Isaac Pitman’s Shorthand

Humans have been writing in abbreviated ways as long as writing has existed. In the 19th century, Isaac Pitman developed – and marketed – a system of shorthand that became widely adopted.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Holly 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 Argonix, listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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  This is the story of the one. As a shipping manager, he's running the dock, stocking supplies, and making sure every order goes out on time. And Granger helps him stay prepared. From shipping supplies to PPE to hand tools, he counts on Granger to keep products moving and trucks rolling. So his operation runs smoothly, no matter the shift. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click Granger.com, or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.

• 1:39Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:50Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.

• 1:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 1:55Holly Frey?

  So, uh, Nosferatu came out.

• 1:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:00Holly Frey?

  Because of that, I have, of course, been deep in my Dracula/ Bram Stoker rabbit hole.

• 2:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 2:07Holly Frey?

  Um, which I have mentioned on recent shows. It had been a little while since I reread the original English language version of Dracula. And after I reread Powers of Darkness, which is the Icelandic version, which, when it was translated back into English, reveals a lot of differences from the original. We talked about that a little on our Bram Stoker episode. There's some fun scholarship around it and whether or not Bram Stoker actually prepared a different version for Sweden and Iceland, or whether some interpreter just took some things upon themselves. It's a pretty interesting thing if you want to get into that.

• 2:45Holly Frey?

  But after I reread that, I then was like, well, I think I need to go back to the 1897 novel and compare them. This is not a Halloween episode, so don't worry with all this Gothic talk. But what jumped out at me, even more than just trying to track the variations of the narrative, was just how often shorthand is mentioned in the book as a plot point. At one point, Jonathan Harker writes a letter to Mina in shorthand while he is captive in Transylvania. The idea being that the villainous titular count will not be able to read shorthand. And then in Mina's journal entries in the book, she mentions how she's been learning shorthand so she can help her future husband in his work.

• 3:29Holly Frey?

  She also presents some notes to Van Helsing in shorthand when she first meets him as kind of a burn after she feels infantilized by him because she wants to show him that she is very smart and accomplished. She feels very guilty about doing this almost instantly because Van Helsing can't read shorthand and turns out to be a very nice man. But all of this got my brain wondering about why Bram Stoker might be so focused on shorthand. So now we're gonna talk about shorthand during this time period. There was a lot going on with shorthand at the time. It had become very, very popular in the couple of decades leading up to this.

• 4:11Holly Frey?

  And that's largely due to one person because it turns out that if you search online for the inventor of shorthand, One name comes up from the 19th century, even though there have been various forms of systematized shorthand or abbreviated writing in play for literal centuries. But today, we are going to talk about that one person that comes up, Isaac Pitman, and how he developed and marketed a system of shorthand that became very widely adopted in the 19th century when Bram Stoker was writing his book.

• 4:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yes, so if by chance you don't know what shorthand is, it's an abbreviated way to write, and it's often used for taking down notes or recording what a person is saying verbatim. There are lots of different names that have been used for it, including stenography, tachygraphy, brachygraphy, and as we'll see in today's story, a lot of other stuff. This can really look like indecipherable scribbles to somebody who is not familiar with the system being used. And it's really not a modern invention, although what we are talking about is the 19th century today.

• 5:24Holly Frey?

  There have been systematized abbreviation methods for writing almost as long as there have been written languages. Xenophon, a Greek historian who was born circa 430 BCE, used it when he wrote down the memoirs of Socrates. Both Chinese and Japanese languages have their own abbreviated writing schemes, as do a lot of other languages. The diary of Samuel Pepys, often referenced on this show, was written in shorthand, and Martin Luther wrote his sermons in shorthand. In fact, a lot of average people wrote in shorthand in previous stages of history, sometimes to record events unfolding around them, but also because they could just rapidly get their thoughts down on paper

• 6:08Holly Frey?

  and then revise and refine them as they copied those notes into a longhand form. That's a practice that comes up in today's show as well.

