George Bernard Shaw, famous writer, critic and playwright, was dissatisfied with the limits of currently available shorthand methods. He was also mightily displeased with the vagaries of English spelling, and wanted a phonetic reworking of the written language.
In his will, he provided for a competition, and Kingsley Read won it with his 'Shavian' script. After a lengthly 'beta testing' phase with about 500 users, he reworked his alphabet again and came up with Quickscript.
There are about forty unique symbols in the script, plus some ligatures (characters formed of multiple characters joined together, much as æ or fi are in some Roman alphabet scripts). The characters are designed to often flow into one another while still maintaining readability, and to be easy to write - since no computers existed at the time, and only a few typewriters were ever made with the Shavian script.
There is a small community currently (May 2002) keeping up an Internet presence in Yahoo Groups and on an Ikonboard, with perhaps forty active members.