Author: Isaac Pitman

Phonography was the name Isaac Pitman gave his shorthand, because it recorded sounds rather than spellings, and The Phonographic Teacher and its companions are the drill books that taught it. He set the system out in 1837 in a penny pamphlet called Stenographic Sound-Hand, then spent sixty years revising it, running a phonetic institute in Bath, publishing his own manuals and answering learners by post. It worked: for a century Pitman was what a court reporter, a secretary or a journalist learned, and versions were made for a dozen other languages. Born in Trowbridge in 1813, a weaver's son, he was dismissed from a teaching post for joining the Swedenborgians, campaigned for spelling reform, and ate no meat for the last half of his life. He was knighted in 1894 and died in 1897.