• 6:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  We won't go through all the various people who worked on their own shorthand methods, but we will mention one in particular because it was used by today's main subject, Isaac Pitman, and also because the book we're about to name has just an entertainingly long title, and you know, we love those. In 1786, Samuel Taylor published "An Essay Intended to Establish a Standard for an Universal System of Stenography or Shorthand Writing, Upon Such Simple and Approved Principles As Have Never Before Been Offered to the Public, Whereby a Person in a Few Days May Instruct Himself to Write Shorthand Correctly, and by a Little Practice Cannot Fail Taking

• 7:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  Down Any Discourse Delivered in Public."

• 7:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  This cost one guinea. That was considered to be pricey enough that this book was an investment. By that point, Taylor had been working on his system for about 13 years. He had created simpler versions of 19 letters of the alphabet because his system did not need vowels in words that had more than one syllable. And this also eliminated any consonants that were deemed to be superfluous.

• 7:34Holly Frey?

  Yeah, he was just like, hey, what about instead of you write an A, you do this little dash, you'll be fine. And that brings us to Isaac Pitman. He is the person who is invoked frequently as the inventor of shorthand, though that's obviously not really accurate. He did, though, come up with a new form of it and one that became incredibly popular. And he is a very interesting figure. So that is why we are stepping away from my initial plan of just doing a history of stenography to really talk about him and his life.

• 8:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Isaac Pitman was born in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England, on January 4th, 1813. His father, Samuel Pitman, worked in the textile industry, and his mother was Maria Davis Pitman. The family included 10 other children, of which Isaac was the third, and they were very religious. Samuel was the superintendent of a Sunday school. From a young age, Isaac is said to have been very fascinated with language and writing and the ways in which ideas were recorded.

• 8:38Holly Frey?

  As a child, Isaac didn't get a lot of formal education. He later said it was hardly worthy of mention, but he was so curious as a kid that he managed to get a pretty fair amount of self-education from reading. In addition to language, he devoured books about astronomy. And then that led him to study math because he wanted to be able to calculate the movements of celestial bodies. At this point in time, astronomy and astrology had diverged for the most part, but Pitman used his astronomy knowledge to write horoscopes for his entire family. I don't know why I find that very charming. He also carried around a copy of a grammar book that he studied whenever he had a free moment.

• 9:21Holly Frey?

  According to the account of a family friend from the time he was 12, Isaac would copy little bits from various books into a blank book that he always kept with him with the intention of memorizing anything that he committed to its pages. A 1919 biography of Pitman says that one of his pocket companions, which still exists today, contained the entirety of a Greek grammar guide. And to be clear, Isaac did attend school, even if he didn't seem to think it was an especially robust amount. In addition to the schooling that the Pitman children did get, they also had music lessons in the evening for a while. Their father had hired a woman to come in and teach them music every night.

• 10:05Holly Frey?

  And then Samuel also bought two globes for them to study. Samuel also joined one of the area's first lending libraries, and Isaac made regular use of that membership.

• 10:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Isaac later wrote about how, as a teenager, he came to be interested in shorthand. He noted, quote, "With that instinctive love of knowledge common to boys, I began to study shorthand. I saw that it would be a great advantage to write six times as fast as I had been accustomed to. And I borrowed a book, read it through, copied the alphabet and arbitrary words and have written shorthand ever since." His cousin, Charles Laverne, had loaned him a book about the Samuel Taylor method of scenography. And that was the beginning of a lifelong fascination and study.

• 10:53Holly Frey?

  Coming up, we're going to talk about Isaac's move into the workforce. But first, we'll pause for a sponsor break.

• 11:03Holly 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?

• 11:48Holly Frey?

  Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 11:58Speaker 04

  This live check-in is brought to you by State Farm. Porque el bienestar de tu familia también merece protección. Okay, real talk. I'm about to become a dad again. And wow, it hits different the second time. Hi, I'm Wilmer Valderrama, and I've done, you know, I've done the red carpets, the long days on set and all that, but nothing prepares you for that moment when you're building a crib and you realize you're building a future. Familia is everything to me. The laughs, the chaos, the unconditional love, but also the pressure, la responsabilidad. If you're stepping into something big right now, starting a family, getting engaged, moving cities, you're not alone. Take one step at a time. Why breathe?

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  Be present and lean into the people that got your back. Disfruta. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

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  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers, producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of the group Sheik. A great song has a way of defining a moment, a moment of joy, heartbreak, or anything in between.

• 13:06Speaker 05

  This fall, I'll be driving across the country, dropping in on some of the coolest, most fascinating artists working today. We'll go deep into their lives and careers and hear what it was like before the moment that made them. From hitmakers like Miguel.

• 13:23Speaker 06

  That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life. Regardless of how everyone else buys into this, I believe in this and I'm gonna push.

• 13:35Speaker 05

  To rising stars like Alex Warren.

• 13:38Speaker 07

  You know, a song is a story and the verse is setting the scene. And for me, at least, it's allowing me to be personal and vulnerable with the audience, whether it's about my wife and I'm being vulnerable about her, or it's about, you know, my parents and I'm being vulnerable to them. And it's almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story.

• 13:56Speaker 05

  It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 14:15Holly Frey?

  Pitman went right to work as a clerk in 1829 at the age of 16. His first job was in James Edgell's cloth mill where his father was his supervisor. And then, when his father opened his own mill two years later, Isaac moved there to work, still serving as a clerk. His older brother Jacob once wrote of Isaac, quote, "Isaac never had any of that rollicking nonsense about him peculiar to most of us boys. Nor do I remember his ever stopping on his way from school to play, but home directly he went, either to his books or to his work." And Isaac does seem to have been pretty serious from an early age. As a very young man, he became an advocate for temperance,

• 15:00Holly Frey?

  and he swore off drink for the rest of his life, with one minor exception for a bit, and we'll talk about that shortly.

• 15:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  At the end of every 12-hour workday, Isaac went home and read as much as he could. He kept focusing on expanding his education. He also got up at 4 a.m. to read before work. He had been really disappointed when he had to end his school days to work full-time, and he's said to have begged his father to let him go back. As Samuel Pitman became more financially successful, he sent Isaac to a specialty school for career training. At the Training College of British Foreign School Society, he got teaching credentials. Isaac had already shown an interest in teaching, and he had taught at the Sunday School.

• 15:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  He did so well at the Training College that the headmaster wrote to Samuel, quote, "You may send me as many more of your children as you can spare." Five more of Isaac's siblings took that offer. Jacob, Joseph, Rosella, Jane, and Mary Pitman all attended at various times. After getting his teaching certification, Isaac went from clerking to a full-time teaching position in Lincolnshire at Barton upon Humber at a school known as Long's School. Long's School had 120 students, and as master, Pitman made 70 pounds a year.

• 16:23Holly Frey?

  In Barton, Isaac dedicated himself not just to his students, but also to the community. He gave free lectures on astronomy and also on temperance, and he became a member of the Methodist Church, was very active in his church community. He also prepared and distributed a temperance pamphlet to everyone in town, which included the rhetoric, quote, "Ardent spirits, pure or mixed, are pronounced by the highest authorities in our land to be evil spirits. This is not generally believed. Faith is weak because knowledge is imperfect. Not till lately has the old-fashioned falsity been exploded that a comfortable glass does one good. Spirits and poisons are synonymous terms."

• 17:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  A few years into his time at Barton, Isaac got married to Mrs. Mary Holgate. Mary was the widow of George Holgate, who had left her pretty well off. The two of them got married the day after Isaac's 22nd birthday, on January 5th, 1835.

