Isaac Pitman’s Shorthand

Humans have been writing in abbreviated ways as long as writing has existed. In the 19th century, Isaac Pitman developed – and marketed – a system of shorthand that became widely adopted.

Research:

• Baker, Alfred. “The Life of Sir Isaac Pitman.” London. Pitman. 1919. Accessed online: https://archive.org/details/centenlifeofsiri00bakeuoft/page/34/mode/2up
• Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Sir Isaac Pitman". Encyclopedia Britannica, 8 Jan. 2025, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Isaac-Pitman
• Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Pitman shorthand". Encyclopedia Britannica, 18 Apr. 2016, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pitman-shorthand
• Miller, Genesie. “A Brief on Shorthand.” Utah Division of Archives and Records. April 11, 2023. https://archives.utah.gov/2023/04/11/a-brief-on-shorthand/
• “Sir Isaac Pitman.” The Vegetarian. 1895. https://archive.org/details/vegetarianmonthl00unse_0/page/122/mode/2up?q=sir+isaac
• Pitman, Benn. “Sir Isaac Pitman, His Life and Labors.” Cincinnati. C.J. Krehbiel. 1902. https://archive.org/details/sirisaacpitmanhi00pitmuoft/page/48/mode/2up
• Pitman, Isaac. “Phonotypic Journal, for the Year 1845.” Vol. 4. Phonographic Institution. 1845. https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=K-gOAQAAIAAJ&pg=GBS.PP7&hl=en
• Russon, Allien R.. "shorthand". Encyclopedia Britannica, 10 Nov. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/topic/shorthand
• Triggs, T.  (2009, October 08). Pitman, Sir Isaac (1813–1897), deviser of a system of shorthand writing. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-22322

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So, uh, no, Staratu
came out because of that. I have, of course been

(00:23):
deep in my Dracula bram Stoker rabbit hole, yeah, which
I've mentioned on recent shows. It had been a little
while since I reread the original English language version of Dracula,
and after I reread Powers of Darkness, which is the
Icelandic version, which when it was translated back into English,

(00:44):
reveals a lot of differences from the original. We talked
about that a little on our bram Stoker episode. There's
some fun scholarship around it, and whether or not bram
Stoker actually prepared a different version for Sweden and Iceland,
or whether some interpreter just took some things upon themselves.

(01:05):
It's pretty interesting thing if you want to get into that.
But after I reread that, I then was like, well,
I think I need to go back to the eighteen
ninety seven novel and compare them. This is not a
Halloween episode, so don't worry with all this gothic talk.
But what jumped out at me. Even more than just
trying to track the variations in the narrative was just

(01:25):
how often shorthand is mentioned in the book as a
plot point. At one point, Jonathan Harker writes a letter
to Mina in Shorthand while he is captive in Transylvania,
the idea being that the villainous titular count will not
be able to read shorthand, and then in Mina's journal
entries in the book, she mentions how she's been learning

(01:47):
shorthand so she can help her future husband in his work.
She also presents some notes to Van Helsing in Shorthand
when she first meets him as kind of a burn
after she feels infantilized him because she wants to show
him that she is very smart and accomplished. She feels
very guilty about doing this almost instantly because Van Helting

(02:09):
can't read shorthand and turns out to be a very
nice man. But all of this got my brain wondering
about why bram Stoker might be so focused on shorthand.
So now we're going to talk about shorthand during this
time period. There was a lot going on with shorthand.
At the time, it had become very very popular in
the couple of decades leading up to this, and that's

(02:34):
largely due to one person, because it turns out of
that if you search online for the inventor of shorthand,
one name comes up from the nineteenth century, even though
there have been various forms of systematized shorthand or abbreviated
writing in play for literal centuries. But today we are

(02:55):
going to talk about that one person that comes up,
Isaac Pittman, and how he developed and marketed a system
of shorthand that became very widely adopted in the nineteenth
century when Bram Stoker was writing his book. Yes, So,
if by chance you don't know what shorthand is, it's
an abbreviated way to write, and it's often used for

(03:16):
taking down notes or recording what a person is saying verbatim.
There are lots of different names that have been used
for it, including stenography, to kigraphy, bracigraphy, and as we'll
see in today's story, a lot of other stuff. This
can really look like indecipherable scribbles to somebody who was

