on.

The one thing that prevents an unlimited use of the telephone is the
expensive wires and the still more expensive work of putting them
underground or stringing them overhead. So the capping of the climax of
the wonders of the telephone would be wireless telephony, each
instrument being so attuned that the undulations would respond only to
the corresponding instrument. This is one of the problems that inventors
are even now working upon, and it may be that wireless telephones will
be in actual operation not many years after this appears in print.

A MACHINE THAT THINKS

A Typesetting Machine That Makes Mathematical Calculations

For many years it was thought impossible to find a short cut from
author's manuscript to printing press--that is, to substitute a machine
for the skilled hands that set the type from which a book or magazine is
printed. Inventors have worked at this problem, and a number have solved
it in various ways. To one who has seen the slow work of hand
typesetting as the compositor builds up a long column of metal piece by
piece, letter by letter, picking up each character from its allotted
space in the case and placing it in its proper order and position, and
then realises that much of the printed matter he sees is so produced,
the wonder is how the enormous amount of it is ever accomplished.

In a page of this size there are more than a thousand separate pieces of
type, which, if set by hand, would have to be taken one by one and
placed in the compositor's "stick"; then when the line is nearly set it
would have to be spaced out, or "justified," to fill out the line
exactly. Then when the compositor's "stick" is full, or two and a half
inches have been set, the type has to be taken out and placed in a long
channel, or "galley." Each of these three operations requires
considerable time and close application, and with each change there is
the possibility of error. It is a long, expensive process.

A perfect typesetting machine should take the place of the hand
compositor, setting the type letter by letter automatically in proper
order at a maximum speed and with a minimum chance of error.

These three steps of hand composition, slow, expensive, open to many
chances of mistake, have been covered at one stride at five times the
speed, at one-third the cost, and much more accurately by a machine
invented by Mr. Tolbert Lanston.

The operator of the Lanston machine sits at a keyboard, muc