• 17:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  Because of Mary's financial standing, Isaac was able to live a much more luxurious life than a teacher normally would have. But they moved from their home a year after the wedding because Isaac was offered a job at a new nonconformist school in Watten Under Edge in Gloucestershire. This move had the advantage of bringing Isaac closer to his brother Jacob, who was also teaching by this time and had married a woman who was also a teacher.

• 17:56Holly Frey?

  Their family was like, teachers, teachers, teachers. His sibling group did a lot of teaching. As you'll see, he brings some of his other siblings in to teach under him. Isaac and Mary lived at Watten for a little more than three years, and these were very important times for him. For one, he was introduced to the works of Emmanuel Swedenborg by a man named John Kingwell Bragg. He happened to meet Bragg by chance when the men were sharing a stage coach. Swedenborg's religious ideas were controversial. In the shortest version, he didn't believe in the Holy Trinity, and he thought that he had a direct interaction line with God. He believed that the spiritual was something that was within every person at

• 18:40Holly Frey?

  their core. And all of this might sound kind of benign today, but even 60 years after Swedenborg's death, when he was being encountered by Isaac, these were contentious, and some people believed dangerous ideas. But Isaac Pitman was fascinated, and he really thought Swedenborg was on to something. He became a Swedenborgian, essentially, and he paid for that fascination because for these beliefs, Pitman was turned out of his church, and he also lost his teaching job.

• 19:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  While the institutions he had been part of changed their relationships with him, Pitman made a lot of changes to his life himself during this time as well. Up to 1837, while he spoke out against spiritus liquors, he still, like a lot of people, drank beer. But he completely cut that out of his life that year. He also significantly changed his eating habits after being asked to kill a bird for the cook to use to make dinner. Pitman was not able to do it, and he started to think about his relationship with animals and their use as food. He came away from those reflections a vegetarian.

• 19:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  Later, he would share that his ongoing issues with upset stomach and heartburn went away as soon as he changed his diet in this way. He wrote the following in 1879 in a letter to the Times, quote, "My dietetic experience is simply this: about 40 years ago, dyspepsia was carrying me to the grave. Medical advisers recommended animal food three times a day instead of once and a glass of wine. On this regimen, I was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse. I avoided the meat and the wine, gradually recovered my digestive power, and have never since then known by any pain that I have a stomach."

• 20:32Holly Frey?

  I love that turn of phrase. I wouldn't even know I had a stomach. It never bothers me. So, this is all a lot to go through, right? Losing your religious community, losing your job, changing your diet in a pretty significant way, particularly for the time, and then cutting out that last bit of alcohol. But Isaac was still a very young man. He didn't need to worry about money, thanks to his wife's income. And after having been dismissed from that job, but still wanting to teach, he regrouped and he opened his own school. He put it on the same street as the school that had let him go. I don't know if that was just like the fortune of where he was able to get a lot, or if

• 21:15Holly Frey?

  it literally was like a way to thumb his nose at them. But free to set his own curriculum, one of the subjects that Pitman taught his students was shorthand. He had been using Samuel Taylor's system for years at that point. It was the only way he took notes. He also wrote the first drafts of his correspondence that way so that he could capture what he wanted to say before transcribing it into longhand. And so, he started teaching Samuel Taylor's method of shorthand to his students.

• 21:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  But soon he realized that there was a big obstacle to this effort. There still wasn't a reasonably priced and simple to understand book to use as a study guide or a reference. So he set out to create one. He wrote his guide based on what he knew was needed in practical coursework and prepared it for submission to publisher Samuel Bagster. Bagster accepted the manuscript, but before putting it to print, he got a colleague whose name we don't know to look at it. And this colleague wrote to Bagster and said, quote, "The system Mr. Pitman has sent to you is already on the market. Now, if he will compile a new system, I think you will be more likely to succeed in your object to popularize shorthand.

• 22:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  There will be novelty about it." What this existing book was is also unclear, and so is why someone like Pitman wouldn't have known about this book already existing. But Bagster took this back to Isaac Pitman in May of 1837 and encouraged him to do as this feedback suggested and create a whole new system.

