This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMaio. He had to master the pressure. That was clear from his first lesson.

If he didn't, if he didn't know how hard he was going to have to push. All sense, all meaning would be lost.

Was it think, or sink, or or zinc or kink? It all depended on how

much pressure he applied to the pen as it ran across the paper, thus determining the thickness

of the line. And that was the key, as much as the shape or the swoop, the angle, the direction

of the marks he would be making.

That was the master's stroke of Sir Isaac Pittman, when he devised his eponymous Pittman method,

which added, along with the lines themselves, the straight ones and the curved ones,

the ones of varying lengths, which his and other schools of shorthand used to transcribe the sound of words as they

are spoken rather than write them out as they are spelled. Sir Isaac codified varying thicknesses

of certain lines, which allowed the practitioner to use fewer total penstrokes, and therefore

get words down more quickly. If you, like Nathan Barron, were a teenager in New York City at the turn of the last century,

perhaps like him the child of Austrian immigrants, and you wanted to find a career off

the factory floor, upstairs in the office, perhaps, or at City Hall, or a courthouse.

Not as the boss, you were never going to be the boss,

or a lawyer or a judge, one of those important men who did things in this world.

But maybe you could work for one of them. Maybe you could learn shorthand.

Write down what men like that said. Keep a record of their important statements.

Help facilitate in your own small way, their important deeds.

If you wanted that, if you wanted more, you could study the Pittman method.

Doing so landed Nathan Barron a job. He would become a stenographer in the New York City court

system. He would spend his work days recording everything that was said during official proceedings

...