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Jefferson’s Lister Oration “The Mind of Mechanical Man” (BMJ, 25 June 1949) says that if a machine typewrites its answers, it may be said to have learned to write when it would be doing no more than telegraphic systems already do. Copy claim link
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Supporting evidence: primary · 1 source
Date 1949-06-25 · publication Records dated 1949 → Claimed date 1949-06-09. Delivered on 9 June 1949 (footnote, p. 1105); the wording read is the published text. Role Earliest located Register (kind of text) Nonfiction Scope and limits The passage concerns a machine that answers in typewriting, which is the form of Turing’s imitation game (1950) but precedes it; Jefferson does not describe a test procedure. The same paragraph says a machine would have to find for itself words for its additions to knowledge. Turing’s paper of 1950, recorded on C1 as context, quotes this oration. Earliest located means the earliest text found by the collection’s searches and the searches for the antecedent texts, not a first statement.
The evidence 01 primary source Supports the claim
The Mind of Mechanical Man (BMJ, 25 June 1949), page scans ↗ British Medical Journal 1 (4616), pp. 1105–1110; page scans in PubMed Central (PMC2050428) · 1949-06-25
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Source excerpt “If the machine typewrites its answers, the cry may rise that it has learned to write, when in fact it would be doing no more than telegraphic systems do already.” Location in source p. 1110, left column, first paragraph (continued from p. 1109), sentence beginning “If the machine typewrites”
How it was read Retrieved directly from the publisher
Machine-checked · 2026-11-04
Source details and check notes Authors Geoffrey Jefferson Version Retrieved for the candidate pack on 2026-11-04 (SHA-256 c7740569465eb6b32b0d59294341d80f35d3fb731ea43a5bf691aa04c060cce3). PubMed Central scans of the journal pages; replaces the third-party facsimile as the evidence source (same wording). A third-party facsimile of the six pages (https://www.edoardolimone.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Geoffrey-Jefferson-Mind-of-Mechanical-Man.pdf, SHA-256 4e6ea632806197131de18f0bee5d407f7ddb4c4545a395030b13241e0703f1b8), read on 2026-11-03, has the same wording; its host’s permission is not established, so it is not a source. Canonical address Open the canonical source ↗ Accessed 2026-11-04 Language English (en) Attribution Geoffrey Jefferson, “The Mind of Mechanical Man (BMJ, 25 June 1949), page scans”, 1949-06-25. Reuse No open redistribution licence asserted. Bibliographic metadata, editorial paraphrases and short attributed quotations (at most 50 words each). Recheck terms before wider redistribution. Check notes Candidate pack passage, antecedent texts (research/prehistory). Read on the page image for the candidate pack; it could not be matched mechanically. Page image of p. 1110 (PMC scan brmedj03683-0008.png), read on 2026-11-04 and by a second check by a model of another family (C1), same SHA-256. The p. 1105 scan (brmedj03683-0003.png, SHA-256 d5ce80c5fd86f04a…) gives the issue date and the delivery date. The PMC PDF still answers a browser challenge. The third-party facsimile read on 2026-11-03 has the same wording. No human editorial review. Status and meaning Editorial status. Machine-checked . Machines found this record and checked it against its sources; no person accepted it individually. Each evidence record above shows how it was checked.
Relation. A passage of the document meets the proposition’s criterion. The record documents what the text states, in its register (fiction and satire are labelled); it is not evidence that the proposition is true and implies no influence on or from another text.
Date. Issue date in the BMJ masthead; the oration was delivered on 9 June 1949 (footnote, p. 1105).
Record ID pre-c1-jefferson-1949