• 22:54Holly Frey?

  Isaac spent his summer dedicated to this new endeavor. He was wrapping up work on another project that he had been in the midst of for Bagster. That was a corrected edition of the Comprehensive Bible. And that project had started, I love this so much, after Isaac wrote to Bagster, who was the Bible's publisher and was a very well-known Bible publisher, with a list of errors that he had found in the circulating version of it. And so then Bagster was like, "Fine, do you want to just work for me and, and make a corrected edition?" And he did. Please don't do that to publishers, though. That's not the way to get a job today. But with that Bible almost done, Isaac could focus on this new and apparently thrilling

• 23:37Holly Frey?

  challenge of forming a shorthand system. Isaac's brother Ben later wrote, quote, "We talked of nothing else on our way to and from school and in our occasional morning walks, and intense was the joy of my brother at the completion of his long task, the Comprehensive Bible, and the opportunity it afforded him to give his time and thoughts, as well as his heart, to new ideas in the field of experiment and usefulness then opening up to him."

• 24:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Pitman's idea differed from what had come before in one very important way, and we'll talk about it after we hear from the sponsors that keep the show going.

• 24:19Holly 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?

• 25:04Holly Frey?

  Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  This live check-in is brought to you by State Farm. Porque el bienestar de tu familia también merece protección. Okay, real talk. I'm about to become a dad again. And wow, it hits different the second time. Hi, I'm Wimmer Valderrama, and I've done, you know, I've done the red carpets, the long days on set and all that, but nothing prepares you for that moment when you're building a crib and you realize you're building a future. Familia is everything to me. The laughs, the chaos, the unconditional love, but also the pressure, la responsabilidad. If you're stepping into something big right now, starting a family, getting engaged, moving cities, you're not alone. Take one step at a time.

• 25:56Speaker 04

  Vibe, breathe, be present, and lean into the people. They've got your back. Y disfruta. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 26:05Speaker 05

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers, producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of the group Sheik. A great song has a way of defining a moment, a moment of joy, heartbreak, or anything in between.

• 26:22Speaker 05

  This fall, I'll be driving across the country, dropping in on some of the coolest, most fascinating artists working today. We'll go deep into their lives and careers and hear what it was like before the moment that made them. From hitmakers like Miguel.

• 26:39Speaker 06

  That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life. Regardless of how everyone else buys into this, I believe in this and I'm gonna push.

• 26:50Speaker 05

  To rising stars like Alex Warren.

• 26:54Speaker 07

  You know, a song is a story and the verse is setting the scene. And for me, at least, it's allowing me to be personal and vulnerable with the audience, whether it's about my wife and I'm being vulnerable about her, or it's about, you know, my parents and I'm being vulnerable to them. And it's almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story.

• 27:12Speaker 05

  It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 27:30Holly Frey?

  Isaac Pitman had the idea to develop a new system of shorthand that was based on sounds, representing words phonetically rather than just abbreviating the words and making simpler letters. He started with vowels because that seemed the most lacking in existing systems. You'll recall that Taylor often did away with them altogether. Pitman was really nervous about figuring out those vowels and creating a new approach to shorthand, but once he did, it was as if the whole system became almost obvious to him. He described this as follows, quote, "I saw the truth, practiced it, and it became delightful. In a few months, I got clear of the shallow waters and breakers of our present orthography

• 28:15Holly Frey?

  and committed myself to the boundless deep of phonographic writing."

• 28:21Holly Frey?

  So this new form that he came up with was tested in the classroom. Isaac's younger brothers taught at his school and his brother Ben, who was only 15 at this point, learned the new shorthand and taught it to a class of a couple of dozen students to test it. Then the entire Pitman family learned it and started using it to continue to test its value. When Isaac had compiled his new system and written out a guide for it in manuscript form, he brought it to Bagster. Before 1837 was out, at the age of 24, Isaac had published Stenographic Soundhand.