(03:36):
not familiar with the system being used, and it's really
not a modern invention. Although what we are talking about
is the nineteenth century today. There have been systematized abbreviation
methods for writing almost as long as there have been
written languages. Xenophon, a Greek historian who was born circa
four thirty BCE, used it when he wrote down the

(03:59):
Memoirs of Crates. Both Chinese and Japanese languages have their
own abbreviated writing schemes, as do a lot of other languages.
The Diary of Samuel Peeps, often referenced on this show,
was written in shorthand, and Martin Luther wrote his sermons
in shorthand. In fact, a lot of average people wrote

(04:20):
in shorthand in previous stages of history, sometimes to record
events unfolding around them, but also because they could just
rapidly get their thoughts down on paper and then revise
and refine them as they copied those notes into a
long hand form. That's a practice that comes up in
today's show as well. We won't go through all the
various people who worked on their own shorthand methods, but

(04:43):
we will mention one in particular because it was used
by today's main subject, to Isaac Pittman, and also because
the book we're about to name has just an entertainingly
long title, and you know we love those. In seventeen
eighty six, Samuel Taylor published an essay intended to establish
a standard for an universal system of scenography or shorthand

(05:07):
writing upon such simple and approved principles as have never
before been offered to the public, whereby a person in
a few days may instruct himself to write shorthand correctly,
and by a little practice cannot fail taking down any
discourse delivered in public. This cost one guinea that was

(05:29):
considered to be pricey enough that this book was an investment.
By that point, Taylor had been working on his system
for about thirteen years. He had created simpler versions of
nineteen letters of the alphabet because his system did not
need vowels in words that had more than one syllable,
and this also eliminated any consonants that were deemed to

(05:53):
be superfluous. Yeah, he was just like, hey, what about
instead of you write an A, you do this little dash.
She'll be fine. Uh. And that brings us to Isaac Pittman.
He is the person who is invoked frequently as the
inventor of shorthand, though that's obviously not really accurate. He
did though, come up with a new form of it,

(06:15):
and one that became incredibly popular, and he is a
very interesting figure. So that is why we are stepping
away from my initial plan of just doing a history
of stenography to really talk about him in his life.
Isaac Pittman was born in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England, on January fourth,
eighteen thirteen. His father, Samuel Pittman, worked in the textile industry,

(06:37):
and his mother was Maria Davis Pittman. The family included
ten other children, of which Isaac was the third, and
they were very religious. Samuel was the superintendent of a
Sunday school. From a young age, Isaac is said to
have been very fascinated with language and writing in the
ways in which ideas were recorded. As a child, Isaac

(07:01):
didn't get a lot of formal education. He later said
it was hardly worthy of mention, but he was so
curious as a kid that he managed to get a
pretty fair amount of self education from reading. In addition
to language, he devoured books about astronomy, and then that
led him to study math because he wanted to be
able to calculate the movements of celestial bodies. At this

(07:24):
point in time, astronomy and astrology had diverged for the
most part, but Pittman used his astronomy knowledge to write
horoscopes for his entire family. I don't know why, I
find that very charming. He also carried around a copy
of a grammar book that he studied whenever he had
a free moment. According to the account of a family friend,

(07:45):
from the time he was twelve, Isaac would copy little
bits from various books into a blank book that he
always kept with him, with the intention of memorizing anything
that he committed to its pages. A nineteen nineteen biography
of Pittman says that one of his pocket companions, which
still exists today, contained the entirety of a Greek grammar guide.

(08:08):
And to be clear, Isaac did attend school, even if
he didn't seem to think it was an especially robust amount.
In addition to the schooling that the Pittman children did get,
they also had music lessons in the evening. For a while,
their father had hired a woman to come in and
teach some music every night, and then Samuel also bought
two globes for them to study. Samuel also joined one

(08:31):
of the area's first lending libraries, and Isaac made regular
use of that membership. Isaac later wrote about how as
a teenager he came to be interested in shorthand. He noted, quote,
with that instinctive love of knowledge common to boys, I
began to study shorthand. I saw that it would be

(08:51):
a great advantage to write six times as fast as
I had been accustomed to. When I borrowed a book,
read it through, copied the alphabet and arbitrary words, and
have written shorthand ever since. His cousin, Charles Laverton, had
loaned him a book about the Samuel Taylor method of scenography,
and that was the beginning of a lifelong fascination and study.

