Slate’s always enjoyable Explainer dissects Stenotype machines, those anachronistic typewriters used by official court reporters to record the proceedings. Who knew each stenographer had their own secret shorthand?
How does it work? Court stenographers can type entire words all at once by striking multiple keys at the same time. The left hand spells out the beginning of a syllable, while the right hand spells out the end; all keys are pressed at the same time, and the machine produces an alphabet soup that’s incomprehensible to anyone who’s not trained in machine shorthand.
