The dreams of a bored industrialist, a tenth-grader learning shorthand, a self-styled management consultant, and a Portuguese orientalist coalesced to spur the greatest race for technological dominance in the early twentieth century.

Our story begins with Ward Stone Ireland, teenage stenographer (and Glenn Shadix lookalike), who worked as a court reporter in the state of Texas. An early user of the courtroom stenotype machine, which uses multi-key ‘chordal’ gestures to record letters, Ireland went on to patent the 1911 Ireland Stenotype Shorthand Machine that set a new standard for speed and efficiency. Never mind that this machine could not type the letters m or n: it was fast, portable, and cheap, so its trivial shortcomings were as easily overlooked as the polydactyl imagery of today.

That the alphabet itself might be the problem was an idea that resonated with the great Andrew Carnegie, the distinguished steel magnate who had latterly turned his attention to philanthropy. In 1906, with poverty, disease, war, famine, and injustice not requiring his attention, Carnegie focussed on the next great frontier: spelling reform. The brain trust he assembled, known as the Simplified Spelling Board, included two lexicographers, Melvil Dewey (of the eponymous Decimal System), Mark Twain, and Supreme Court Justice David J. Brewer, and together they inveighed against the corrosive effects of letters that were extraneous (‘catalogue’) or phonetically reversed (‘sabre’). When President Teddy Roosevelt took an interest, alphabet reform advanced onto the national stage, doubtless embraced in a spirit of humility by a government that, by its own admission, didn’t really understand the issues.

Galvanizing the movement was Harrington Emerson, who, through his hands-on public service in such occupations as land speculation and gold prospecting, had the necessary qualifications to consult with industry about operational efficiency. In 1910, he testified before the Interstate Commerce Commission that the railroads, if properly organized, could save a million dollars a day, cementing the final link between technological innovation and financial gain. Under the unimpeachable rubric of ‘efficiency’ (coincidentally, the title of his book), Emerson and his new field of ‘scientific management’ would rewrite the very definition of the organization: no longer a collection of participants, it was now imagined as a collection of procedures.

Whatever reluctance the country might have had to rethink the alphabet was hushed in the wake of jarring international developments. In 1911, the United States was rocked by the announcement that the Portuguese, seemingly overnight, had modernized its orthography under the direction of Gonçalves Viana. Seven years later, the Bolsheviks successfully demonstrated a modernized Cyrillic alphabet that shed its vestigial letters Fita, Yat, and Dotted I. That countless other nations might develop this powerful new technology could scarcely be ignored, justifying the national rush to embrace the world-changing invention that ultimately gave rise to the modern era. Below, a progression of ‘efficiency typewriters’ of the period, demonstrating the proud moment in which we all came together to support something for some reason.

Published January 2, 2024. Copyright © 2024 Jonathan Hoefler.