(09:15):
Coming up, we're going to talk about Isaac's move into
the workforce, but first we'll pause for a sponsor break.
Pittman went right to work as a clerk in eighteen
twenty nine at the age of sixteen. His first job

(09:37):
was in James Edgel's cloth mill, where his father was
a supervisor, and then when his father opened his own
mill two years later, Isaac moved there to work, still
serving as a clerk. His older brother, Jacob once wrote
of Isaac quote. Isaac never had any of that rollicking
nonsense about him peculiar to most of us boys. Nor

(09:58):
do I remember his ever stopping on his way from
school to play, but home directly. He went either to
his books or to his work. And Isaac does seem
to have been pretty serious from an early age. As
a very young man, he became an advocate for temperance,
and he swore off drink for the rest of his life,

(10:19):
with one minor exception for a bit, and we'll talk
about that shortly. At the end of every twelve hour
work day, Isaac went home and read as much as
he could. He kept focusing on expanding his education. He
also got up at four a m. To read before work.
He had been really disappointed when he had to end

(10:39):
his school days to work full time, and he said
to have begged his father to let him go back.
As Samuel Pittman became more financially successful, he sent Isaac
to a specialty school for career training at the Training
College of British Foreign School Society. He got teaching credentials.
Isaac had already shown an interest in teaching, and he

(11:01):
had taught at the Sunday school. He did so well
at the training college that the headmaster wrote to Samuel, quote,
you may send me as many more of your children
as you can spare. Five more of Isaac's siblings took
that offer. Jacob, Joseph, Risella, Jane and Mary Pittman all
attended at various times. After getting his teaching certification, Isaac

(11:24):
went from clerking to a full time teaching position in
Lincolnshire at Barton upon Humber, at a school known as
Long's School. Long School had one hundred and twenty students,
and as master, Pittman made seventy pounds a year. In Marton,
Isaac dedicated himself not just to his students, but also
to the community. He gave free lectures on astronomy and

(11:47):
also on temperance, and he became a member of the
Methodist Church was very active in his church community. He
also prepared and distributed a temperance pamphlet to everyone in town,
which included the rhetoric quote ardent spirits, pure or mixed,
are pronounced by the highest authorities in our land to
be evil spirits. This is not generally believed faith is

(12:11):
weak because knowledge is imperfect. Not till lately has the
old fashioned falsity been exploded that a comfortable glass does
one good. Spirits and poisons are synonymous terms. A few
years into his time at Barton, Isaac got married to
missus Mary Holgate. Mary was the widow of George Holgate,

(12:33):
who had left her pretty well off. The two of
them got married the day after Isaac's twenty second birthday,
on January fifth, eighteen thirty five. Because of Mary's financial standing,
Isaac was able to live a much more luxurious life
than a teacher normally would have. But they moved from
their home a year after the wedding because Isaac was

(12:55):
offered a job at a new nonconformist school in Watten
under Edge and Lecester. This move had the advantage of
bringing Isaac closer to his brother Jacob, who was also
teaching by this time and had married a woman who
was also a teacher. Their family was like teachers teachers teachers.
His sibling group did a lot of teaching. As you'll see,

(13:18):
he brings some of his other siblings in to teach
under him. Isaac and Mary lived at Wotton for a
little more than three years, and these were very important
times for him. For one, he was introduced to the
works of Emmanuel Swedenborg by a man named John Kingwell Bragg.
He happened to meet Bragg by chance when the men
were sharing a stage coach. Swedenborg's religious ideas were controversial.

(13:43):
In the shortest version. He didn't believe in the Holy Trinity,
and he thought that he had a direct interaction line
with God. He believed that the spiritual was something that
was within every person at their core. And all of
this might sound kind of benign today, but even sixty
years after Swedenborg's death, when he was being encountered by Isaac,

(14:04):
these were contentious and some people believed dangerous ideas. But
Isaac Pittman was fascinated and he really thought Swedenborg was
onto something. He became a Swedenborgian essentially, and he paid
for that fascination because for these beliefs, Pittman was turned
out of his church and he also lost his teaching job.

