Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Behind the Scenes Minis: Tamara and Isaac About this episode Holly and Tracy talk about the spiky parts of Tamara de Lempicka's life story. They also discuss how Isaac Pitman benefitted from his association with a bible publisher.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
0:04 Speaker 01 Snoring, gasping for air during sleep, daytime sleepiness? I'm Shaquille O'Neal, and this shouldn't be anybody's experience. Ask your doctor about Zepbound Trisepotide, the first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea in adults with obesity.
0:20 Speaker 02 Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains trisepotide and should not be used with other trisepotide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens, or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic
1:05 Speaker 02 reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia, if you're nursing, pregnant, plant-to-be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems.
1:27 Speaker 01 Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979, or visit zepbound.lily.com.
1:34 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
2:05 Tracy V. Wilson? Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country... Or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile. Staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy. Some of the most life giving conversations start with just a phone call. That's why AT&T guarantees the network you can rely on so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most. That's the AT&T guarantee. AT&T, connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.
2:40 Holly Frey? We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated and what's just wrong? Health versus Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health versus Hype wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
3:24 Holly Frey? Hello and happy Friday. I'm Holly Frey.
3:27 Tracy V. Wilson? And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
3:30 Holly Frey? We talked about tomorrow at the Olympia this week. Woo, she's a lot.
3:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
3:39 Holly Frey? I have such mixed feelings about her.
3:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
3:44 Holly Frey? Boy, her art is spectacularly beautiful.
3:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Yep. So there's the part where we read a quote that she had said that was sort of like, I was the first woman ever to do this.
3:58 Tracy V. Wilson? And I was like, hmm, really? Because the name did not ring a bell. And then I Googled and I was like, okay, this is incredibly distinctive visual artwork.
4:12 Tracy V. Wilson? You're not the first woman ever to be an artist, but I kind of see what you're saying about.
4:19 Holly Frey? Right.
4:19 Tracy V. Wilson? What's distinct about it.
4:21 Holly Frey? Yeah, it is. It's so distinctive and it is really exceptionally beautiful, especially if you really like that like. Slightly surreal art deco look. Right? But yeah, like I said, if I had one tenth of her confidence. I'd be scared of myself, I think.
4:43 Holly Frey? She, I didn't include it in the episode, but she does bump up against other people we have talked about on the show, including, she was apparently a pretty regular attendee at Natalie Clifford Barney's get togethers.
4:57 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay, makes absolute sense.
4:59 Holly Frey? I could see the two of them rolling together, no problem. Like, those are two women that are friends.
5:04 Tracy V. Wilson? I just wrote a whole fiction in my head.
5:11 Holly Frey? Yeah. I am ceaselessly fascinated, heartbroken, curious about her relationship with today's. And how they continue to kind of keep going together, even though they both clearly didn't like their marriage. And, you know, it really is one of those things of like two people who are very broken, but in ways that do not work. You know, a lot of times, people will say if you go through as a couple, some particularly harrowing experience, it either brings you very close together and galvanizes you, or it tears you apart. And it's like theirs tore them apart, but also they weren't apart.
5:57 Holly Frey? So they just kind of tortured each other for the next number of years. Which is awful.
6:05 Holly Frey? She was so controlling.
6:11 Holly Frey? Not only of her husband, child, et cetera. I mean, forget the double standard of, by the way, I can have affairs as often and as blatantly as I want, but you meet one person and you have betrayed me.
6:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
6:26 Holly Frey? I have a whole girl.
6:28 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
6:28 Holly Frey? Get over you with that whole thing, but she was controlling with people she had no business being involved in their lives kind of situation. She is one of those people, this is really gonna grind your gears. I can just tell you upfront. At things like dinner parties, she didn't have to be the host. She would start clearing people's plates before they were done. And talking about how like Americans were all too fat.
6:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, no, thank you.
6:56 Holly Frey? Apparently she was at, I don't know who this quote is attributed to because the account I read kind of is sparing the person who said it from being revealed because it it could be considered very,
7:14 Holly Frey? I don't know if rude is the right word, but just, you know, not appropriate things to say at dinner, even though they're responding to someone being very inappropriate. It involves a threat, which is probably why, but apparently she was at one of these dinners in New York in the late 1960s and started clearing people's plates. And one of the guests who was also a woman, is my understanding, turned to her and said, Baroness, if you touch my plate, I will break your arm.
7:45 Holly Frey? And I'm like, I would like to think that would be me, but I don't know.
