Eli5 how a stenographic machine works.
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It’s mechanically similar to a typewriter, but the problem is that A. a human can only type so quickly and B. the keys can only move so quickly and they all want to go to the same place.
So just using a regular typewriter would be like mashing the keyboard with your palms, all the keys would get stuck. In the case of a court room, the stenographer can’t just ask everyone to talk slower, they have to keep up SO
They invented a form of writing super quickly, called “stenographer shorthand”, it basically uses a system of symbols and shapes that can be written much more quickly than the alphabet and is based more on sounds, or chunks of sounds, than just each symbol being a letter, in short- there are fewer keys on a stenographer keyboard than a normal QWERTY keyboard.
So a stenographer can both type much faster, because there are fewer “letters” per word (each “letter” representing a chunk of sound) and the type writer can keep up because there are fewer keys moving around.
To a layperson the stenographer’s message would be unintelligible because it’s essentially written in code. You would need someone who can read the shorthand to translate the code into given language.
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