Whyte notation
The Whyte notation for classifying steam locomotives by wheel arrangement was devised by Frederick Methvan Whyte, and came into use in the early twentieth century following a December 1900 editorial in "American Engineer and Railroad Journal". The notation counts the number of leading wheels, then the number of driving wheels, and finally the number of trailing wheels, groups of numbers being separated by dashes. Other classification schemes, like UIC classification and the French, Turkish and Swiss systems for steam locomotives, count axles rather than wheels.
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.