Bill Bryson writes [at page 129]:

               Another enthusiast for simplified spelling was Mark
           Twain, who was troubled no so much by the irregularity
           of our words as by the labor involved in scribbling them.
           He became enamored of a "phonographic alphabet" devised
           by Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand (which Pitman
           called Stenographic Soundhand, thus proving once again that
inventors are generally hopeless at naming their inventions.

              "To write the word 'laugh' "Twain noted in _A Simplified
Alphabet_, "the pen has to make fourteen strokes . To write
'laff', the pen has to make the same number of strokes ... no
labor is saved to the penman." But to write the same word with
           the phonographic alphabet, Twain went on, the pen had to make
           just three strokes. To the untrained eye Pitman's Phonographic
Alphabet looks rather like a cross between arabic and the trail
           of a sidewinder snake, and of course it never caught on.

Regards,
Ralph Gainey