7:48 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
7:49 Holly Frey? But just like.
7:50 Tracy V. Wilson? I mean, you have openly described yourself as food aggressive.
7:53 Holly Frey? I am food aggressive, so I really would break her arm, but I just like, I cannot imagine if that happened to me, if that happened to someone else and I saw it, I think I would lose my mind. Like, no, it's not your job or your your place to be taking people's food. What? Like, what are, oh. And then I really, I will, I will say this. So I think I have mentioned before on the show that when I was much younger in my twenties and working at a hair salon, we had a
8:32 Holly Frey? client, a regular that came in every week to get her shampoo set, who was.
8:38 Holly Frey? Mean as a snake.
8:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
8:39 Holly Frey? She was mean to me. She was mean to her hairstylist. She was mean to everyone. She was just really curt and brusque and unkind. And I remember thinking like, damn, you are unpleasant. And then one day she was paying and I saw the numbers tattooed on her wrist.
8:57 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
8:58 Holly Frey? And after that, I was like, you can be as mean as you want. Like, you've been through it all. I don't.
9:03 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
9:04 Holly Frey? I'm, I will never judge you again. And I kind of felt that way researching Tamara. Like, I understand you went through this big watershed moment where you lost everything. Like, the life you thought you were building for yourself got ripped out from under you. But then, like, it's like, she's, she's getting later on in her life and she's doing things like telling her daughter she should be visiting her instead of caring for her husband who is
9:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
9:30 Holly Frey? cancer treatment. I'm like, oh, no, you are actually kind of a monster.
9:34 Tracy V. Wilson? Right, right.
9:35 Holly Frey? My forgiveness has worn out on you. I can't, I don't have it anymore.
9:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
9:39 Holly Frey? My grace has been siphoned. I don't, it's a wild one.
9:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
9:45 Holly Frey? She did, incidentally, not leave her house in Cornavaca to her daughter. She sold it very cheaply to one of her close friends.
9:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Hmm.
9:53 Holly Frey? Before she died, because she, I guess, just wanted to be spiteful.
9:57 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
9:59 Holly Frey? There is a lot of the accounts of the end of her life. She definitely sounds like someone who recognizes that she is out of step with a changing world. And her reaction is to become very spiteful and angry about all of it.
10:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
10:13 Holly Frey? Please don't let that happen to me. Please, please, please. I already feel out of step with the world half the time anyway. So hopefully that transition won't be too.
10:25 Holly Frey? Anyway, love her art.
10:28 Tracy V. Wilson? It is, yeah, it is very striking.
10:30 Holly Frey? Oh, I love it. I mean, that's good art. I am really, really kicking myself that I can't make it out to the DeYoung in time to see it before they take it down. Because it is a really extremely comprehensive look at her whole life as an artist.
10:47 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
10:48 Holly Frey? Um, I did buy their big book that they published there. I mean, calling it a catalog feels like a lie because it's really a big, beautiful art book, but
10:59 Holly Frey? I won't get to see it in person and I'm bummed. But Kristin, I hope this was everything you wanted.
11:09 Speaker 01 Snoring, gasping for air during sleep, daytime sleepiness? I'm Shaquille O'Neal and this shouldn't be anybody's experience. Ask your doctor about Zepbound Trisepotide, the first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea in adults with obesity.
11:25 Speaker 02 Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains trisepotide and should not be used with other trisepotide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens, or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction.
12:11 Speaker 02 Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia, if you're nursing, pregnant, plant-to-be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulphonal urea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems.
12:32 Speaker 01 Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979, or visit zepbound.lily.com.
12:39 Speaker 05 First thought is like, wow, how are we gonna do all this?
12:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fans' experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
13:03 Speaker 05 It was gonna rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
13:10 Tracy V. Wilson? That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held Up on game day.
13:17 Speaker 06 Through what Alan's whole crew designed. We connected the event visitors to the world.
13:23 Tracy V. Wilson? And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.
13:26 Speaker 06 To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing. It's a beautiful thing.
13:31 Speaker 05 What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.
13:34 Tracy V. Wilson? AT&T, connecting fans to what they love.
13:37 Speaker 07 Connecting changes everything. AT&T.
