4th January: Sir Isaac Pitman

Today is the birthdate of Sir Isaac Pitman, who invented shorthand. He was born in 1813.

1. Isaac Pitman was born in Trowbridge in Wiltshire. He was the third of eleven children born to mill manager Samuel Pitman and his wife, Maria.
2. From the age of thirteen, he was home schooled. He had to leave the local grammar school because of his health - the overcrowded classrooms gave him fainting fits.
3. He must have overcome this health problem eventually, for after leaving school he went to the Training College of the British and Foreign School Society, which in those days took all of five months. He was a teacher in Barton-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire and Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire. He later started his own school in Bath, where he lived in Royal Crescent.
4. He opened his own school because he'd been fired from the previous one, for holding unconventional religious beliefs. He was a Swedenborgian, a movement which believed in the writings of the scientist and theologian Emmanuel Swedenbourg, who claimed to have received a new revelation from Jesus Christ through heavenly over a period of at least twenty-five years. He was one of the founding members of a Swedenborgian church in Bath and remained active until he died. The church had a stained glass Window dedicated to him in 1909.
5. One of Pitman's lifelong passions was spelling reform. He believed spelling in the English language should be made simpler and based on the sounds of the words. He published numerous pamphlets on the subject. This interest resulted directly in his phonetic shorthand system which was first published in a pamphlet in 1837. He believed in spelling reform so strongly that in the 1881 Census, he entered his name as "Eisak Pitman".
6. His motto was "time saved is life gained".
7. In 1843, he left the teaching profession and went into publishing and printing full time. His company, Isaac Pitman and Sons, would become one of the world's leading educational publishers and training businesses with offices in London, Bath, New York City, Melbourne, Johannesburg, Toronto and Tokyo. With the introduction of uniform postage rates across the UK in 1840, Pitman came up with the idea of the correspondence course as a way for people to learn shorthand - students would transcribe texts into shorthand onto a postcard and send them to Pitman to be marked. The training business evolved into two separate businesses: Pitman Training and JHP Training (now learndirect).
8. His shorthand system became very popular with journalists, coming at a time of expansion in the Newspaper industry. It made their work a whole lot easier.
9. At the age of about 24, Pitman gave up drinking alcohol and became a vegetarian the following year. He claimed being a tee-total vegetarian was the reason for his good health and ability to work long hours. He was vice president of the Vegetarian Society.
10. His memorial plaque on the north wall of Bath Abbey reads, "His aims were steadfast, his mind original, his work prodigious, the achievement world-wide. His life was ordered in service to God and duty to man."

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