• 28:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  This was not a big fancy publication scenario where Bagster handled everything. It sounds a lot more like kind of a DIY effort with Pitman getting help to assemble the books after Bagster had the leaves printed. This is evidenced by a charming note that Isaac wrote to Bagster. Quote, "I have sent 200 stenographies for present sale and the rest, to make up 1,500, will follow by wagon in about a week. I think I shall want 1,500 for myself. Please let me know in a month or two how they sell. I must beg pardon for the manner of sewing in this 200. The next will be dark colored thread and done properly. Also, the labels will be more neatly in the center.

• 29:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  The stitching was done by the elder boys in my school who have learned the system. They are quite delighted to spend two or three days in this sort of half play. Since this first essay, we have had a lesson on the subject from a stationer."

• 30:01Holly Frey?

  I love this so much. Yeah. Then he had the kids at his school sew together his books. And he was like, "You're doing it wrong. You're doing it wrong. Let me get a pro in here to tell you how to do it."

• 30:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  Well, and this also highlights how like printing and bookbinding are two different things.

• 30:17Holly Frey?

  Yes. Well, and you know, there were books that Bagster was handling everything for. Like he was known, like I said, as a Bible publisher, but he was kind of doing this as a little bit of a favor. And they wanted to make it an inexpensive book so anybody could afford it. So he was like, "I can't pay for the binding because that will drive the price up. But if we can figure out a way to do that, then sure, that's no problem." I just, I love everything about this. According to a 1919 biography of Pitman, written by Alfred Baker, "The Pittmanic system was introduced to the world quietly and without advertisement.

• 30:57Holly Frey?

  As far as can be discovered, its author engaged in no special efforts to make it known. He was indeed far more concerned in effecting improvements in his work for the contemplated second edition." Pitman called this first edition "a feeler" to see how it was received, and he was continuing to teach at his school and work on revisions for all this time. This wasn't his only focus.

• 31:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  Two years after the first edition of Cinegraphic Soundhand was released, Pitman moved to Bath and started another school there. One possible draw was a Swedenborgian church that had been established there, which Isaac and Mary joined right after the move. Isaac, meanwhile, was preparing a second edition of the book, which he wanted to have a catchier title. He and Bagster landed at "phonography," a new name for a new thing, according to Bagster.

• 31:52Holly Frey?

  Yeah, there's a whole interesting account of them kind of landing at that word and Isaac being like, "That's not really a word yet." And Bagster's like, "Right, because we're gonna make it a word." Because no one knows how to describe this kind of shorthand. So while this may have had a quiet start, by 1846, Isaac's shorthand phonography system had become quite popular. This was because, in part, in 1839, a uniform postage law was passed in the UK called the Penny Postage Law, and it went into effect in 1840. And that law stated that any letter could be sent for one penny. And Pitman was ready for this change.

• 32:35Holly Frey?

  He had made a penny plate laid out in his system in a very abbreviated way that he could mail to school headmasters to get them interested in phonography. They could also, per a note he included, "share this with students if they wished." And he also offered on that brief print the note that, "Any person may receive lessons from the author by post gratuitously."

• 33:00Holly Frey?

  He also let people send him their work and their exercises in the system, and he would personally correct any errors and make notations and send it back. This was essentially the beginning of correspondence courses, at least in the modern sense. Incidentally, Pitman got really angry at people who started charging for this same service, even though he had originally planned to do so himself, but he changed his mind and made it free, hoping that that would help entice more people to start using it. But then he was like, "You should not get paid a wage to do this. I'll do it all for free, even if I work 19 hours a day," which is not wise.

• 33:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  Next, he arranged lecture tours during school breaks, so he could go out and teach people phonography and explain its usefulness as, quote, "A method of writing all languages by means of signs that express sounds." To prove that, he included exercises in his book that included multiple languages, including the 100th Psalm, which he featured in French, German, Italian, Chinese, and Hebrew. He would also have the audience members at his lectures give him dictation in foreign languages, so he could write them on a large blackboard in his version of phonography. Realistically, it doesn't quite work in all languages.

