Episode 242: The Handwriter

This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMeo. 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 gonna have to push, all sense, all meaning would be lost. Was it think or zinc 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 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 pen strokes, 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 are 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 with pen and paper, leaning over a desk.

His pad, his pen, wrist, elbow placed just so, an inkwell right there, a cloth to dab away blotches or spills, though such missteps were rare for the skilled stenographer, and he was very skilled.

So much so that in nineteen twenty-one, at the age of twenty-one, Nathan Baron entered the annual competition held by the National Association of Court Reporters. The competition was then just two years old. It had been started out of what the top men in the NACR felt was urgent necessity. Perhaps as an outgrowth of their vocations, these esteemed court reporters prize truth and accuracy.

And people had been lying. There had been stories, certainly propagated by various stenographic schools and schools of thought. Fabrication. Or at the very least, exaggerated marketing messages meant to secure students and sell books and differentiate the many shorthand programs that had lately been popping up across the country, that promised people like Nathan Barron a way toward white collar work.

People were telling stories of superhuman stenographers and shorthand secretaries, out there somewhere in mountaintop hermitages or in some misty, mythic Midwestern office, I suppose. Laying down transcriptions at three hundred and fifty, even four hundred words per minute. This was preposterous. Human conversation, even at its most animated and purposeful, rarely cracks 250 words a minute.

An auctioneer at the top of their profession selling steer or swine at some South Texas stockyard might reach a dizzying four hundred fifty. This is true, but no human hand. no pencil or pen, no shorthand method, be it Pittman or Gregg or some other system heretofore unknown to the learned men atop the National Association of Court Reporters at the turning of the nineteen twenties, could ever write so fast.

Certainly not accurately. To claim otherwise was not just preposterous, it was fraud. And so for the sake of the profession, for the sake of truth and accuracy, they brought together the best shorthand stenographers in the country. And set out three challenges. A text drawn from literature, spoken at 200 words per minute, a judge's instructions to a jury, delivered at a crisp two hundred and forty, in the most difficult discipline.

A lively mock legal examination in which an Ursat's attorney and witness bantered back and forth at a rat-a-tat 280 words per minute, like something out of a Preston Sturgis picture. In this competition. Prove what those men already knew. That there were physical limits to taking dictation. Ink and paper. Now this isn't a story in which someone will enter, a character will be introduced who will prove these men wrong, will swoop in and upend and therefore expand possibility.

It turns out that humans can, in fact, only transcribe so quickly. There are limits to what bodies can do, and excellence is determined therein. Nathan Barron was excellent. When he won his first trophy, that first year he entered the national competition in 1921 at 21 years old. He set new standards for both speed and accuracy. He returned the next year. And one and the next year.

And one. But the next year I would like to enter into the record and into this story new characters. Nine of them, each of them teenagers, the oldest nineteen, the youngest fifteen, each of them students of Ward Stone, Ireland, and each of them entered into the nineteen twenty four competition. with the express purpose of changing the course of stenographic history. For each of them came armed with a stenotype.

The invention of their teacher. A twenty two key keyboard an ingenious invention that allowed the user to type with all ten fingers nearly simultaneously. Initial consonant sounds with their left fingers your duhs, your puzz, your thus, your quiz, your your quesses ending sounds with the right fingers, vowels with the thumbs. And further,

The machine allowed them to make something like chords in a piano. The word like, or for that matter hate, for instance, could be made by pressing the three keys that made up the initial consonant sound, the ending sound, and the vowel sound simultaneously. generating a whole readable word with a single stroke. It was quite a machine, and the kids were very good at using it. And so the first round was won by young Fanny Schoenfeld, her accuracy dazzling in the literary contest at 200 words.

The second went to young Clem Bowling, dizzyingly precise in the two twenty, which left only the two eighty. And as the fake lawyer began his fake examination of his fake witness, the gathered members of the National Association of Court Reporters. Felt the pressure. Can you hear the... thunderous gallop of progress at their heels, feel the hot breath of the kids coming up from behind on their necks.

And they turned their eyes to Nathan Barron, the best of them, their champion, their John Henry, their last hope at keeping the future at bay. He wrote like the wind. There is nothing in the record that allows me to tell you with any certainty about how Nathan Barron felt after the competition, as he waited for the scores to be tallied, for the text to be checked over, scoured for mistakes.

We don't know how his wrists felt after writing all out for five minutes straight. We don't know if he was surprised when he won. But we know that that evening, in their hotel in Atlantic City, where the NACR convention and contest were being held, the leaders of that organization knew that Nathan Barron should enjoy. The machines were coming.

in that hotel by the ocean. That was the last contest they would hold for a very long time. The future came quickly. Within a couple of years, the stenotype was everywhere. You could find it in nearly every quarter. In boardrooms. Find it just about anywhere where important men were doing important things, or at least were saying things they thought were important enough to hire another man or a woman to write down.

At least until tape recorders came around. Since then, they are mostly found in courtrooms and by people doing captioning for TV. And since the nineteen fifties, when the annual competition held by the NCRA was revived, everyone has used a machine. No handwriter could possibly keep up, and so Nathan Barron never competed again. Because he, then in his late fifties, still wrote by hand.

still taught the Pittman method, though it had, even among the dwindling number of handwriting devotees, been largely overtaken by other schools of shorthand. He does seem to have had some sort of advisory role with the National Association, though, as far as I have been able to ascertain, never held an official title, besides that of champion.

Earned those four consecutive years at the beginning of the nineteen twenties, in the beginning of his career, and the rest of his life spent in courtrooms. There have been studies done on people like Nathan Barron, professional transcribers. Neuroscientists have mapped their brains and found a kind of bifurcation, with one area of the brain that's associated with attention and information processing essentially on fire.

And another associated with deep thinking, in a calm, almost restful state. The transcriber's brain as inverted duck, placid below the surface, paddling wildly above. And this has been reflected in interviews with transcribers that investigated the phenomenology of their experience. One court reporter spoke extensively about her ability to daydream, to plan, to make shopping lists, what have you, all while accurately transcribing complicated testimony.

She even reported realizing that she had no idea what the result was of a particular death penalty trial that she had been working on day after day. So lost was she in her own thoughts that she had to look back at the transcript that she herself had written, completely accurately, to learn how it had all turned out.

There is little record of Nathan Barron's life and the decades he spent writing down what other people said. When their lives, however grand or humble, The things they did and the things they witnessed entered the public record in the New York courtroom. There is no record of what Nathan Barens thought about while he did. what it was like in that calm part of his mind. There was though Nathan Barron there beside him to write any of it down. We do not really know who he was.

But we know for a while there. He was excellent. This episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMeo, in March of twenty twenty six. The show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independent artist-owned listener supported podcasts from PRX.

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If you ever want to drop me a line, you can do so at nate at thememorypalace.us. You can also follow me on Instagram and threads at the MemoryPalace Podcast, on Facebook at the MemoryPalace, and on Blue Sky at NateDemayo. I'll talk to you again.