The last few days have been inmportant ones in the history of shorthand, for they witnessed the death of Andrew J. Grahan at Orange, N. J., and the conferring of the order of knighthood by Qucen Victoria upon Isaac Pittman.
Pittman, who is now past 80 years of age, is the father of the modern art of verba- tim reporting, and Graham, who put out a system of his own, based upon Pittman's, was one of the first to practice the art in America.
Pittman's invention was the result of a change of religious faith on his part. In 1835, when he was 22 years old, he was a teacher in an English school conducted under the auspices of the Church of England. The writings of Swedenborg fell into his hands, and Pittman became a convert to the doctrines set forth in them. This necessi- tated his giving up his situation, after which he opened a school in Bath. He turned his attention to spelling reform, inventing first an alphabet containing a character for every sound, very similar in appearance to the common Roman alphabet. Then he went a step further and phonographic shorthand was the result. It is probably not as. serting too much to say that Mr. Pittman's invention is one of the ten or twelve most beneficial of the entire century. It has completely revolutionized reporting and letter writing.
Just how many shorthand writers there are in New York it would be difficult to state, probably from 4500 to 5000. The number has increased with great rapidity during the last three or four years, and there are now probably more women than men in New York, who make their living in this way. In 1887 there were about 2500 shorthand writers here all told, of whom about 1000 were women. The first woman to write shorthand here was a Mrs. Stafford. She began her work about twenty-five years ago. Prior to that time it was held that women could not write shorthand. Her success, however, was so marked as to make her famous and induce large numbers of other women to follow in her footsteps. The first man to write shorthand here was Dr. Houston, a newspaper reporter. He began about forty-live years ago. The introduc- tion of the typewriting machines gave shorthand writing its great boom.
"The pay of shorthand writers?" said an expert reporter to the writer yesterday, "is not what it used to be, the truth being quite as greatly exaggerated oftentimes con- cerning it as regarding speed. Official court reporters in New York get from $2000 to $3000 a year. Shorthand clerks get all the way from $8, for which many rather inex- pert young girls work. up to $25 and $35, but those who receive the latter figure are very few in number. Business shorthand writers do not need often to write more than sixty or eighty words a minute, and when they write faster, it is but for a few minutes at a time. Very few writers can sustain 150 words a minute, and the talk of writing 250 words is rank nonsense. Most of the big stories of phenomenal shorthand feats come from the far West. The farther away from New York the source of the story the higher the rate. Not long ago there was a yarn about a man who was ambitious to