• 34:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  There are languages that don't have the same sounds in them.

• 34:29Holly Frey?

  Correct.

• 34:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  But it does work well with quite a few of them, apparently.

• 34:34Holly Frey?

  Yeah, I will confess, I have never used it or learned shorthand, but apparently there are a lot of languages that will perfectly fit into this system. But thanks to all of these marketing efforts, Pitman's system did start to catch on, and his writings, lesson supplements, and books started selling incredibly well. Phonography was reprinted many times to meet this demand. And in 1846, when it really got popular, he actually shut down the school to use that space for more print facilities. The school morphed at that. That point, and it became the first phonetic institute. He would have to move in the years that followed to larger and larger facilities

• 35:17Holly Frey?

  as demand for phonetic books and information continued to grow. And to spread his method even farther than he could with this new institute, he started a periodical, The Phonetic Journal.

• 35:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  During this time, he was also working on another concept, phonetic spelling reform. He was trying to reform spelling in English to a more rational system without all the odd exceptions that are so common. This was sort of a natural follow on from his phonography work as he ended up printing a second journal, Phonographic Correspondent. He was the editor. He said in a lecture to the Phonographic Corresponding Society in 1844, quote, "Many attempts have been made to reform the errors of our written language, but hitherto without success. There was no desire created in the public mind for a consistent system of orthography. Now, by your benevolent exertions and spreading abroad the truths of phonetic writing,

• 36:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  a desire has been created for phonotype, a desire that will increase on that which it feeds." He collaborated with mathematician Alexander John Ellis on creating the English phonotypic alphabet, which never really caught on, much like all of the other attempts to make English phonetically spelled.

• 36:37Holly Frey?

  Yeah. There is in the notes for this episode, a link to one of his publications that is typeset phonetically, and it is one of the hardest things I have ever tried to make my way through. Admittedly, some of that is just me. But I'm curious if anybody wants to go look for these to see how they do. On April 21st, 1861, Isaac got married a second time, this time to a woman named Isabella Masters. His first wife, Mary, had died in 1854, but the specifics of her passing

• 37:17Holly Frey?

  kind of eluded me. His brother's biography even mentions it only in passing and actually references Isaac's feelings for another woman. We'll talk about that a little bit behind the scenes on Friday. Isaac and Isabella welcomed their first child, Alfred, a year after the wedding, and then a second son, Ernest, was born in 1864.

• 37:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  By the end of the 1850s, Isaac had started setting aside money to save up for a purpose-built facility to house his institute. He eventually bought a block of buildings at auction in 1873 for this project. He hired architect Frederick John Williams to design the new building, which made use of some of the existing structures on the lot. The resulting building was four floors plus a basement. When it was complete, Isaac fitted it out with the latest printing technology, a steam-powered press. His staff had a steep learning curve with it, and there were innumerable stumbling blocks to keeping it up and running. And

• 38:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  then it was also so loud that a neighbor made a noise complaint. It turned out that running a press was really challenging.

• 38:29Holly Frey?

  But he did stay in the printing business, and eventually he moved into like creating a larger publishing company. When his sons reached adulthood, Isaac formed a publishing house with them called Isaac Pitman and Sons. They printed the various books and study materials that Isaac designed, and then eventually expanded into a more generalized education press. That press continued into the 20th century, and then it was eventually purchased by another publisher in the 1980s, so it went on for a long time.

• 39:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  Less than a decade after starting the publishing company with his sons, Isaac Pitman was knighted in 1894. Two years after that, in the autumn of 1896, the papers reported that Sir Isaac was quite ill with a, quote, "congestion of the lungs." He continued on for several months, sometimes rallying some energy, but mostly having to stay in bed. He was pragmatic about his health. He wrote to his brother, quote, "I must expect a continual decrease of strength until the heart gives its last pulsation, and the angelic messengers who wait on the dying draw out the spiritual body from this one. Then I shall have a sound heart and get to work in my new sphere of life."

