Samuel Taylor (stenographer)

Samuel Taylor (1748/49 – 1811[1]) was the British inventor of a widely used system of stenography.

He began working on his own method of stenography in 1773, based on earlier efforts.

His stenographic method consisted in cutting out the superfluous consonants as well as the vowels in polysyllabic words.

[2] His system was adopted for several other languages, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Swedish.

[3] His book was translated and published in France by Théodore-Pierre Bertin in 1792 under the title Système universel et complet de Stenographie ou Manière abrégée d'écrire applicable à tous les idiomes.

Plate XI from Samuel Taylor's shorthand book, 1786
Taylor's signature, from the end of the subscribers' list of the first edition of the Essay .