4 January: Boreham on Isaac Pitman

Flying Fingers
Journalists and their readers would stand convicted of base ingratitude if they failed to notice that the 11th of January marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Sir Isaac Pitman.[1]

Biographers very frequently find occasion to comment on a certain striking fitness in the hour at which their hero was ushered into the theatre of his activities. The time was peculiarly suited to the distinctive genius of the man. This was never more marked than in the case of Sir Isaac Pitman. He was born in 1813. It was a period of unprecedented storm and strife; the French Revolution was just behind and the battle of Waterloo just before. Moreover, the birth of Pitman preceded by only a few weeks the birth of Livingstone. Men like Gladstone, Tennyson, Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were among the babies of the period. Momentous events were everywhere taking shape. History on a grand scale was in the making. Journalism and commerce were both entering upon a larger life. The growing possibilities of the newspaper, and the imperative necessity for greater expedition and efficiency in its control, were simultaneously forcing themselves upon general attention.

Nobody supposes for a moment that Sir Isaac Pitman was the inventor of shorthand. In his essay on Lord Bacon, Macaulay quotes Seneca as saying that in his time the practice of reporting had been brought to such perfection that a shorthand writer could keep pace with the most rapid speaker. And Plutarch tells us that many of the orations of Cicero were placed on record by the skill of a shorthand writer named Tiro. The younger Pliny never travelled without a stenographer. To the nimble fingers of such writers we undoubtedly owe the verbatim reports that adorn the New Testament records. Of that period Marcus Martial, the Emperor Domitian's favourite poet wrote:

Swift though the words, the pen still swifter sped:
The hand had finished ere the tongue had said.

And it goes without saying that only by the use of taught shorthand could the voluminous utterances of Chrysostom have been preserved to us.

A New Tool For A New Task
If, however, Sir Isaac Pitman did not invent shorthand, he did something equally worthy of our gratitude. He, overhauled it scientifically and then simplified, beautified and popularised it. Until he applied his genius to the task, the work of memorising any applied system of stenography was a toil of the most forbidding proportions. Indeed a clever satirist remarked that, if a man had such a prodigious memory as to be able to retain the countless and complicated hieroglyphics of these primitive systems, then that same memory, without any such adventitious aids, should have been equal to the ordeal of repeating verbatim all that the most fluent and diffuse speaker had said. It may not have been quite as bad as that, but the facts demonstrate beyond all question that it was bad enough to deter all but a few valiant spirits from embarking upon the conquest of the winged art.

In 1837, however, Pitman published his first textbook, in which, instead of arbitrary signs for words, sounds were represented by definite characters, suggested with artistic taste and scientific precision. One of his fundamental principles was that if a symbol looks ugly, it has been wrongly written; the thing must flow rhythmically and attractively. The primer was offered at the modest price of fourpence, for its author was determined that, so far as possible, it should be brought within the reach of the lowliest in the land. The appearance of the book was perfectly timed. In that selfsame year, her youthful Majesty Queen Victoria ascended the British throne. The hammers were ringing in the dockyards on the hulls of the first steamers that were to cross Atlantic waters. The Reform Bill had recently become law, and the entire people was conscious of a new and more vital interest in parliamentary proceedings and political debate. The profession of the journalist was being invested with a fresh and more popular significance and the time was exactly ripe for just such an innovation as Pitman's cheap little textbook provided. Commerce, too, detected at a glance the immense possibilities latent in the scheme, and the day of the shorthand clerk immediately dawned.

Worldwide Appropriation And Appreciation
The most eloquent testimony to the value of Sir Isaac Pitman's invention is represented by the use that has been made of it. Its renown was soon echoed all over the world. A few years after its first appearance in London it was introduced into Spain. In 1882 a French version was published, and, a year later, a further adaptation was issued for Italians. In swift succession, Welsh, German, Dutch, Bengali, Scandinavian, Marathi, Tamil, Chinese, Japanese, Malagasy, and numerous other editions were printed.

In 1887—the year in which the jubilees of both the Queen and the system were celebrated—Sir Isaac received the most convincing evidences of the nation's gratitude and admiration. Tributes were showered upon him in the wealthiest profusion by the most eminent statesmen, the princes of commerce, the captains of industry, the halls of learning and all the public bodies. Seven years later, at Windsor Castle, he received the honour of knighthood at the hands of the Queen, with Her Majesty's personal thanks. When, not long afterwards, he died, the newspapers of the whole world vied with each other in resounding appreciation of one whose life-work had immensely relieved the strain of modern journalism and made possible many of its most remarkable achievements. As the years go by, Sir Isaac's system will probably be adapted and improved beyond all recognition; but the day will never come when men will cease to think with veneration of that master-mind by whose practical genius the deft and clever system of phonetic writing was originally established.

F W Boreham

Image: Isaac Pitman

[1] This editorial appears in the Hobart Mercury on January 11, 1947. It is interesting to note that the F. W. Boreham Mission Training Centre at Auburn in Melbourne has Dr. Boreham's Certificate of Proficiency in Phonography, certifying "that Mr. F. W. Boreham has a thorough knowledge of my system of phonography or phonetic shorthand, and is a Member of the Phonetic Society." It is signed by Eizak Pitman and dated 13 April, 1887.