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 going to have to push, all sense, all meaning would be lost.
Was it think or sink 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 were never going to be the boss, or a lawyer,