We have spoken of shorthand, an art so intimately allied with typewriting that they are known today as the "twin arts." The story of the typewriter cannot be adequately told if this other art is left out of the picture. Unlike the writing machine, the beginnings of shorthand date back to antiquity. Some have believed that Xenophon wrote stenographic notes of the lectures of Socrates, but it is at least established that the learned slave Marcus Tullius Tiro, freed by Cicero and made his secretary, developed a system which soon came into widespread use. Few high school boys and girls today, who struggle with the orations of Cicero, know that it was the art of Tiro which preserved these classics for us. The "Notae Tironianae" (notes of Tiro) consisted of some 5,000 signs for words, and it is doubtful if stenography would today be so popular a profession had one to burden his memory with an equal list. But the ancients were more patient than we, and, once mastered, these notes proved swift and practical. Busy Rome found much use for its stenographers. Atticus, a famous Roman book lover, trained a great force of slaves in the art for the sole purpose of transcribing, and thus become a real publisher ages before the days of printing. Five manuscript readers were allotted to each one hundred stenographers, and these took down the spoken words. And the cost to the thrifty Atticus was one pound of grain and a small allowance of wine per slave. Even Rome's greatest men, the Emperor Titus among them, did not scorn to master Tiro's notes. In a later age the sermons of the church fathers, the great Origen, Chrysostom, St. Augustine and others, were noted down in shorthand; so also in the fifteenth century were the sermons of Savonarola. Roger Williams wrote shorthand; so did Samuel Pepys, the author of the famous diary. Among later celebrities who mastered the art was Charles Dickens, who, in his early days, used the Gurney system in reporting speeches in the House of Commons. Ultimately, however, the modern principle of "phonography" came into possession of the field. This system, evolved through the labors of Isaac Pitman and others, used characters to represent the spoken sound of words instead of their spellings, and was such an obvious improvement that, in its various forms, it has become practically universal.