Fonetic Speliŋ
I’ve written quite a bit already about my Longley relatives, including Thomas, who spoke out against slavery in Kentucky in 1805, and Abner, who joined a utopian socialist community in 1844. I joke sometimes that this branch of my family never met a radical idea they didn’t want to try out, and there’s actually some truth to that. Abner’s sons continued this pattern, becoming journalists, printers, flag and playing card manufacturers, utopian socialists, and in the case of his oldest son Elias Longley, a passionate advocate for phonetic spelling. It is Elias and his wife Margaret Vater Longley about whom I am writing today and in my next post.
Portrait of Elias Longley. 1895. The Illustrated Phonographic World 9 (4): frontispiece. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Elias Longley was born in 1823 in Oxford, Ohio, northwest of Cincinnati. In 1832, he moved with his family to Lebanon, Indiana, where his father Abner Longley was the first resident (a story unto itself) and then, in 1840, back to Ohio, this time to Cincinnati. There Elias spent three years at Woodward College. His father hoped that Elias, like Abner himself, would become a Universalist minister, but Elias did not have that calling. Instead, he was drawn to the life of a newspaper man and learned phonography, a form of shorthand notation based on word sound, to facilitate his reporting (Venable 1891; Cross 1899).
During his newspaper career, Elias reported for several Cincinnati newspapers, recording in shorthand political speeches by presidents Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, and James A, Garfield. On April 14, 1865, the day of Lincoln’s assassination, he attended the celebration of Union victory at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and transcribed the speech there made by Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. After the Civil War, he was, for many years, city editor for the Cincinnati Daily Chronicle. He also spent some time as the official reporter for the Ohio state legislature (Venable 1891; Cross 1899).
Longley, Elias. 1855. The American Manual of Phonography. Cincinnati, OH: Longley Brothers, Phonetic Printers.
Elias’s interest in phonography went well beyond its use to him as a reporter. Early in his career, while working with several of his brothers in the printing trade, he published The American Manual of Phonography, a textbook outlining his approach to shorthand. His shorthand system remained in use throughout his lifetime. The U.S. Bureau of Education in 1893 reported that the Longley system was being taught at 28 schools of shorthand across the country, including two run by members of the Longley family (Rockwell 1893).
Similarly, in November 1897, Illustrated Phonographic World reported that:
The Los Angeles High School begins its third year with phonography and typewriting as branches of study, W. H. Wagner as teacher, and the Longley series of shorthand books and Mrs. Longley's Typewriter Lessons as text-books (p. 113).
As the quote above suggests, Elias’s wife, Margaret Vater Longley, was very much his partner in business as well as in life. They married in May 1847 when he was 23 and she was 16 and were married for nearly 52 years, until his death in January 1899. I suspect they met at the Claremont Phalanx, the utopian socialist community where both of them lived with their families in the years preceding their marriage. They had three surviving children, the oldest of whom, a daughter, they named Consuelo Phonetta Longley.
Longley, Margaret Vater. 1882. Type-Writer Lessons, for the Use of Teachers and Learners. Cincinnati, OH.
Like her husband, Margaret worked as a journalist and editor, but her principal contribution to their many professional interests was in typewriting. Margaret learned to type soon after the emergence of commercially available typewriters in the 1870s and, by 1882, had invented the eight-finger typing method still used today, in which the thumbs operate the space bar and the remaining fingers type specific letters on each side of the keyboard (Yasuoka 2009). She published this method in textbooks such as Type-Writer Lessons, for the Use of Teachers and Learners. She also taught typing at the shorthand and typing schools she and Elias established, first in Cincinnati and later in Los Angeles, after they moved there in 1885 (Messenger 2011).
Margaret and Elias were undoubtedly idealists. One of Elias’s obituaries describes him as “opposed to physical force in the government of children, and to capital punishment” (Cross 1899). Elias was also a fervent believer in spelling reform. Together with several of his brothers, he established a print shop in Cincinnati that specialized in publishing books using phonetic spelling, which requires special typefaces. They printed phonetic readers for children, as well as several journals related to spelling reform, including the Fonetic Advocat, which was itself printed using a phonetic alphabet (Healey 2017). Margaret, for her part, was an advocate for teaching children to read using phonetics, implementing this system at schools in both Cincinnati and Indianapolis (Messenger 2011).
I’m skeptical of Elias’s assertion that his phonetic spelling system is “so similar to the ordinary spelling that anyone who can read it, will be able, after but a little practice, to read the phonetic spelling readily” (Longley 1878). To me, it looks pretty illegible. Still, I do appreciate the lifelong commitment Elias and Margaret showed to their beliefs, especially to women’s suffrage, as I will discuss in my next post.
Longley, Elias. 1855. The American Manual of Phonography. Cincinnati, OH: Longley Brothers, Phonetic Printers, p. .
Works Cited
Cross, Jesse G. 1899. “Sketch of the Life of Elias Longley.” Bulletin of Eclectic Shorthand 2 (3): 11-12.
Healey, Elspeth. 2017. “How *Do* You Spell That?: Adventures in Spelling Reform.” Inside Spencer: The KSRL Blog.
Longley, Elias. 1878. “Announcement.” The Phonetic Educator 1 (1): 1.
Messenger, Robert. 2011. “Speedy Typing: Terry, the Longleys, Traub and McGurrin.” ozTypewriter: The Wonderful World of Typewriters.
Rockwell, Julius Ensign. 1893. Shorthand Instruction and Practice. Bureau of Educatiοn, Circular of Information No. 1. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
Venable, William H. 1891. Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley: Historical and Biographical Sketches. Cincinnati, OH: Robert Clarke & Co.
Yasuoka, Koichi and Motoko. 2009. “On the Prehistory of QWERTY.” ZINBUN : Annals of the Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University, No. 32: 161-174.