George Bernard Shaw who died in 1950 left instructions for the design of a “Proposed British Alphabet” which would use 40 new symbols to represent the different sounds of English. The resulting alphabet was very efficient, the shapes of the letters being simpler than in traditional English. Also, the voiced and unvoiced consonants were related - one being written upside-down compared to the other. For example, the 'z' sound was represented by an upside-down 's'.
This alphabet - though having undoubted merit - suffered by being too
different from the existing system. Without carefully learning what each new
symbol represented, it was quite impossible to read the new script at all.