Thomas Shelton (stenographer)

Life

Nothing certain is known about Thomas Shelton's origin and education, though he was thought to come from the well-known Shelton family of Norfolk. During the English Civil War he sided with Parliament and held Puritan religious sympathies. He earned his living teaching shorthand in London for thirty years while developing his stenographic systems, and sold his books from his house.

Shelton's shorthand

Shelton published his first shorthand system in 1626 under the title Short-Writing; from 1635 onward it was called Tachygraphy, Ancient Greek for 'speedy writing'. The system used easy symbols for consonants, sometimes resembling alphabetical letters, while vowels were indicated by the height of the following consonant. For example, the B symbol with L directly above meant 'ball', with L below meant 'bull', and with L on the top right meant 'bell'.

A vowel at the end of a word was shown by a point in the appropriate position, and there were separate symbols for initial vowels, frequent prefixes and suffixes, and consonant connections. A drawback was that vowels and diphthongs were not always distinguished: the symbols for 'bat' could also mean 'bait' or 'bate', and those for 'bot' could mean 'boot' or 'boat', leaving interpretation to context. The system was easy to learn, leading to more than 20 editions of Tachygraphy between 1626 and 1710, with German editions from 1679 to 1743 and a French edition in Paris in 1681.

Users included Samuel Pepys, John Byrom, and US President Thomas Jefferson. In 1650, the year of his death, Shelton published another shorthand system, Zeiglographia, which saw 10 editions through 1687 but did not become as widespread as Tachygraphy. Zeiglographia was used by Sir Isaac Newton and Thomas Bayes.