13:41 Tracy V. Wilson? So you're considering getting a home security system, but you want something that fits your space. Well, with ADT Blue, it's easy to customize a system that's right for you and set it up yourself. Just pick the kit and monitoring plan that makes sense for your home. Let's say you're worried about package theft. The ADT Plus app can walk you through setting up a new doorbell camera kit. Once it's installed, ADT Pros can help you keep tabs on it 24/7, or you can manage it yourself from the ADT Plus app. There are no long-term contracts, so you can change your monitoring plan whenever you want. The flexibility doesn't end there. You can add to your system as you need to with things like extra cameras or motion sensors. Some life decisions are hard, but thanks to ADT Blue,
14:23 Tracy V. Wilson? you can DIY trusted ADT home security in a snap. Head to ADT.com/BLU to build your system today. And to hear more about home protection and other grown-up topics, check out new episodes of Grown Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
14:52 Holly Frey? We talked about Isaac Pittman and his shorthand this week.
14:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Yep.
14:57 Holly Frey? He is a delightful and fascinating creature to me.
15:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh huh.
15:05 Holly Frey? One of the things that I learned about him in one of the biographies that I looked at was that he was one of those people who had learned a lot of things because he read them in books, but he didn't know how to actually say them.
15:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, sure.
15:21 Holly Frey? And he realized this when he was still pretty young, that he was kind of. Talking about things that he knew a lot about, but he didn't sound as smart as he was because he was saying them incorrectly. And so he made a very concerted effort to try to correct that. And as a consequence, he apparently had very distinctively enunciated and good speech.
15:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Like, Okay.
15:45 Holly Frey? He was kind of the perfect person to develop a phonetic writing system because he was so focused on how words sounded because he had made such a study of it, which is pretty interesting. One of the things we did not talk about was how a big part of why his method took off was because of his relationship with Bagster.
16:07 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
16:09 Holly Frey? And I read one quote that pretty nicely sums it up, which is that, "As has been more than once pointed out, the success of the method was without doubt greatly promoted by the fact that it was issued by the eminent Bible publisher, whose name was a guarantee that it was of a meritorious kind and not of a catch penny nature." So basically like the biggest and most respected Bible publisher in Britain at the time, putting out this phonetic system book, made people go, well, it must be good because
16:41 Tracy V. Wilson? It must be fine.
16:42 Holly Frey? Bagster did it and they don't do, even though had they known that like 13 year olds sewed it together in a schoolroom, they might feel differently.
16:51 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
16:57 Holly Frey? I also found a really cute poem that Bagster wrote about Isaac Pitman's work. It's just four lines. It's super cute, which is, "Artists and scribes no more delight, their arts imperfect found. Daegu now draws by rays of lights and Pittman writes by sound."
17:16 Tracy V. Wilson? I love that.
17:17 Holly Frey? He was likening him to Daegu in terms of like how important his invention was.
17:23 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
17:23 Holly Frey? Which was pretty great.
17:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
17:26 Holly Frey? His biography by his brother Ben.
17:30 Holly Frey? Is really interesting because Ben, like a brother, clearly adored Isaac, but also does not always pull punches about talking about him. And he notes at one point, he was somewhat deficient in aesthetic taste.
17:43 Tracy V. Wilson? That's funny.
17:43 Holly Frey? And he was like, people always thought my brother had really good taste, but it's because his first wife, Mary, was wealthy and had good taste. And so she had bought all of these nice things. And even after she died, he still had like these amazing pieces of furniture in his house. And it was all because of that.
18:04 Holly Frey? Okay, it's time to talk about the intrigue.
18:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
18:07 Holly Frey? And this is also thanks to Ben. Ben and I'm trying to remember, I should have written this down. I don't remember if it's one of their sisters or one of the brother's wives discovered at one point, a cache of letters. And they are very clearly love letters.
18:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Ooh.
18:34 Holly Frey? Between Isaac and a woman whose name starts with M, but was apparently not his wife, Mary.
18:42 Holly Frey? And though these were apparently being written while he was married to Mary. And that these two, these two members of the family had, had seen them, knew what was up, you know, not necessarily that there was any sort of like physical relationship or anything, but clearly these were two people that felt very emotionally romantically attached to one another. And so when Isaac married Isabella, they were like, what? Because we thought after Mary died, you were going to marry this other lady who you clearly loved and loved you back. Like, why are you not marrying her? And we don't know.
19:23 Tracy V. Wilson? Whoa.
19:24 Holly Frey? But this was apparently a family intrigue that no one ever asked him outright. Like, no one ever said to him, hey, we know you're actually in love with somebody else. And no one ever asked him, hey, why didn't you marry that woman that you clearly were in love with?
19:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
19:37 Holly Frey? But they waited till after he died and put it in his biography.
19:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
19:43 Holly Frey? That's very carefully written. I want to say it's not written in a scandalous way. It's more like a, we have always wondered. Clearly, he had very strong and ardent feelings for this person and it seemed reciprocated. And we just don't know why those two didn't make a go of it. So presumably she was available, right? Because otherwise, I mean, this was not a family that was going to be living the tomorrow d'olimpica, like, I will just have, I'll just be with people I'm not married to. So we don't know, but that's the intrigue that I stumbled across very late in the game.
20:19 Tracy V. Wilson? And we do know that it was a woman.
20:22 Holly Frey? Yes.
20:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
20:23 Holly Frey? Yes, like, they knew who she was.
20:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, okay, okay.
20:26 Holly Frey? Her name is withheld in the biography to not scandalize her.
20:30 Tracy V. Wilson? I understand. I had interpreted what you were saying as like, we weren't actually sure who the letters.
20:36 Holly Frey? No, they knew, but we don't.
20:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay, okay. They kept that a secret.
20:40 Holly Frey? Yes.
20:40 Tracy V. Wilson? I see.
20:41 Holly Frey? In the interest of propriety, they invoked no one's name, but they all apparently liked this woman and knew her.
20:49 Tracy V. Wilson? Fascinating.
20:50 Holly Frey? And didn't understand why he didn't marry her.
20:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, yeah.
20:58 Speaker 01 Snoring, gasping for air during sleep, daytime sleepiness? I'm Shaquille O'Neal, and this shouldn't be anybody's experience. Ask your doctor about Zepbound trisepotide, the first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea in adults with obesity.
21:14 Speaker 02 Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains trisepotide and should not be used with other trisepotide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens, or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction.
21:59 Speaker 02 Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. If you're nursing, pregnant, plant to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems.
22:21 Speaker 01 Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit zepbound.lily.com.
22:29 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?
23:14 Holly Frey? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
23:31 Holly Frey? It's interesting. This is definitely a case where one of the few things I did not get a feel for him about was his married life to either of his wives. He seems like he was, you know, certainly a
23:48 Holly Frey? Dedicated husband, but his work kinda came first.
23:51 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
23:52 Holly Frey? He worked really long hours, like, like I, we mentioned during the episode that he would rather work for free on these correspondence lessons he was giving than let somebody else charge for them. And I still don't know if this is a case where he just thought that kind of information and help should be free, or if he really was like, no, you will mess it up. I am the arbiter of these things. Or if there's something else in play, it's a little unclear.
24:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
24:22 Holly Frey? But he's, he's very fascinating to me.
24:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
24:27 Holly Frey? He was a very busy bee. I love that note that he wrote to the minister at the end of his life.
24:32 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
24:33 Holly Frey? Like, just tell everybody it was peaceful. I'm fine. I have made peace with it. And all of the accounts that I have read by people that knew him support that, like, he wasn't, they were like, he, well, he knew he was dying, but he was very pragmatic about it and was just kind of like, okay, I'm gonna enjoy the time I have left. And when the moment happens, it happens.
24:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
24:53 Holly Frey? I'll just do my best while I got it. And he was, you know, certain he was going on to an afterlife. So he really did just see it as a transition. Just such a beautiful way to look at it. And he seemed so calm about the whole thing. I'm like, hmm.
25:05 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
25:07 Holly Frey? Can I borrow that? That sounds great.
25:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
25:09 Holly Frey? Anyway, Isaac Pitman.
25:15 Holly Frey? You know, perhaps we'll do a, an episode on Greg later and his version of stenography.
25:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Maybe.
25:23 Holly Frey? Uh, does it any, did you grow up with anybody in your house using shorthand?
25:27 Tracy V. Wilson? No, no, it was something that I knew about from like novels and
25:33 Holly Frey? Gotcha.
25:34 Tracy V. Wilson? Something in my head that I thought would be useful for me to know. Uh, because when I was a kid, when it was time to learn to write, I could not tell you what hand I used to like color with or whatever. But when it came time to learn to write and the teacher was like, put the pencil in the hand where it feels most comfortable. I was like, I don't know what you are talking about.
26:00 Holly Frey? Oh, yeah.
26:00 Tracy V. Wilson? This is a weird foreign object that feels bad in both hands.
26:04 Holly Frey? Yeah.
26:04 Tracy V. Wilson? So I just imitated my classmates and started writing with my right hand.
26:08 Holly Frey? Gotcha.
26:09 Tracy V. Wilson? And I've always wondered if that was right.
