Thomas Edison, John Jackson, Mevil Dewey, and Early Vertical Writing
By the time that Edison was nine years old, penman like Platt Rogers Spencer had taken hold of the imagination and spirit of many young people and others seeking to impress others with their careful and practiced style. Here, Spencer brags of his success.
http://davidkaminski.org/wiki/Platt_Rogers_Spencer,_Gents
It is interesting to note that Edison's boyhood penmanship does not represent the norm of a forward slanted joined script of the more educated and practiced writers of the day. Early in his life, as a boy of 15, Edison had a somewhat unimpressive mixed style of a backhanded cursive mixed with some lettering.
As a growing man with an evolving writing style, Edison wrote more neatly and consistently with script much more in a style of a round hand, vertical style.
Employed as a telegraph clerk trying to write faster and more legibly, Edison developed a manuscript print style, and it was a style that was perpetuated among and imitated by other telegraph clerks.
While Edison's style remains largely unacknowledged in books on the history of penmanship, it clearly is upright, unlike the style of the time. However, it is fair to say that he neither authored a book on penmanship nor taught it in any institutions, and so he cannot be seen as among those who influenced the nation's youth nor the broader public.
By contrast, one can point to the next iteration of a vertical style that was widely promoted with great vigor and purported to be backed by scientific studies. Writing teachers in Europe first adopted it, and later it came to be popularized by John Jackson in England in the 1880's. While it is hard to find the exact date that Jackson's vertical style came to be known by those in the United States, there is evidence that it was not later than 1887. Here, one can see an advertisement of it in The Educational Times
The history of vertical writing, as it comes from the Europeans and John Jackson extends into Canada with Newlands and Row in Canada as early adopters there; Vaile and Harison as early adopters in the US; and many others later from roughly 1894 - 1904, at which point the trend reversed itself and most people abandoned the vertical style and returned to a forward slanted script--either by returning to the older Spencerian script or a newer Spencerian "practical penmanship," one of the many of the assorted "practical styles," Palmer method, or other style.
However, news of Edison's style, present since the late 1860s, and his efforts did, however, reach Melvil Dewey, who was perhaps inspired by Edison. No later than 1887, Dewey begins to promote "library hand," itself a vertical style, as the official style to be used by all librarians. Like Edison, he was interested in speed, efficiency, and legibility. One can think of the vertical style as the handwritten equivalent to the typewriter, which was rapidly evolving as a fast and efficient office machine that created its own vertical print.
However, likely neither Edison, Jackson, nor Dewey would have probably approved of the evolution of their vertical script ideals in the years after their innovations. For many writers, vertical script evolves into an awkward and difficult to read backhand style. Here is a library card written for a gift received in 1909. This particular script has the worst qualities of being somewhat ornate, which Edison had avoided; it is also not in Dewey's prescribed style. A librarian who did not follow the rules? A person who learned backhand in the era from 1894 - 1904, and whose writing had simply deteriorated like that of others?
Through these examples, the evolution of writing appears somewhat regressive or circuitous. Whether one reflects on Edison's own backhanded script, or on a forward slanted script's slant now reversed, one can only wonder how all the reform of such great minds of the time and humanity's own efforts could have brought about this. Oh, progress!