• 39:47Holly Frey?

  His 85th birthday party was celebrated with his friends at home the following January. He was very weakened at this point, but he was still managing the details of his press from a wheelchair. He made all of the arrangements for his January publications before his death on January 22, 1897, at the age of 84. He had sent a note shortly before he passed to his minister, which read, quote, "To those who ask how Isaac Pitman passed away, say, peacefully and with no more concern than in passing from one room into another to take up some further employment."

• 40:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  Many years after Isaac Pitman created his system, he gave a lecture in which he talked about the genesis of his method and his ongoing efforts to refine it through use, which included, quote, "The shorthand alphabet given in the first edition of phonography contains the elements of the present matured system, but in several of its details it was imperfect because it proceeded from a finite mind. These imperfections were discovered by experience and removed. As a skillful anatomist can, from three or four bones, construct the entire skeleton of an animal, so from three or four shorthand signs or letters that have been acknowledged from the commencement of shorthand writing as

• 41:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  the best for certain letters, we can construct a natural shorthand alphabet."

• 41:15Holly Frey?

  Pitman's shorthand lives on. It remains one of the three most popular shorthand systems in the world alongside the Gregg method, which came up just a few decades after him, and the T-line methods.

• 41:30Holly Frey?

  I found him to be such a fascinating creature.

• 41:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hmm.

• 41:33Holly Frey?

  I have very joyous email to read.

• 41:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh, good.

• 41:38Holly Frey?

  This is very, very joyous to me personally. So this is from our listener Hannah, who writes, has nothing to do with history. Get ready. Hello. Following up on my email from quite a while ago. Thank you so much to Holly for all the advice about Galaxy's Edge. Our original trip got postponed by quite a bit, but we finally made it to Disney this week and even got to do a full five day trip. We did rope drop early access hours. We were even the first in line to scan into the park and we spent 12 full hours in Galaxy's Edge and cannot wait to go back again. It was the coolest experience ever. I could live there if they would let me. We were able to ride Rise of the Resistance three times. Truly the most amazing ride I have ever been on. Even ties with the Haunted Mansion for me.

• 42:23Holly Frey?

  Hannah, we're neck and neck. We feel the same. Smuggler's Run was accepting parties of two in their single rider queue and we walked on the ride six times in one hour. I got pilot once and crashed the Millennium Falcon. I'm so proud of you. Oga's Cantina was fantastic and I want to recreate their cocktails at home now. Ronto Roasters in Docking Bay were so delicious and I had to exercise so much self-control to not buy all of the merch. Thank you again for all your advice and I hope you get to go to Galaxy's Edge again soon too, Hannah. And then Hannah sent pictures of their trip and they look so delighted and joyous and it makes my heart so happy. I'm actually going to Galaxy's Edge in a couple of days with my best friend because I'm spoiled. I, as Tracy knows, sometimes I work from Galaxy's Edge.

• 43:10Holly Frey?

  Sometimes I just decide I'm going to work from Galaxy's Edge tomorrow and I, we're close enough. It's a 45 minute flight. Then go down there, bring my laptops and in Ronto Roasters and type while I, while I eat delicious things. It's a great, great way to live. That is thanks to many kajillion business trips giving me all of the. All of the sky miles on earth. I can just be like, I'm going, goodbye. Uh, I hope everybody gets to do things like that that delight them. Thank you so much for sharing all of that with me, Hannah. It made me so happy and made my, made my heart very joyous to know that you had a time as good as I hoped for you. So I hope you get to go back again. I too would love to live there.

• 43:53Holly Frey?

  If you would like to write to us about your vacations, historical or Star Wars or otherwise, you can do so at [email protected]. You can also subscribe to the show. It's so easy. You could do it in the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.

• 44:16Tracy 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.

• 44:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  Wait, I came in for two things.

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