 The Long History of ShorthandbyLauren Roberts
Shorthand used to be something that any woman who wanted to work in an office through most of the twentieth century had to learn because working in an office meant you were a secretary. In fact I recall entering a secretarial training program right out of high school where shorthand was required. I hated it, and within two weeks, I was failing so I quit and went to college instead. I doubt shorthand is utilized in offices any more in America, though court reporters and a few other specialized fields still use it. But it has an interesting history. Speed was never been a criterion in the development of written languages. There was no reason for it to be and, as a result, the best speed normal cursive writing can produce is about 35 words per minute (wpm). Human speech normally runs between 120-150 wpm so when the desire to record it became important a faster method needed to be devised. Shorthand—a method of rapid handwriting that uses symbols or abbreviations for words and common phrases—is that system. The word itself comes from the Greek stenos (narrow, close) and graphos (writing). Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome all had variations. Greece’s systems used single strokes to represent letters which in turn stood for common words, suffixes and prefixes in which that letter appeared. Historians refer to these systems as stenography (narrow writing), brachygraphy (short writing), and tachygraphy (swift writing). Their common feature was compact, fast writing that was used in the business, educational, religious, legal and political fields. In ancient Rome, shorthand may have appeared as early as 200 B.C. But it was not until 63 B.C. that definite evidence of the use of shorthand is recorded. And it came from Plutarch who described a debate recorded in shorthand in the Roman Senate with Cicero at the center. Most notably, it was Cicero’s freed slave and scribe, Marcus Tullius Tiro, who is given credit as the author of the first truly tachygraphic system by codifying a set of symbols and abbreviations that represented common words with the remainder of the text filled in from memory using context clues. Even Julius Caesar knew this system—which proved deadly to him when the stylus, similar to a pencil with a point of ivory or steel—was the instrument of his death. Caesar wasn’t the only one to die by the pen. Early on, Pope Clement divided Rome into seven districts and appointed a shorthand writer for each, and Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage, interested in greater accuracy, added more symbols (of a religious nature) to supplement Tiro’s. Naturally, these additions made shorthand more difficult to learn. When Cassianus, former Bishop of Bescia, established a school for shorthand, his students, perhaps suffering from stress induced by too many symbols, stabbed him to death with their styli. As the Roman Empire declined, so did shorthand. In the sixth century, Emperor Justinian forbade its use. Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1212-1250) considered the use of shorthand symbols “diabolical” and ordered that all shorthand characters be destroyed. As a result, shorthand quickly became a lost art. It wasn’t until 1588 that shorthand was revived in the form of a book entitled An Arte of Shorte, Swifte, and Secrete Writing by Character. Written by Timothie Bright and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I, the book listed 500 arbitrary signs resembling words. In return, the queen rewarded Bright with a Yorkshire living. She also granted him the sole right for fifteen years of teaching and printing books on shorthand “in or by Character not before this tyme commonlye knowne and vsed by anye other oure subjects.” A number of others followed including John Willis’ Art of Stenographie (with 14 editions issued between 1602 and 1647), An Abbreviation of Writing by Character and Thomas Shelton’s Short Writing in 1626 (later re-issued as Tachygraphy). William Mason contributed Pen pluck’d from an Eagle’s Wing in 1672, The Universal English Shorthand by John Byrom was published in 1763. Samuel Taylor’s An Essay intended to establish a Standard for a Universal System of Stenography was published in 1786, and in 1780 William Mayor put out Universal Stenography. One interesting note concerns Shelton’s system, which was republished many times between 1620 and 1687, because it was the one Samuel Pepys used in his famous diary as well as in his record of the Great Fire of London and his recollection of the Great Plague. Over in America, shorthand was making its own name. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and other politicians used it, and Madison created his own personal version to voluntarily record the 1787 Constitutional Conventions while participating in it. His shorthand notes are the only record of the actual discussions. When the House opened its doors, Thomas Lloyd, already known as a writer and teacher of shorthand, was there to report the full deliberations in the Congressional Register, a publication which he founded and edited. Without his work, the four-volume compilation of the debates of the First Congress of the United States would not exist, nor would the verbatim transcript of George Washington's inaugural address. Lloyd used an alphabetic shorthand to record Congress’ daily workings. Despite complaints about his dozing (it was exhausting work) and occasional drunkenness, his notes were until recently considered the best record available.
