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From STANFORD magazine, Jan/Feb 2009:

Bad Spellers of the World, Untie

. . . For nearly as long as English has had relatively stable spelling, people have been trying to reform it. Prominent proponents of simplified systems have included Benjamin Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt, Melvil Dewey of Dewey Decimal System fame (who changed his given name from Melville to eliminate extraneous letters), and Stanford University president David Starr Jordan.

Add to that list Allan Kiisk, a retired professor of engineering, fluent in three languages. Kiisk, MS ’68, has developed a spelling system in which each letter represents a single spoken sound. The method, called Simpel-Fonetik, ditches “unnecessary” letters c, q, x and y, and introduces new symbols to differentiate among the various sounds of the letter a.

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