From time immemorial ( or at least since the commercial yield of the typewriter in 1873 ) , office procedure go like this : the boss dictate , the steno claim it down , and a typist translate the squiggles into character . In 1913 , Mr. John B. Flowers , “ a youthful electric applied scientist of Brooklyn ” did his honest to eliminate the jobber ( or , most potential , middlewomen ) with an early example of representative - trigger technology . snap through for a penny-pinching looking at Flowers ’s invention — and its limitations .
Flowers ’s gadget attempt to play the human capitulum and handwriting . As explained by Scientific American :
In his apparatus a telephony diaphragm takes the place of the human pinna swot up ; instead of the fibers , he employs a set of blade reeds , respectively tune up to the unlike overtone frequency of the first principle ; for brass he uses galvanizing electric current , and for the human hand [ on the typewriter keyboard ] a bank of solenoid .
There were “ serious limitations which must be considered ” with Flowers ’s voice - operated typewriter , chief among them its inability to distinguish between homophones like “ to , ” “ too , ” and “ two , ” and that Word like “ laughter ” would have to be label phonetically in order for the machine to spell them correctly . fortuitously , Flowers did “ not salute his invention as a stark solution of the problem of the voice - work typewriter , but merely as a gradation toward that end . . . ”
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