Death Mask of Sir Isaac Pitman from the Library Collection of the University of Bath
Sir Isaac Pitman (4 January 1813 – 22 January 1897), was an English teacher who developed the most widely used system of shorthand, known now as Pitman shorthand. He first proposed this in Stenographic Soundhand in 1837. He was also the vice president of the Vegetarian Society. Pitman was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1894.
The first distance education course in the modern sense was provided by Sir Isaac Pitman in the 1840s, who taught a system of shorthand by mailing texts transcribed into shorthand on postcards and receiving transcriptions from his students in return for correction. The element of student feedback was a crucial innovation of Pitman’s system. This scheme was made possible by the introduction of uniform postage rates across England in 1840.
License: CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Learn more