(14:26):
While the institutions he had been part of changed their
relationships with him, Pittman made a lot of changes to
his life himself during this time as well. Up to
eighteen thirty seven, while he spoke out against spiritust liquors,
he still like a lot of people, drank beer, but
he completely cut that out of his life. That year,

(14:47):
he also significantly changed his eating habits. After being asked
to kill a bird for the cook to use to
make dinner, Pittman was not able to do it, and
he started to think about his relationship with animals and
their use as food. He came away from those reflections
a vegetarian. Later he would share that his ongoing issues

(15:09):
with upset stomach and heartburn went away as soon as
he changed his diet in this way. He wrote the
following in eighteen seventy nine in a letter to the Times, quote,
My dietetic experience is simply this. About forty years ago,
dyspepsia was carrying me to the grave. Medical advisers recommended
animal food three times a day instead of once, and

(15:32):
a glass of wine. On this regimen, I was nothing bettered,
but rather grew worse. I avoided the meat and the wine,
gradually recovered my digestive power, and have never since then
known by any pain that I have a stomach. I
love that turn of phrase. I wouldn't even know I
had a stomach. It never bothers me. So this is

(15:54):
all a lot to go through, right, losing your religious community,
losing your job, your diet in a pretty significant way,
particularly for the time, and then cutting out that last
bit of alcohol. But Isaac was still a very young man.
He didn't need to worry about money thanks to his
wife's income, and after having been dismissed from that job

(16:16):
but still wanting to teach, he regrouped and he opened
his own school. He put it on the same street
as the school that had let him go. I don't
know if that was just like the fortune of where
he was able to get a lot, or if it
literally was like a way to thumb his nose at them,
but free to set his own curriculum. One of the

(16:37):
subjects that Pittman taught his students was shorthand. He had
been using Samuel Taylor's system for years. At that point,
it was the only way he took notes. He also
wrote the first drafts of his correspondence that way, so
that he could capture what he wanted to say before
transcribing it into longhand. And so he started teaching Samuel

(16:58):
Taylor's method of shorthand to his students, But soon he
realized that there was a big obstacle to this effort.
There still wasn't a reasonably priced and simple to understand
book to use as a study guide or a reference,
so he set out to create one. He wrote his
guide based on what he knew was needed in practical coursework,

(17:20):
and prepared it for submission to publisher Samuel Bagster. Bagster
accepted the manuscript, but before putting it to print, he
got a colleague whose name we don't know to look
at it, and this colleague wrote to Bagster and said, quote,
the system mister Pittman has sent to you is already
on the market. Now. If you will compile a new system,

(17:40):
I think you will be more likely to succeed in
your object to popularize shorthand there will be novelty about it.
What this existing book was is also unclear, and so
is why someone like Pittman wouldn't have known about this
book already existing. But Bagster took this back to Isaac
Pittman in May of eighteen thirty seven and encouraged him

(18:04):
to do as this feedback suggested and create a whole
new system. Isaac spent his summer dedicated to this new endeavor.
He was wrapping up work on another project that he
had been in the midst of for Bagster, that was
a corrected edition of the Comprehensive Bible, and that project
had started. I love this so much. After Isaac wrote

(18:27):
to Bagster, who was the Bible's publisher and was a
very well known Bible publisher, with a list of errors
that he had found in the circulating version of it.
And so then Bagster was like, fine, do you want
to just work for me and make a corrected edition?
And he did, Please don't do that to publishers. So
that's not the way to get a job today. But

(18:48):
with that Bible almost done, Isaac could focus on this
new and apparently thrilling challenge of forming a shorthand system.
Isaac's brother Ben later wrote, quote, we talked of nothing
else on our way to and from school and in
our occasional morning walks, and intense was the joy of
my brother at the completion of his long task the

(19:09):
Comprehensive Bible and the opportunity it afforded him to give
his time and thoughts, as well as his heart, to
new ideas in the field of experiment and usefulness. Then
opening up to him Pimman's idea differed from what had
come before in one very important way, and we'll talk
about it after we hear from the sponsors that keep

(19:30):
the show going. Isaac Pittman had the idea to develop
a new system of shorthand that was based on sounds
representing words phonetically rather than just abbreviating the words and

(19:51):
making simpler letters. He started with vowels because that seemed
the most lacking in existing systems. You'll recall that Taylor
often did away with them altogether. Pittman was really nervous
about figuring out those vowels and creating a new approach
to shorthand. But once he did, it was as if
the whole system became almost obvious to him. He described

