Meanwhile the Chinese and Japanese buy typewriters--thousands of them; not to write their own languages, of course, but other languages, usually English. And they are coming to use these machines, not alone for foreign correspondence, but for business correspondence among themselves. The time saving service of the typewriter is so great that they find it "worth another language." And this brings us to what many will regard as the most interesting of all the achievements of the typewriter. The steady growth of English as the commercial language of the Far East is a well known fact, and of all the influences that have caused this growth, one of the most important is the writing machine. Thus it may be said for the typewriter that it has not only facilitated the use of language but it has been no mean influence in determining the spread of language itself. What is to be the future of this remarkable mechanism, which in fifty years has transformed the whole world of business, and has wrought such fundamental changes in our modern social order? As we pass the fiftieth milestone of typewriter history, it is natural, not only to review the past, but to think of all that time may hold in store. That the future of the typewriter will be wonderful, more wonderful than anything we have yet known, is certain, but what new forms it may assume is for no man to say, for the futility of such speculations has been demonstrated by all human experience. On the mechanical side such forecasts are obviously impossible. The most farseeing typewriter man of today knows that the mechanical progress of the next fifty years is a sealed book to him--even as the history we have just recorded was a sealed book to the pioneers of 1873. Even on the side of its application to human needs, it is hard to forecast the future progress of a machine, the use of which is already so nearly universal. We know, however, that this fact does not impose any limits on future development. Even if the reign of the typewriter today were complete and absolute, and the pen had become as obsolete as the stylus, there would still be new worlds for the writing machine to conquer. The need which first called the typewriter into being, the problem of clerical time and labor saving, is always with us; it changes its form, but never its essence. The enormous time-saving the machine has already achieved is only the promise of more time-saving, and when every writing task has been annexed by the typewriter, it will be more than ever its mission to perform these tasks with ever increasing efficiency, increasing accuracy, and increasing speed.