Frederick Methvan Whyte
Frederick Methvan Whyte (March 2, 1865 – 1941 Athens) was a mechanical engineer of Dutch background who worked for the New York Central in the United States. He is most widely known as the person who developed Whyte notation to describe the different wheel arrangements of steam locomotives in 1900.
Shape note
Shape notes in published music date from late 18th century America, notably tune-books written by Boston composer/singing-master William Billings, engraved, printed, and published by Paul Revere. They appeared more widely at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when two publications came out using shaped note heads – "The Easy Instructor" by William Little and William Smith in 1801, and "The Musical Primer" by Andrew Law in 1803, intended for use in singing schools. Little and Smith used the four-shape system shown above. Law's system had slightly different shapes: a square indicated "fa" and a triangle "la", while "sol" and "mi" were the same as in Little and Smith. Law's invention was more radical than Little and Smith's in that he dispensed with the use of the staff altogether, letting the shapes be the sole means of expressing pitch. Little and Smith followed traditional music notation in placing the note heads on the staff, in place of the ordinary oval note heads. In the end, it was the Little/Smith system that won out, and there is no hymnbook used today that employs the Law system.
Some copies of "The Easy Instructor, Part II" (1803) included a statement, on the verso of the title page, in which John Connelly (whose name is given in other sources as Conly, Connolly, and Coloney) grants permission to Little and Smith to make use in their publications of the shape notes to which he claimed the rights. Little and Smith did not themselves claim credit for the invention, but said instead that the notes were invented around 1790 by John Connelly of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Andrew Law asserted that he was the inventor of shape notes.