Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1909-08-15


crossed the room and shut the door; "but
didn't stop it-vesterdav | took advantage
OF it. We don't have to stop it. The other side
will attend to that after few more days like
this. Still, if you re in a hurry He drew
some sheets of paper from his pocket, and.
lecting one of them. laid it before his partner.
Cast your cage eye over that
Loring picked up the creased and somewhat
soiled page of typewriter paper and studied it
with a puzzled expression. don't see any
bic of words-no they aren't words at all.
Just mess of typewriter letters, as If some
one had been striking the keys at random
And yet, said Carleton, his eyes dancing,
" that is Just the sort of random work that has
cost the firm more than a hundred thousand
dollars-until this morning, when we got some
of it back on Rubber"
is it a cipher. John2" asked Loring. 81
don't possess the key to it, if it is. .
Look at it closely, chief. It's letter. See,
Swll a.axpn rbbwe ahoel Bitton gill deep our
tpnorreo lmplas a.; yoi Jabe' Can you make
it out?"
No. Can your"
. 1t means. chief, that an enterprising firm Of
brokers has hired the room above mine, across
the shaft from Miss Marshall's, and has en-
ployed an expert typewriter operator to watch
your stenographer s fingers through a heldglass
she writes your letters. Miss Marshall uses
the touch system entirely. By constant prac-
UCe, IcNeT lOOkl1lS DIT Ills OWL IlldCHlllS, Dul
keeping his eyes fixed on the movements OF her
fingers, and following their motions with his
own on the keys of his typewriter, this keen
sighted young man was able to come somewhere
near the sense of the letters she was TRANSCRIPT
ing. OF course he could not be sure to strike
the exact key every time, but he often did,
and could generally hit one pretty near It, any
how. Then by studying the keyboard and
picking out the letters that would make sense.
he was able to arrive at pretty definite idea OF
what our orders were"
Hold on minute" interrupted Loring,
whats the principle of this touch system
How does it work."
"HY, the keyboard is conceived to be di-
w vided into eight parts one for each finger,
the thumbs being used for the space bar and
the keys in each Of these eight divisions. or
groups, are always struck by the same finger,
which, with practice, IS soon taught to select
the proper one. The eyes of the operator, ac
cordingly, need never be shifted from the copy
to the keyboard. In the of an operator
who follows the movements OF the fingers OF
another operator, even if he never touches the
same key, he IS bound, if he uses the same
fin ger to strike within the same division. Then,
if the result does not make words that he can
read, he has only to set down under each letter
all the other letters in that group and to select
such as do make words. The context will aid
him in selecting the words that were probably
used. and SO enable him to learn what the opera
tOI lie - lOHOWlIl9 HIS WTlttcI Ill TIE Ouly
stance of that sort of work that has come under
my observation, the operator very often struck
the right key which simplified the translating
Take that first word on the sheet you are
looking at, Swll,' for example. There is no
vowel f is next to w on the keyboard. Sub
stitute it. and you have sell "A, axpn comes
next. The comma is obviously out of place
and N IS alongside of it on the machine. Try
that. We now have 'Amaxpn.' Any school
boy could put and O in the next two
places and get Amazon Amazon ribbwe'
looks as if it might be ribbon but it isn't
It's rubber
You can work the whole thing out in the
same way, as the inqusitive young man on the
floor above undoubtedly did the sheets he
took away with him last night. He probably
thought the scrublady who cleaned up his Of
flee would not care to spend the time to work
out the puzzle. and so considerably left the
original copies on the floor for me to pick up,
with her innocent connlvance.
The apparently meaningless tumble of let
tiers would then read, Sell Amazon Rubber
short Bottom will drop out tomorrow. I'm
load al you have That is of the letters
Miss Marshall wrote for me yesterday. They
went into my pocket and not into the mail
however. That made it easy for me to construe
the copies: had pony Our astute friend
could not be certain that he right every
different part of the board from buy SO he
safe enough on that score. Miss Marshall
is good operator, but not very speedy one.
SO it was not SO difficult for him. He must have
had hard time guessing when it came to