Ancient Inventions

Shorthand

It is difficult to say when the very earliest shorthand was developed. But according to his ancient biographer, the soldier and writer Xenonphon (around 430-354 B.C.) invented shorthand when drafting the memoirs of his mentor, the great philospher Socrates. Greek shorthand later became very popular among the civl service of the Roman Empire, until Marcus Tullius Tiro, a freed slave employed by the politician Cicero, invented the first Latin shorthand system in 63 B.C. Cicero, a lawyer, politician and orator, was noted for his long-winded speeches, so the motivation behind Tiro's invention is clear. His latin shorthand continued to be used in Europe for more than a thousand years.

Shorthand had also been invented in China by the tenth century A.D., as we can see from an anecdote told by the great Arab physician al-Razi (about A.D. 850-925). Al-Razi received as a houseguest a Chinese scholar who had learned fluent Arabic during his stay in Baghdad. A month or so before he had to return to China, he asked al-Razi if he could dictate to him the entire sixteen volumes of Galen, a clasical medical treatise from the ancient Greek world preserved by the Arabs:

I told him that he had not sufficient time to copy more than a small part of it, but he said: "I beg you to give me all your time until I go and to dictate to me as rapidly as possible. You will see that I shall write faster than you can dictate." So together with one of my students, we read Galen to him as fast as we could, but he wrote still faster. We did not believe that was he getting it [rigth] until we made a collation and found it exact throughout. I asked him how this could be, and he said, "We have in our country a way of writing which we call shorthand, and this is what you see. When we wish to write very fast, we use this style, and then afterwards transcribe it into the ordinary characters at will." And he added that an intelligent man who learns quickly cannot learn this style in under twenty years.

Al-Razi's guest had been using "grass writing" (tshao shu), or Chinese shorthand. Suprisingly this complex ancient Oriental system directly influenced the development of modern European shorthand. During the Middle Ages Latin shorthand fell out of use, having become associated, through its use of symbols, with witchcraft. The first modern attempt at shorthand was made in 1587 by Timothy Bright, who invented a system of English shorthand using ideograms arranged in vertical columns, inspired by Chinese "grass writing."

Read about other ancient inventions that shaped history and paved the way for modern inventions.