Pitman

Pitman, SIR ISAAC, founder of the Pitman system of Shorthand (q.v.), who was knighted in 1894, was born at Trowbridge, Wiltshire, 4th January 1813. His father, a factory overseer and afterwards cloth manufacturer, was superintendent of the poet Crabbe's Sunday-school. Young Pitman, a studious and religiously disposed youth, was for a time a clerk, and after some preliminary training taught a school at Barton-on-Humber (1832-36) and at Wotton-under-Edge, where he turned his attention to the popularising of shorthand, and issued through Bagster his Stenographic Sound Hand (1837). Copies of his second edition were put into circulation simultaneously with the introduction of the penny post in 1840. Dismissed from Wotton because he had joined the New (Swedenborgian) Church, he conducted a school at Bath (1839-43). Henceforward his career is the history of the development of shorthand and spelling reform. He wrote, travelled, and lectured in its interest, his working day commonly lasting from 6 A.M. till 10 P.M., with three hours for meals and relaxation. In 1842 he brought out the Phonetic Journal, with which the late A. J. Ellis was for a time associated. In 1845 premises were opened in London for the sale of Pitman's publications. In recognition of his exertions he was presented with £350 and a marble timepiece in 1862, and at a phonographic jubilee meeting in 1887 was presented with a marble bust of himself. He died 22d January 1897. In his early days he spent much of his narrow income in the cause. Up till 1890 he had issued from his Phonetic Institute, Bath, 150 different shorthand books, and his Phonographic Teacher was selling at the rate of 150,000 annually. From the date of issue 1,370,000 had been sold. There were also eighty-four shorthand associations, and a National Phonographic Society, whilst the subject had been recognised in the Education Code (1890) and the Technical Instruction Act of 1889, so that Pitman's labours of more than half a century have been crowned with success. About 95 per cent. of reporters in England, the colonies, and America use Pitman's system, which has been adapted to the Welsh, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, and Malagasy languages. It is estimated that its practitioners all over the world number above half a million. See T. A. Reed's Biography of Isaac Pitman (1890).