Thomas Shelton
Thomas Shelton invented the shorthand that hid Samuel Pepys's diary for a hundred and fifty years. Almost nothing is known about him. He published a system of rapid writing in London in 1626 under the title Short Writing, reissued it in 1635 as Tachygraphy, and the book went through more than twenty editions over the following century. The system used single strokes for consonants and positioned marks for vowels, so that a word could be written in about a third of the strokes longhand required. It was learnable by a diligent amateur, which is what made it spread. Isaac Newton used it for notes. So did Puritan congregations in New England taking down sermons, and it crossed the Atlantic early enough to be the shorthand of the Massachusetts pulpit. Its most consequential user began writing on 1 January 1660 and kept going for nine years. Pepys wrote the whole diary in Tachygraphy, disguising the passages about women in a mixture of Spanish, French and Latin, which suggests he expected the shorthand alone to be read eventually. It was, but slowly and the hard way. John Smith, an undergraduate, spent three years between 1819 and 1822 transcribing the six volumes by working the system out from scratch - and only afterwards was it noticed that a copy of Shelton's manual had been sitting in Pepys's own library at Magdalene the entire time, a few shelves from the diary. That is the whole of Shelton's importance and it is not small: a seventeenth-century clerk's technical invention is the reason the most detailed private record of the Restoration exists at all.
- Lived: 1601 CE – 1650 CE
- Nationality: English
- Roles: scholar
