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possible under current art which had been impossible in 1970; 1 wanted to get busy and design a few
dozen.
For example I had expected that there would be automatic secretaries in use-I mean a machine you
could dictate to and get back a business letter, spelling, punctuation, and format all perfect, without a
human being in the sequence. But there weren't any. Oh, somebody had invented a machine which could
type, but it was suited only to a phonetic language like Esperanto and was useless in a language in which
you could say: "Though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through."
People won't give up the illogicalities of English to suit the convenience of an inventor. Mohammed
must go to the mountain.
If a high-school girl could sort out the cockeyed spelling of English and usually type the right word,
how could a machine be taught to do it?
"Impossible" was the usual answer. It was supposed to require human judgment and understanding.
But an invention is something that was "impossible" up to then-that's Why governments grant patents.
With memory tubes and the miniaturization now possible-I had been right about the importance of
gold as an engineering material-with those two things it would be easy to pack a hundred thousand sound
codes into a cubic foot. . . in other words, to soundkey every word in a Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.
But that was unnecessary; ten thousand would be ample. Who expects a stenographer to field a word
like "kourbash" or "pyrophylilte"? You spell such words for her if you must use them. Okay, we code the
machine to accept spelling when necessary. We sound-code for punctuation . . . and for various formats .
. . and to look up addresses in a file. . . and for how many copies~. . . and routing and provide at least a
thousand blank word-codings for special vocabulary used in a business or profession-and make it so that
the owner-client could put those special words in himself, spell a word like "stenobenthic" with the
memory key depressed and never have to spell it again.
All simple. Just a matter of hooking together gadgets already on the market, then smoothing it into a
production model.
The real hitch was homonyms. Dictation Dairy wouldn't even slow up over that "tough cough and
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hiccough" sentence because each of those words carries a different sound. But choices like "they're" and
"their," "right" and "write" would give her trouble.
Did the L. A. Public Library have a dictionary of English homonyms? It did...and I began counting
the unavoidable homonym pairs and trying to figure how many of these could be handled by information
theory through context statistics and how many would require special coding.
I began to get jittery with frustration. Not only was I wasting thirty hours a week on an utterly useless
job, but also I could not do real engineering in a public library. I needed a drafting room, a shop where I
could smooth out the bugs, trade catalogues, professional journals, calculating machines, and all the rest.
I decided that I would just have to get at least a subprofessional job. I wasn't silly enough to think
that I was an engineer again; there was too much art I had not yet soaked up-repeatedly I had thought of
ways to do something, using something new that I had learned, only to find out at the library that
somebody had solved the same problem, neater, better, and cheaper than my own first stab at it and ten
or fifteen years earlier.
I needed to get into an engineering office and let these new things soak in through my skin. I had
hopes that I could land a job as a junior draftsman.
I knew that they were using powered semi-automatic drafting machines now; I had seen pictures of
them even though I had not had one under my hands. But I had a hunch that I could learn to play one in
twenty minutes, given the chance, for they were remarkably like an idea I had once had myself: a machine
that bore the same relation to the old-fashioned drawing-board-and-Tsquare method that a typewriter
did to writing in longhand. I had worked it all out in my head, how you could put straight lines or curves
anywhere on an easel just by punching keys.
However, in this case I was just as sure that my idea had not been stolen as I was certain that
Flexible Frank had been stolen, because my drafting machine had never existed except in my head.
Somebody had had the same idea and had developed it logically the same way. When it's time to
railroad, people start railroading.
The Aladdin people, the same firm that made Eager Beaver, made one of the best drawing machines,
Drafting Dan. I dipped into my savings, bought a better suit of clothes and a secondhand brief case,
stuffed the latter with newspapers, and presented myself at the Aladdin salesrooms with a view to
"buying" one. I asked for a demonstration.
Then, when I got close to a model of Drafting Dan, I had a most upsetting experience. D j... vu, the
psychologists call it-"I have been here before." The damned thing had been developed in precisely the
fashion in which I would have developed it, had I had time to do so . . . instead of being kidnapped into
the Long Sleep.
Don't ask me exactly why I felt that way. A man knows his own style of work. An art critic will say
that a painting is a Rubens or a Rembrandt by the brushwork, the treatment of light, the composition, the
choice of pigment, a dozen things. Engineering is not science, it is an art, and there is always a wide range
of choices in how to solve engineering problems. An engineering designer "signs" his work by those
choices just as surely as a painter does.
Drafting Dan had the flavor of my own technique so strongly that I was quite disturbed by it. I began
to wonder if there wasn't something to telepathy after all.
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I was careful to get the number of its first patent. In the state I was in I wasn't surprised to see that
the date on the first one was 1970. I resolved to find out who had invented it. It might have been one of
my own teachers, from whom I had picked up some of my style. Or it might be an engineer with whom I [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]