STENOGRAPHY AND THE TYPEWRITER
It is difficult to see how man could now dispense with any of the great
inventions and discoveries that give him power over time and space. Not
one of them could be sacrificed without corresponding loss of power.
Among the great devices that economize time are stenography and the
typewriter. Stenography is the world's business alphabet; the
typewriter, its commercial printing press.
The word _stenography_ is derived from the Greek adjective _stenos_
meaning "narrow" or "close," and the Greek verb _graphein_ signifying
"to write." Stenography, therefore, is the art of close or narrow
writing, so named, perhaps, from the great amount of meaning that by
its use is packed into a narrow compass. It is a phonetic system in
which brief signs are used to represent single sounds, groups of
sounds, whole words, or groups of words.
The idea of stenography or shorthand writing originated in ancient
times. Antiquarians have tried to show, with more or less plausibility,
that it was practised more than a thousand years before the birth of
Christ by the Persians, Egyptians, and Hebrews. Abbreviated writing,
for taking down lectures and preserving poems recited at the Olympic
and other games, was used by the Greeks. The first known practitioner
of the art of shorthand writing was Tiro, who lived in Rome 63 B.C.,
and who was the stenographer of the great orator Cicero. He took down
in shorthand the speeches of his master, by whom they were afterward
revised. Plutarch says that when the Roman Senate was voting on the
charge which Cicero had preferred against Catiline, Cicero distributed
shorthand reporters throughout the Senate House for the purpose of
taking down the speeches of some of the leading Senators. At the close
of St. Paul's letter to the Colossians there is a note to the effect
that the Epistle was written from Rome by Tychicus and Onesimus. It has
been supposed that Tychicus acted as shorthand writer and Onesimus as
transcriber. Certain it is that the early Christian fathers employed a
system of shorthand writing. Saint Augustine refers to a church meeting
held at Carthage in the fourth century of the Christian era, at which
eight shorthand writers were employed, two working at a time.
Charlemagne, the great king of the Franks, who died in 814 A.D., delved
deep into the art of shorthand writing as practised by Tiro, Cicero's
stenographer.
In Chapter xxxviii of _David Copperfield_, Charles Dickens describes
his own experience with shorthand thus: "I bought an approved scheme
of the noble art and mystery of stenography (which cost me ten and
sixpence), and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a
few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were rung
upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such
another position something else, entirely different; the wonderful
vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences
that resulted from marks like flies' legs; the tremendous effects of a
curve in a wrong place--not only troubled my waking hours, but
reappeared before me in my sleep. When I had groped my way, blindly,
through these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, which was
an Egyptian temple in itself, there then appeared a procession of new
horrors, called arbitrary characters, the most despotic characters I
have ever known; who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the
beginning of a cobweb meant _expectation_, and that a pen-and-ink
sky-rocket stood for _disadvantageous_. When I had fixed these
wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else out
of it; then, beginning again, I forgot them; while I was picking them
up, I dropped the other fragments of the system; in short, it was
almost heart-breaking."
Till near the middle of the last century all systems of shorthand
writing were more or less crude and illogical. About 1837 Isaac Pitman,
an Englishman, put stenography upon a phonetic basis and therefore a
scientific basis. As there are in the English language forty-three
different sounds represented by twenty-six letters, Pitman adopted a
shorthand alphabet in which consonants were represented by simple
straight or curved strokes, the light sounds denoted by light strokes
and the heavy sounds by heavy strokes. "The leading heavy vowels are
represented by six heavy dots and a like number of heavy dashes, placed
at the beginning, middle, or end of the strokes, and before or after as
they precede or follow the consonants. The same course is followed with
the light vowels. Diphthongs are provided for by a combination of dash
forms, and by a small semicircle, differently formed and placed in
different positions. Circles, hooks, and loops are employed in distinct
offices."
Pitman's invention of a phonographic alphabet for shorthand was the
beginning of verbatim reporting that has spread to every land which
Anglo-Saxon civilization has touched. There is scarcely a legislative
body, a court of importance, or a great convention of any kind, whose
proceedings are not taken down on the spot in shorthand, accurately and
at once, to say nothing of the very wide use of stenography in private
business. In this bewildering commercial whirl of the twentieth century
time is money, and stenography is time.
The typewriter, invented about forty years ago, is parallel to
stenography in importance. The daily volume of the world's business
could not be accomplished without it. And, as in the case of all the
great inventions, men do not see how they got on before it came. The
world owes the typewriter to two Americans, John Pratt and Christopher
L. Sholes. Pratt was born in Unionville, South Carolina, April 14,
1831. In 1867, while in England, he produced the first working
typewriter that ever secured a sale. A description of his machine in
one of the English periodicals attracted the attention of Sholes, who
was born in Pennsylvania in 1819, but who at that time was living in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He began working at the idea of the typewriter
borrowed from Pratt, and in the same year that Pratt's machine was
first made, Sholes produced a typewriter that was practically
successful and started the manufacture of a machine that was to become
increasingly useful, and finally indispensable.
No business in recent years has grown more rapidly than the typewriter
industry. From nothing forty years ago, it has grown into an industry
producing nearly a quarter of a million machines a year and employing
thousands of workmen. American manufacturers not only supply the home
trade with their output, but export machines to every part of the
civilized world, making this country the home and center of the world's
typewriter industry.