The auction house website showed photo after photo of dusty vintage and antique typewriters. I didn’t raise a brow because I’d seen plenty of them – both dusty and clean – over the years.
When I arrived at the auction house, I found a few Royals and Coronets on a long table, but most were stamped with names I’d never heard of before. Mercedes, Erika, Protos and Regina (all German-made), American, Mercantile and Pittsburg Visible.
Interspersed among the old typewriters were smaller machines with oval-shaped keys and a short roller with paper that resembled cash-register tape. I’d never seen any of these at auction before and initially was not sure what they were.
Then one of them gave up their identity: Stenotype. These were stenotype machines, the kind you’d see on TV shows or in old movies (and sometimes in real-life), and seemingly being used always by a female court reporter. The table held about a half-dozen of the machines, and one, Bevitype, was in its original case.
As soon as I eyed the machines, one question popped into my head. How do these things work? Most didn’t have letters or numbers on the keys like a typewriter, so how did a court reporter know what to type? In the movies or TV, whenever the court reporter was asked to read back an answer, she recounted it word for word without hesitation. Me, I’d still be typing the first word of the answer.
Court reporters with their shorthand machines are used in most court proceedings, and also in closed captioning. I can relate to the shorthand; I took a course years ago because I thought it could help me with my note-taking as a reporter. It wasn’t easy, so I soon gave it up, and like most reporters, developed my own brand of shorthand.
The stenotype machine has fewer keys than the typewriter and they are not marked. Working it requires special skills, with the best court reporters accurately stenotyping 225 or more words a minute.
Here’s how one court reporter explained the process:
“In order to use the stenotype machine, multiple keys are pressed simultaneously like chords on a piano. These chords spell out whole syllables, phrases and words in a single hand motion. Court reporters type out entire words in one stroke by striking several keys all at once. The left hand spells out the first part of a syllable and the right hand finishes the word.”
Another story in Slate magazine gave an example (another Slate story recoiled at the high fees charged by stenographers for transcripts):
“Stenographers spell out syllables phonetically, but there aren’t enough keys on each side of the keyboard to cover every sound. Certain combinations of adjacent keys correspond to the missing consonants: For example, there’s no ‘M’ anywhere on the keyboard, so you have to press ‘‘P’ and ‘H’ together to start a syllable with that sound. There is a ‘B’ on the right side of the board, but none on the left – that means it’s easy to end a syllable with ‘B,’ but for words that begin with ‘B’ you need to hit ‘P’ and ‘W’ together.”
Court reporters also have special movements for common phrases, such as “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Here’s a video of how the machine works and one of a U.S. Senate stenographer walking as she types.
Some version of the stenotype machine was made in various countries as far back as the 1830s starting in Germany. The first one made in the United States was in 1877 by a court reporter named Miles Bartholomew. The machine had 10 keys that could only be pressed one at a time, making a series of dots and dashes similar to the Morse code.
Bartholomew’s machine was followed by others that looked similar. An 1889 machine called the Anderson Machine allowed keys to be pressed two at a time. Each stroke recorded a word or syllables in English. The Ireland Stenotype machine, made by Ward Stone Ireland, in 1911 set the standard for the shorthand machine as we know it today.
Court reporters, no doubt, have always been essential in court rooms. Here are a few tidbits about the more famous of them:
Charles Dickens was a stenographer in Parliament before becoming a writer. His work there became a subplot in his novel “David Copperfield.” Actor Harvey Keitel was once a court reporter, and actresses Michelle Pfeiffer and Kim Delaney studied for the trade. The court reporter in the O.J. Simpson case ended up with a transcript of 1 million lines of type. Ruth Handler, who with her husband Elliott founded Mattel and created the Barbie doll, was a stenographer at Paramount Pictures. Court reporters have recorded the trials of many famous people, including Michael Jackson, Jay Z, Elvis Presley, Jimmy Hoffa, Frank Sinatra, Muhammad Ali, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
As efficient as court reporters and their machines are, courts in many states have replaced them with digital recordings. Perhaps, I may be seeing more and more of the new machines discarded rather than collected.