(20:14):
this as follows quote. I saw the truth, practiced it,
and it became delightful. In a few months, I got
clear of the shallow waters and breakers of our present
orthography and committed myself to the boundless deep of phonographic writing.
So this new form that he came up with was
tested in the classroom. Isaac's younger brothers taught at his school,

(20:37):
and his brother Ben, who was only fifteen at this point,
learned the new shorthand and taught it to a class
of a couple of dozen students to test it. Then
the entire Pittman family learned it and started using it
to continue to test its value. When Isaac had compiled
his new system and written out a guide for it

(20:58):
in manuscript form, he brought it to Bagster before eighteen
thirty seven was out. At the age of twenty four,
Isaac had published Stenographic Soundhand. This was not a big
fancy publication scenario where Bagster handled everything. It sounds a
lot more like kind of a DIY effort, with Pittman

(21:19):
getting helped to assemble the books after Bagster had the
leaves printed. This is evidenced by a charming note that
Isaac wrote to Bagster quote, I have sent two hundred
stenographies for present sale, and the rest to make up
fifteen hundred will follow by wagon in about a week.
I think I shall want fifteen hundred for myself. Please

(21:40):
let me know in a month or two how they sell.
I must beg pardon for the manner of sewing in
this two hundred. The next will be dark colored thread
and done properly. Also, the labels will be more neatly
in the center. The stitching was done by the elder
boys in my school who have learned the system. They
are quite delighted to spend two or three days in

(22:02):
this sort of half play. Since this first essay, we
have had a lesson on the subject from a stationer.
I love this so much. Yeah, that he had the
kids at his school sew together his books, and I
was like, you're doing it wrong. You're doing it wrong.
Let me get a pro and ear to tell you
how to do it well. This also highlights how like

(22:24):
printing and book binding are two different things. Yes, well,
and you know there were books that Bagster was handling
everything for like he was known, like I said, as
a Bible publisher, but he was kind of doing this
as a little bit of a favor, and they wanted
to make it an inexpensive book so anybody could afford it.

(22:44):
So he was like, I can't pay for the binding
because that will drive the price up. But if we
can figure out a way to do that, then sure,
that's no problem. I just I love everything about this.
According to a nineteen nineteen biography of Pittman written by
Alfred Baker, quote, the Pitmanic system was introduced to the
world quietly and without advertisement. As far as can be discovered,

(23:08):
its author engaged in no special efforts to make it known.
He was indeed far more concerned in affecting improvements in
his work for the contemplated second edition. Pittman called this
first edition a feeler to see how it was received,
and he was continuing to teach it as school and
work on revisions for all this time, this wasn't his

(23:30):
only focus. Two years after the first edition of Cinographics
Soundhand was released, Pittman moved to Bath and started another
school there. One possible draw was the Swedenborgian Church that
had been established there, which Isaac and Mary joined right
after the move. Isaac meanwhile was preparing a second edition

(23:52):
of the book, which he wanted to have a catchier title.
He and Bagster landed at phonography, a new name, new thing.
According to Bagster. Yeah, there's a whole interesting account of
them kind of landing at that word and Isaac being like,
that's not really a word yet, and Bagster's like, right,
because we're gonna make it a word, because no one

(24:15):
knows how to describe this kind of shorthand. So while
this may have had a quiet start. By eighteen forty six,
Isaac's shorthand phonography system had become quite popular. This was because,
in part in eighteen thirty nine, a uniform postage law
was passed in the UK called the Penny Postage Law,

(24:35):
and it went into effect in eighteen forty and that
law stated that any letter could be sent for one penny,
and Pittman was ready for this change. He had made
a penny plate laid out in his system in a
very abbreviated way, that he could mail to school headmasters
to get them interested in phonography. They could also per

(24:56):
a note He included share this with students if they wished,
and he he also offered on that brief print the
note that quote any person may receive lessons from the
author by post gratuitously. He also let people send him
their work and their exercises in the system, and he
would personally correct any errors and make notations and send

(25:19):
it back. This was essentially the beginning of correspondence courses,
at least in the modern sense. Incidentally, Pittman got really
angry at people who started charging for this same service,
even though he had originally planned to do so himself,
but he changed his mind and made it free, hoping
that that would help entice more people to start using it.

