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.

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