In old newspapers, and even on old shop fronts etc, you often see people’s first names abbreviated, eg. Geo. for George, Wm. or W[sup]m[/sup] for William, Fredk. for Frederick and so on. Nowadays that never happens - no newspapers wrote about Geo. Bush or Wm. Hague. When did that practice stop and why?
NB I’m not talking about informal abbreviations like Jim/Jimmy for James, etc. These old-fashioned abbreviations seem to have been “officially” used even in court documents etc.
WAG manually type-setting old newspapers was a tedious and time-consuming process. You cut corners, like abbreviating common names, anywhere you possibly could.
Google ngram viewer shows a steady decline from 1900 on.
When I e-mail Mrs. J., I sign off as “yr. affct. husb.”
My experience is that the wide availability of the typewriter in the last decade or two of the 1800s is coincident with such abbreviations and contractions becoming less common, from which I have drawn a conclusion which you may find a stretch: a skilled typist doesn’t really may not see much benefit in saving a few letters whereas a scribe might be thankful for every letter they can omit.
Regular exceptions I see occur in indexes of deeds, which (around here) continued to be done by hand for nearly a century after that and regularly favored the traditional short forms, and city directories, which probably continued to use them for the economy of space they allowed (a grandfather of mine continued to be listed by “Chas” until the late 1950s).
Knead
Who in the real world signs his emails Robt.