(25:41):
But then he was like, you should not get paid
a wage to do this. I'll do it all for free,
even if I work nineteen hours a day, which is
not wise. Next, he arranged lecture tours during school breaks
so he could go out and teach people phonography and
explain and its usefulness as quote a method of writing

(26:03):
all languages by means of signs that express sounds. To
prove that, he included exercises in his book that included
multiple languages, including the one hundredth Psalm, which he featured
in French, German, Italian, Chinese, and Hebrew. He would also
have the audience members at his lectures give him dictation

(26:23):
in foreign languages so he could write them on a
large blackboard in his version of phonography. Realistically, it doesn't
quite work in all languages. There are languages that don't
have the same sounds in them correct, but it does
work well with quite a few of them. Apparently. Yeah,

(26:44):
I will confess I have never used it or learned shorthand,
but apparently there are a lot of languages that will
perfectly fit into this system. But thanks to all of
these marketing efforts, Pittman's system did start to catch on,
and his writing lesson supplements and books started selling incredibly well.

(27:05):
Phonography was reprinted many times to meet this demand, and
in eighteen forty six, when it really got popular, he
actually shut down the school to use that space for
more print facilities. The school morphed at that point and
it became the first phonetic institute. He would have to
move in the years that followed to larger and larger

(27:26):
facilities as demand for phonetic books and information continued to
grow and to spread his method even farther than he could.
With this new institute, he started a periodical, the Phonetic Journal.
During this time, he was also working on another concept,
phonetic spelling reform. He was trying to reform spelling in

(27:48):
English to a more rational system without all the odd
exceptions that are so common. This was sort of a
natural follow on from his phonography work, as he ended
up printing a second journal, phone Graphic Correspondent. He was
the editor. He set in a lecture to the Phonographic
Corresponding Society in eighteen forty four quote. Many attempts have

(28:09):
been made to reform the errors of our written language,
but hitherto without success. There was no desire created in
the public mind for a consistent system of orthography. Now,
by your benevolent exertions and spreading abroad the truths of
phonetic writing, a desire has been created for phonotype, a
desire that will increase on that which it feeds. He

(28:33):
collaborated with mathematician Alexander John Ellis on creating the English
phonotypic alphabet, which never really caught on, much like all
of the other attempts to make English phonetically spelled. Yeah,
there is in the note for this episode a link
to one of his publications that is typeset phonetically and

(29:02):
it is one of the hardest things I have ever
tried to make my way through. Admittedly some of that
is just me, but I'm curious if anybody wants to
go look for these to see how they do. On
April twenty first, eighteen sixty one, Isaac got married a
second time, this time to a woman named Isabella Masters.

(29:23):
His first wife, Mary, had died in eighteen fifty four,
but the specifics of her passing kind of eluded me.
His brother's biography even mentions it only in passing and
actually references Isaac's feelings for another woman. We'll talk about
that a little bit behind the scenes. On Friday, Isaac
and Isabella welcomed their first child, Alfred, a year after

(29:45):
the wedding, and then a second son, Ernest, was born
in eighteen sixty four. By the end of the eighteen fifties,
Isaac had started setting aside money to save up for
a purpose built facility to house his institute. He eventually
bought a block of buildings at auction in eighteen seventy three.
For this project, we hired architect Frederick John Williams to

(30:07):
design the new building, which made use of some of
the existing structures on the lot. The resulting building was
four floors plus a basement. When it was complete, Isaac
fitted it out with the latest printing technology, a steam
powered press. His staff had a steep learning curve with it,
and there were innumerable stumbling blocks to keeping it up

(30:29):
and running. And then it was also so loud that
a neighbor made a noise complaint. It turned out that
running a press was really challenging, but he did stay
in the printing business, and eventually he moved into creating
a larger publishing company. When his sons reached adulthood, Isaac
formed a publishing house with them called Isaac Pittman and Sons.

(30:52):
They printed the various books and study materials that Isaac designed,
and then eventually expanded into a more generalized education press.
That press continued into the twentieth century, and then it
was eventually purchased by another publisher in the nineteen eighties,
so it went on for a long time. Less than
a decade after starting the publishing company with his sons,

(31:15):
Isaac Pittman was knighted in eighteen ninety four. Two years
after that, in the autumn of eighteen ninety six, the
papers reported that Sir Isaac was quite ill with a
quote congestion of the lungs. He continued on for several months,
sometimes rallying some energy, but mostly having to stay in bed.

