A court reporter can capture speech at over 200 words per minute on a keyboard with barely twenty keys. The trick is that a stenotype does not spell. It chords. On a QWERTY board you type serially, one keystroke per letter, and your hands become the bottleneck. A stenotype breaks that limit by pressing several keys at once. Each simultaneous press, a stroke, encodes a whole syllable, word, or phrase in a single motion. The machine reads the chord only when every key lifts, so the order you hit the keys within a stroke never matters. Every key registers no matter how many are held down at once, a property gaming keyboards call full n-key rollover. The layout is built around sound, not spelling. Keys fall into three banks: - Left hand: initial consonants, in steno order STKPWHR - Thumbs: the vowels A O E U - Right hand: final consonants, FRPBLGTSDZ There is no key for every letter, so missing sounds are assembled. Press T and K together and you get D. P and W give B. T, P and H stack...