Claimed Telegraph Breakthrough: Sixty Thousand Words an Hour
We find the following paragraph going the rounds of the papers:— “WONDERS NEVER CEASE.—It is said that Mr. D. H. Craig has made such improvements in telegraphy that it will be practicable to transmit 60,000 words an hour over a single wire; a speed ten times greater than is now possible. The cost can then be reduced to about the ordinary rates of postage.” This would be a wonder indeed. Sixty thousand words an hour would be one thousand words a minute. But the most rapid speakers are able to utter only from two hundred to two hundred and fifty words per minute. So this new system of telegraphing, it seems, is able to transmit words four times as fast as they can possibly be uttered by human lips! It should at once take the place of the art of phonography which requires to be very skillfully handled to secure in full the words of the most rapid speakers.