While reading a book on the development and early history of the typewriter (Richard N. Current, "The Typewriter and the Men Who Made It"), I came across the following passage from 'Scientific American' magazine for July 6, 1867, as contained in an article in that magazine reporting on the description of a "Type Writing Machine":
"The subject of type writing is one of the interesting aspects of the near future. Its manifest feasibility and advantage indicate that the laborious and unsatisfactory performance of the pen must sooner or later become obsolete for general purposes. 'Printed copy' will become the rule, not the exception, for compositors, even on original papers like the 'Scientific American'. Legal copying and the writing and delivery of sermons and lectures, not to speak of letters and editorials, will undergo a revolution as remarkable as that effected in books by the invention of printing, and the weary process of learning penmanship in schools will be reduced to the acquirement of the art of writing one's own signature and playing on the literary piano above described, or rather on its improved successors."
Meanwhile, I continue daily to practice my Spencerian penmanship.
"The subject of type writing is one of the interesting aspects of the near future. Its manifest feasibility and advantage indicate that the laborious and unsatisfactory performance of the pen must sooner or later become obsolete for general purposes. 'Printed copy' will become the rule, not the exception, for compositors, even on original papers like the 'Scientific American'. Legal copying and the writing and delivery of sermons and lectures, not to speak of letters and editorials, will undergo a revolution as remarkable as that effected in books by the invention of printing, and the weary process of learning penmanship in schools will be reduced to the acquirement of the art of writing one's own signature and playing on the literary piano above described, or rather on its improved successors."
Meanwhile, I continue daily to practice my Spencerian penmanship.