26:13 Tracy V. Wilson? Because writing was laborious and it has always been laborious and it continues to be laborious. And then I had to learn cursive and that was laborious. And it just like writing with a pencil or a pen was so time consuming and difficult that I would hear about this system called shorthand and you can see it and it really just looks like little sketches and like not, not things that look as complicated as letters in a lot of cases. Like the symbols can be really simplified. And I was like, man, if I knew how to do that, this whole writing thing would be so much easier. It turns out, though, the thing that really
26:51 Tracy V. Wilson? was a help was learning to touch type in high school, in which I took a typing class, literally in preparation to be writing papers in college.
27:03 Holly Frey? Smart.
27:04 Tracy V. Wilson? And while I initially learned to do this by looking at my fingers, at some point it clicked of how to do it by touch. And I've always typed monumentally faster than writing.
27:17 Holly Frey? Yeah. I mean, that, the typewriter is often cited as one of the things that, you know, led to the, the drop off in stenography being used. It, for a long time, it became kind of associated with things like secretarial work or court reporting, times when you need to be keeping and maintaining a written record of things people say that's as accurate as possible.
27:43 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
27:44 Holly Frey? But it's interesting, I think the most recent one that I read where I saw this in the comments was an article from 2009.
27:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
27:57 Holly Frey? Which is now 16 years ago.
27:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Not possible.
28:01 Holly Frey? But the, this article was talking about a, a recent book that had been written that talked about how nobody used stenography anymore because, you know, we have typewriters and we have electronic media and there are a million other ways that you can do it. And there was somebody in the comments that was like, I work for a law firm, we still use it. And I was like, whoa. I wouldn't have thought even that late that that was still going on. And I presume it's still happening in places today. I'll ask a couple of lawyer friends and see what they say about it.
28:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
28:30 Holly Frey? There are always some old school people in any office, so.
28:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Right. Right. Well, and I could, it's also, some of this is just, you know, kind of vibes, but if you are interviewing a person, especially if you're interviewing a person about something that is painful, or difficult, or sensitive, it can feel like you have a more human connection with them. If you are, you know, sitting at a table or something and somebody has a, a pen and paper, instead of being separated by a laptop and a screen. And so I can see there being kind of a value in somebody that's like doing a lot of interviewing or whatever, taking their notes in shorthand rather than typing them.
29:17 Holly Frey? Yeah. I mean, I feel like for me, I'm gonna default to a recorder then, like, I'll just put my iPhone on the table or something.
29:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Sure.
29:25 Holly Frey? Um, but I, I think that is a good point. But you know, Mina Harker knew how to write in shorthand.
29:38 Holly Frey? I have so many questions now for Bram Stoker. I want to go back and be like, were you just fascinated with shorthand? And I mean, if you're going by his novel, right, 1897, not everyone knew it.
29:51 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm-hmm.
29:52 Holly Frey? And Mina specifically had to seek it out and learn it so that she could be helpful.
29:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Right, right.
29:57 Holly Frey? And even very educated people didn't always know it. So it's interesting. I would love to see statistics and I did, I searched around and didn't find any, I imagine for the obvious reason of like, this isn't necessarily something that was recorded, was like, how many people at various points in time have learned and are using shorthand, whether professionally or personally, but so much of it is personal. It's not like people are like, there's a census of, do you know shorthand?
30:29 Holly Frey? But I would love that data if we could ever get it. So.
30:32 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm-hmm.
30:33 Holly Frey? There's part of me that wants to learn it just for the weirdness of it at this point.
30:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
30:37 Holly Frey? But also I have stuff to do. Gonna go so instead, probably. So that is Isaac Pitman, who just fascinated me and kind of charmed me, even though I think probably he would think I was a little too raucous as a human being and drank way too much.
30:58 Holly Frey? Because I drink it all. Um, but I do like that he, you know, was like, it turns out I can't kill animals. And if I can't kill animals, shouldn't be eating animals. So I'm going to be a vegetarian. I really love that. It's very sweet. Um, Isaac Pitman, I hope that if you have any work to do this weekend, that someone has devised a system that makes it faster and easier for you. Uh, if you have time off, I hope that you get to relax in whatever way makes you delighted and gives you some relaxation and, and helps you connect to the world in a way that's meaningful and helpful to your, your heart and your mind. Uh, we will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode and then
31:43 Holly Frey? on Monday, we will have a brand new one.
31:50 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Previous Isaac Pitman’s Shorthand Next SYMHC Classics: Christine de Pizan Page updated November 5, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated