Machine reading, machine indexing, machine curation, machine writing: computers have accustomed us to all possible eventualities. I have joked before the imminent arrival of the book we don’t need to fuss over: written by machine and read by machine. Seems the only blemish in this picture is the time-line. Atlas Obscura brings us an account of this 1845 machine which would compose (single lines of) Latin hexameters.

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It all looks a bit like a bicycle rack. Rather amazing that it worked.

In indexing this post I find I did one under the same title last year. It was about a different machine though.