Nineteenth-century shorthand methods experienced a major improvement when systems based on a phonetic rather than alphabetic method were developed. One of its best known is the Pitman method, developed in 1837 by Isaac Pitman who had been an educator in England. He had taken an earlier alphabetic system, noted its weaknesses and created his own phonetic one. His brother, Benn Pitman, brought it to America in 1852 where he used it to report on the trial of John Wilkes Booth. With slight modifications, it became the most extensively used system in the U.S. and Canada. In fact, it was a staple of the House and Senate up until it was replaced with electronic machines around 1971. Though popular, Pitman’s method began to be supplemented by a new variation of the phonetic method developed by John Robert Gregg in the final years of the nineteenth century. The latter’s advantage lay in the fact that it used only thin strokes and various lengths of the stroke rather than the thick and thin strokes of the Pitman system. Gregg studied shorthand beginning at age 10. He disliked the Pitman method, and when he read a history of shorthand which listed the essentials of a good system—independent characters for the vowels and consonants, all characters written with the same thickness and on a single line of writing, and few and consistent abbreviation principles—he set to work. He invented his shorthand at age eighteen and published it as Light-Line Phonography in 1888. In 1893 Gregg took his system to the United States, and Light-Line Phonography became Gregg Shorthand. High schools were beginning to teach shorthand, and Gregg traveled throughout the country, demonstrating his teaching methods and selling his system. Gregg overtook Pitman so successfully that his was the method taught to me in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Around this same time, another method called Eclectic Shorthand was attempting to gain ground. It was a symbol system that used tricks to make the writing more compact such as shading, size and deepening curves, and it contained more rules than any other well known one. Though it ensured conciseness, it was an arduous system to learn and use because one must use all the rules without hesitation while writing. Also, its dependence on shading was geared to the ink pens and copperplate script of the time—things that did not live on into the twentieth century. Eclectic shorthand was in short a complex and ponderous method whose techniques seem at odds with its ultimate goal. Because it never became one of the primary systems, the man who invented and taught it, Jasper G. Cross, was difficult to research. I could not find any books on him and only one online reference at North Central (formerly North Western) College’s website: After the move to Naperville, in the fall of 1871, Jasper G. Cross joined the faculty of North Western College as the head of the Commerce Department. Cross was born in New York State in 1835 and moved with his parents to Illinois at a young age. He taught in the public schools and became an ordained Methodist minister. He was affiliated with the Jennings Institute in Aurora, where he later established the Aurora Commercial College. He became known for his mastery of ornamental penmanship and pen drawing as a form of art. He also became famous as the founder of the “Eclectic System” of shorthand. Two departments at North Western were organized by Professor Cross—the Department of Business and the Department of Fine Arts. Cross left the college for a position in Southern California University in 1879. What is particularly interesting about the statement above is that the bookmark has his name, “J.G. Cross, M.A.” with the word “Pres.” under it at the bottom. Does that mean president of his two departments? I simply don’t know. An excerpt from the diary of Guy Sabin who was a student at North Central from 1871 to 1874 has a single reference dated Wednesday, April 19, 1871: “Drew a theorem in the Geometry class. Prof. Cross gave a lesson in writing today.” He charges $1.50 for 30 lessons, one hour and a half each. And that’s it—except for the information on the bookmark itself: Summer School J.G. Cross, M.A. As far as I am concerned, good riddance to shorthand in the office. While its original purpose is commendable (as is its ongoing role in the courtroom), the fact that it evolved—or more accurately, regressed—into yet another pink tether lashing women to the un-escapable secretarial role for decades makes it rot in my eyes. I love this bookmark, and I am fascinated by the history of shorthand. But I am very glad I failed that long-ago class, and even happier that such classes themselves failed the modern office. Bookmark specifications: Eclectic Shorthand Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines has reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, nearly 1,300 bookmarks and approximately the same number of books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She is a member of the National Books Critics Circle (NBCC) as well as a longtime book design judge for Publishers Marketing Association’s Benjamin Franklin Awards. Contact Lauren.
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