Career
Originally from Aberdeen, he later worked as a schoolteacher in Oxford in collaboration with John Wilkins, although the two parted company intellectually in 1659. Dalgarno matriculated at Marischal College, Aberdeen, in 1631. Subsequently he was a schoolteacher in Oxford in the 1650s.
In 1657, he was encouraged to upgrade a system of shorthand on which he was working, by Samuel Hartlib, to a more ambitious universal system and he published on the subject later the same year.
