Graham was a phonotypist during the period between the emergence of
Pitman's and
Gregg's systems for shorthand. In 1854 he published a short-lived (only 9 issues) phonotypy journal called
The Cosmotype, subtitled
"devoted to that which will entertain usefully, instruct, and improve humanity", and several other monographs about phonography. The
New York Public Library has a collection of phonographic shorthand notes Graham took of court cases, including
Johnson v. Root patent lawsuit in the
United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (in
Boston).
Graham shorthand system In 1857 Graham published his own Pitman-like "Graham's Brief Longhand" that saw wide adoption in the United States in the late 19th century. In his youth,
Woodrow Wilson (a future president of the United States) had mastered the Graham system and even corresponded with Graham using it. Throughout his life, Wilson continued to develop and employ his own personal variant on the Graham system for personal writing, to the point that by the 1950s, when the Graham method had all but disappeared, Wilson scholars had trouble interpreting his shorthand. In 1960 an 84-year-old anachronistic shorthand expert Clifford Gehman managed to crack Wilson's shorthand, demonstrating on a translation of Wilson's acceptance speech for the
1912 Democratic Party presidential nomination. ==References==