex businesses could hardly operate
without these machines.

Adding is only one operation. To perform arithmetical
computation involves also subtraction, multiplication, and
division, and in addition some method for temporary storage of
results, removal from storage for further manipulation, and
recording of final results by printing. Machines for these
purposes are now of two types: keyboard machines for
accounting and the like, manually controlled for the insertion of
data, and usually automatically controlled as far as the
sequence of operations is concerned; and punched-card
machines in which separate operations are usually delegated to
a series of machines, and the cards then transferred bodily from
one to another. Both forms are very useful; but as far as
complex computations are concerned, both are still in embryo.

Rapid electrical counting appeared soon after the physicists
found it desirable to count cosmic rays. For their own purposes
the physicists promptly constructed thermionic-tube equipment
capable of counting electrical impulses at the rate of 100,000 a
second. The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will
be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times
present speeds, or more.

Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present
commercial machines, so that they may readily be adapted for
a wide variety of operations. They will be controlled by a
control card or film, they will select their own data and
manipulate it in accordance with the instructions thus inserted,
they will perform complex arithmetical computations at
exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results in such
form as to be readily available for distribution or for later
further manipulation. Such machines will have enormous
appetites. One of them will take instructions and data from a
whole roomful of girls armed with simple key board punches,
and will deliver sheets of computed results every few minutes.
There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed
affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.

This article was originally published in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.