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A stenotype or shorthand machine is a specialized chorded keyboard or typewriter used by stenographers for shorthand use. A trained court reporter or closed captioner must write speeds of approximately 225 words per minute at very high accuracy in order to pass the Registered Professional Reporter test[1][2]. Many users of this machine can even reach 300 words per minute and per the website of the California Offical Court Reporters Association the official record for American English is 375 wpm. The keyboard looks more like a compact piano than a regular alphanumeric keyboard. Multiple keys are pressed simultaneously (known as "chording") to spell out whole syllables, words, and phrases with a single hand motion. This system makes realtime transcription practical for court reporting and live closed captioning. Because the keyboard does not contain all the letters of the English alphabet, letter combinations are substituted for the missing letters. There are several "schools" of thought on how to record various sounds, known as "theories", e.g., the StenEd and Phoenix theories. The first shorthand machine (not then called "stenotype") on a punched paper strip was built in 1830 by Karl Drais. An American shorthand machine was patented in 1879 by Miles M. Bartholomew. A French version was created by Marc Grandjean in 1909. The direct ancestor of today's stenotype was created by Ward Stone Ireland in about 1913 or so, and the word "stenotype" was applied to his machine and its descendants sometime thereafter. Most modern stenotype keyboards have more in common with computers than they do with typewriters or QWERTY computer keyboards. Most contain microprocessors, and many allow sensitivity adjustments for each individual key. They translate stenotype to English internally using user-specific dictionaries, and most have LCD screens. They typically store a full day's work in non-volatile memory of some type, such as floppy diskette, hard drive, non-volatile RAM, or flash card. These factors influence the price, along with economies of scale, as there are only a few thousand stenotype keyboards sold each year. As of April 2008, student models such as a Stentura 400SRT sell for about US $1,500 and top-end models sell for approximately US$ 5,000. Machines that are 30-40 years old still resell for upwards of $350.
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