(31:35):
He was pragmatic about his health. He wrote to his brother, quote,
I must expect a continual decrease of strength until the
heart gives its last pulsation, and the angelic messengers who
wait on the dying draw out the spiritual body from
this one. Then I shall have a sound heart and
get to work in my new sphere of life. His

(31:57):
eighty fifth birthday party was celebrated with his friends at
home the following January. He was very weakened at this point,
but he was still managing the details of his press
from a wheelchair. He made all of the arrangements for
his January publications before his death on January twenty second,
eighteen ninety seven, at the age of eighty four. He

(32:19):
had sent a note shortly before he passed to his
minister which read quote, to those who ask how Isaac
Pittman passed away, say peacefully and with no more concern
than in passing from one room into another, to take
up some further employment. Many years after Isaac Pittman created
his system, he gave a lecture in which he talked

(32:41):
about the genesis of his method and his ongoing efforts
to refine it through use, which included quote, the shorthand
alphabet given in the first edition of Phonography contains the
elements of the present matured system, but in several of
its details, it was imperfect because it proceeded from a
finite mind. These imperfections were discovered by experience and removed

(33:06):
as a skillful anatomist can from three or four bones
construct the entire skeleton of an animal. So from three
or four shorthand signs or letters that have been acknowledged
from the commencement of shorthand writing is the best. For
certain letters, we can construct a natural shorthand alphabet. Pittman
shorthand lives on. It remains one of the three most

(33:30):
popular shorthand systems in the world, alongside the Greg method,
which came up just a few decades after him, and
the t Line methods. I found him to be such
a fascinating creature. M hmmm, I have very joyous email
to read. Oh good, this is very very joyous to

(33:50):
me personally. So this is from our listener Hannah, who
writes has nothing to do with history. Get ready. Hello.
Following up on my email from quite a while ago.
Thank you so much to Holly for all the advice
about Galaxy's Edge. Our original trip got postponed by quite
a bit, but we finally made it to Disney this
week and even got to do a full five day trip.

(34:10):
We did rope drop early access hours. We were even
the first in line to scan into the park and
we spent twelve full hours in Galaxies Edge. I cannot
wait to go back again. It was the coolest experience ever.
I could live there if they would let me. We
were able to ride Rise of the Resistance three times,
truly the most amazing ride I have ever been on,

(34:30):
even ties with the Haunted Mansion. For me, Hannah, we're
neck and neck. We feel the same. Smuggler's Run was
accepting parties of two in their single rider cue and
we walked on the ride six times in one hour.
I got pilot once and crashed the Millennium Falcon. I'm
so proud of you. Uh Ogus Cantina was fantastic and
I want to recreate their cocktails at home now. Ronto

(34:51):
Roasters and Docking Bay were so delicious, and I had
to exercise so much self control to not buy all
of the merch. Thank you again for all your advice,
and I hope you get to go to galaxy He's
Edge again soon too. Hannah and then Hannah sent pictures
of their trip and they look so delighted and joyous,
and it makes my heart so happy. I'm actually going
to Galaxies Edge in a couple of days. With my

(35:12):
best friend because I'm spoiled I, as Tracy knows, sometimes
I work from Galaxy's Edge. Sometimes I just decide I'm
going to work for Galaxy's Edge tomorrow and I we're
close enough it's a forty five minute flight, and go
down there, bring my laptops and in Toronto roasters and

(35:32):
type while I while I eat delicious things. It's a great,
great way to live. That is thanks to many Kajillian
business trips giving me all of the all of the
sky miles on Earth. I can just be like I'm
going goodbye. I hope everybody gets to do things like
that that delight them. Thank you so much for sharing
all of that with me, Hannah. It made me so

(35:52):
happy and made my heart very joyous to know that
you had a time as good as I hope for you.
So I hope you to go back again. I too,
would love to live there. If you would like to
write to us about your vacation's historical or Star Wars
or otherwise, you can do so at History Podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com. You can also subscribe to the show.

(36:15):
It's so easy. You could do it in the iHeartRadio
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