Gloucestershire, England, 1837: renowned English educator Sir Isaac Pitman published what would become the most culturally significant of the seven books he wrote before his death in 1897, ...

They crowd around the speaker, a bright-eyed, eager mob, and thrust their little digital recorders under his nose. If sequestered in a courtroom or a press box they must, I suppose, turn the volume to ...

It looks like hieroglyphics - but Pitman shorthand is a way of phonetically writing English at speed. Former court reporter and shorthand expert Mary Sorene attained a speed of 210 words per minute at ...

For more than 2,000 years people have used shorthand to make note-taking quicker and more reliable. It's a skill that has weathered being banned by a Roman emperor and associations with witchcraft, ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...

1809: Louis Braille is born. He'll devise a tactile alphabet for the blind. 1813: Isaac Pitman is born. He'll devise a shorthand alphabet for quickly writing what people are saying. It's probably more ...

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