Court Reporting Stays Ahead Of The Technology Curve

Though most people are aware of their silent presence in the courtroom or deposition rooms, few outside the field of stenography actually understand what court reporters do.  "Don't they type on those funny typewriters?"  Not always.  The occupation of court reporting goes back thousands of years to at least 63 B.C., when a former slave, working as a secretary for Cicero the philosopher, used his own method of shorthand to record a speech by Cato.  Using a metal stylus, Marcus Tullius Tiro used abbreviations for the most-used words and omitted words that he could easily remember. He also created a pattern of shorthand where a symbol could stand for a complete sentence.  If he had trouble understanding the speaker, he would later compare his notes with those of his pupils. The ampersand (&) is the only sign that still remains of Tiro's shorthand, but it still has the same meaning in several hundred languages.

As technology evolved, shorthand did as well.  John of Tilbury, a monk, developed the very first system of abbreviated writing for English speaking people in 1180 - an innovation that kept court reporting ahead of the technology curve.  Later, in 1588, Dr. Timothie Bright invented a system of shorthand that had no alphabet at all.  It was made up of hundreds of characters that had to be memorized.  Over the next 300 years, court reporting became more and more refined, shortening the writing process and allowing stenographers working with pen and paper to easily keep up with fast speakers, speaking in excess of 160 words per minute or more.

Court reporting technology took a major leap in 1879, when Miles Bartholomew received a patent for his typewriting machine that used a letter for each stroke.  While this would not be directly used for stenography, as it proved to be too slow, the typewriter was later refined so the keys could represent sounds instead of letters.  This advancement was made by Ward Stone, and is considered to be the greatest contribution to the advancement of machine shorthand than that of any other. His keyboard, still in use today, relies on a minimum number of keys, reducing or eliminating the awkward reaching for keys not directly under the fingers. Using Stone's machine, even inexperienced operators were then able to attain and break speed writing championship records.

As the shorthand machine design continued to evolve, something was needed to speed up the conversion of shorthand notes into final transcript form. In the 1950s the military and IBM worked together to develop a computerized system that could translate foreign languages into English.  IBM eventually stopped working on the project, citing there was too small a market for the technology. But in the 1970s, a group of court reporters urged NSRA, their association at the time, to help further the creation of computer-aided transcription – CAT software.

Soon, a usable system was created, allowing an individualized dictionary for each court reporter.  So while one set of keystrokes may represent one thing to one reporter, it may have a totally different meaning to another.  The reporter then writes on the steno machine, and an English translation is decoded onto a computer screen.  This is the technology most widely used today.