TIRONIAN NOTES.
Courtesy of Isaac Pitman & Sons
Even Rome’s greatest men, the Emperor Titus among them, did not scorn to master Tiro’s notes. In a later age the sermons of the church fathers, the great Origen, Chrysostom, St. Augustine and others, were noted down in shorthand; so also in the fifteenth century were the sermons of Savonarola. Roger Williams wrote shorthand; so did Samuel Pepys, the author of the famous diary. Among later celebrities who mastered the art was Charles Dickens, who, in his early days, used the Gurney system in reporting speeches in the House of Commons.
Ultimately, however, the modern principle of “phonography” came into possession of the field. This system, evolved through the labors of Isaac Pitman and others, used characters to represent the spoken sound of words instead of their spellings, and was such an obvious improvement that, in its various forms, it has become practically universal.
Here we encounter a singular fact. After a history covering ages, the great improvement in shorthand, which finally perfected the art, was delayed by destiny until the very eve of the invention of the typewriter. Its coming, just at this time, seems, in the light of later events, almost prophetic. For it is obvious that shorthand, even as perfected by phonography, would have been restricted, without the typewriter, to a limited field of usefulness. As a time saver, shorthand is clearly a half measure, and, so long as the art of transcribing notes in long hand could be done only at pen-writing speed, the swiftest shorthand writer could render only a partial time-saving service. In the days before typewriting, it would have required more than one stenographic secretary to free the busy executive from the bondage of the pen. He would have needed a complete retinue of them, to whom he would dictate in rotation, which is exactly what the great Julius Caesar is said to have done. But the Caesars of history are few, and equally few are the notables of the past, in any field of effort, who had the means or the inspiration to provide themselves with a whole battery of stenographers.
In this fact we find one outstanding distinction of the typewriter as a labor saver—it perfected the process which shorthand had begun—it completely emancipated the executive. When we talk of “labor saving” we usually think in terms of manual labor. But when the typewriter freed the executive from pen slavery it did more than save mere hand labor. It saved and conserved the very highest quality of brain labor. True, the busy man of affairs works as hard today as he ever did, but the typewriter has made his labor more productive. It has relieved him of the old pen drudgery, so that the greater part of his time may now be devoted to creative tasks. It is common to speak of the higher efficiency of the present-day business man, as though men themselves had grown bigger in our own times. Perhaps they have. But let us not fail to credit a part of this growth to the emancipation achieved through the stenographer and the writing machine.
The typewriter, like every great advance in human progress, came in the fullness of its own time. Looking back over the past, we can now see why it came when it did, and why it could not have come before. In the days when commerce was smaller, when writing tasks were fewer, when the ability to write or even to read was limited, when life itself was simpler, the world could get along after its own fashion without the writing machine. As education grew, as business grew, as the means for transportation grew, as all human activities grew, so the need grew, and it grew much faster than any real consciousness of the need, which seems always to be the way with our poor humanity. It is this fact which explains the struggle and frequently the tragedy in the early history of so many great inventions. They do not come in response to a demand, but in recognition of a need, and this recognition, in its early phases, is usually confined to the few. These few are the real pioneers of progress, and it is through their labors and struggles, often unappreciated and unrewarded, that humanity advances in all the civilized and useful arts.
It was even so with the writing machine!