Other Volapukists, such as the Austrians Ludwig Zamponi and Sigmund Spielmann, editor of the 1888 Volapukist almanac and author of a book on bank and business correspondence; Joseph Bernhaupt, a postal employee sta- tioned in Beirut; the Catholic teacher Carl Zetter; and the Danish L. P. Jensen, claimed that the language was of greatest value to the Nicht-Gelehrten (the non-learned).12 Since the learned (Gelehrten) had a tendency to unnecessar- ily complicate the language for aesthetic reasons, Volapuk would be best used by practical people, the merchants and businesspeople. An artificial language could save in translation costs and help standardize business communica- tion, making it more transparent and less liable to costly misinterpretations.
In the United States, the retired Colonel Charles E. Sprague (1840-1912), whom a former student described as "a gentleman of the old school, courtly, sensitive, tactful; a man of wide culture with a genuine love for beauty in art and literature,"13 was also very much convinced that "the most obvious ap- plication of Volapuk is for international correspondence, especially commer- cial correspondence, which is numerically the most important. . . . If firmly established for this purpose, the extension of its usefulness into the fields of science, diplomacy and literature may safely be left to the future to determine, as well as whether it will ever be used by travelers."14
Like his friend Melville Dewey (1851-1931) (or Melvil, as he preferred to spell it), who invented the Dewey Decimal cataloguing system, Sprague was very active in the American spelling reform movement.15 Both men were born standardizers. Dewey obtained public recognition in library and information sciences, and Sprague succeeded in accounting. Beginning as a clerk, he be- came president of the Dime Savings Bank of New York City. In his capacity as a prominent banker and the first university professor of accounting, Sprague played a leading role in the professionalization of accounting in the United States and the standardization of accounting methods, critical for the trans- mission of reliable information in economic transactions.16
Second in the official hierarchy of the North American Society for the Propagation of Volapuk was the Bostonian Charles C. Beale (1864-1909), the publisher of Volapuk: A Monthly Journal of the World Language (1888-1890).
Like Sprague, Beale was interested in Volapuk as a standard medium of com- munication for commerce and economic transactions. He was a member of the Boston Shorthand Bureau, and owner of the Boston School of Phonogra- phy, which offered instruction in shorthand methods, typewriting, and busi- ness correspondence. He was also editor of the journal Stenography, which discussed the pros and cons of different shorthand methods and advocated for a shorthand standard for the English language.
But the most critical character in the history of Volapuk, after Schleyer, was the Frenchman Auguste Kerckhoffs (1835-1903). Kerckhoffs was born in the Netherlands, in the eastern part of the Catholic province of Limburg, a region assigned to the Dutch after the secession of Belgium. He studied phi- losophy and natural sciences at the universities of Liege and Louvain. In 1860 he moved to France, where he worked as a private instructor in mathematics, history, Latin, German, and English. For the next ten years, he taught in the lycee of the small town of Melun, close to Paris. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), he served in the French National Guard and became a French citizen. He later moved to Germany and studied at the Universities of Bonn and Tubingen. In 1876 he returned to France with a Ph.D. in Ger- man literature. For the next four years he worked as a private instructor, and in 1880 he became professor of German language at the Ecole des hautes etudes commerciales of Paris.17
By the time Kerckhoffs learned Volapuk, he had already demonstrated that he was a very learned person with a variety of interests. On top of his dis- sertation on German drama, he had published books on Flemish literature, English grammar, and a research piece on art history. In 1887 Kerckhoffs set up the Association fran^aise pour la propagation du Volapuk, imitating the Association nationale pour la propagation de la langue fran^aise (or the Al- liance Fran^aise, as it was later named). In 1887, he launched the monthly Le Volapuk and published a Grammaire abregee de Volapuk, a Dictionnaire Volapuk-Frangais et Frangais-Volapuk, and the Premiers elements de Volapuk. But it was his Langue commerciale internationale: Cours complet de Volapuk that secured him a leading position in the movement. His Cours was the most successful Volapuk handbook. It was translated into German (1880), English (1887), Italian (1887), Portuguese (1888), Russian (1886), Dutch (1886), and Spanish (1885). His success made Kerckhoffs the most prominent rival to Schleyer's leadership.18
Kerckhoffs's first encounter with artificial languages was not with Volapuk. Nor has he entered the annals of history as a Volapukist. Rather, Kerckhoffs is remembered historically as a cryptographer. His book La cryptographie mil- itaire (1883) was a brilliant analysis of military encoding systems from an- tiquity to his own time, and his research on cryptography is still recognized and now known as "Kerckhoffs's principle." The principle broadly stipulates that more important than hiding secret information is the protection of the key code. His research in cryptography acquainted him with artificial lan- guages, more specifically, with Solresol, a bizarre language code invented in the 1830s and occasionally used by the military for encryption.19 A person with a strong character, Kerckhoffs was not a conformist. He was not in- clined to remain silent when he thought something was wrong, as his fel- low Volapukists would very soon learn. His criticism of the way the French Ministry of Education administered state exams cost him his job at the Ecole des hautes etudes commerciales and forced him to become an itiner- ant teacher.
Like Sprague, Kerckhoffs thought that the language should mostly serve commercial purposes, as the title of his successful handbook, Langue com- merciale internationale, clearly indicated. This was also Adolphe Nicolas's po- sition. Nicolas was a maritime physician and vice-president of the Association fran^aise pour la propagation du Volapuk. As he put it, Volapuk is "a com- mercial, telephonic and telegraphic language, a language of commercial re- lations par excellence."20 A common language, according to Kerckhoffs and the official French Volapukist movement, could boost economic growth not only because of the savings in translation costs, but, more important, because it would eliminate the information noise associated with translating back and forth from different languages. A shared and transparent communication system, they argued, could promote trust among economic agents, and thus contribute to a more efficient allocation of economic resources. But since appeals to general interests are usually less attractive than appeals to private ones, the French Volapukists polished their argument accordingly. An arti- ficial, commercial language, they claimed, would level the international play- ing field and let France demonstrate her real economic power by trimming the undeserved advantage of English and German.21 As Kerckhoffs saw it, Volapuk did not jeopardize the "patriotic" mission of the Alliance Fran- ^aise. On the contrary, it would undergird French's status as the interna- tional language of diplomacy. He simply envisioned a diglossic regime, with French dominating in international relations and Volapuk in commerce and perhaps in science.22 To quote from the English edition of his Cours: "In the same manner that diplomats have a universal or common language for their international dealings, scholars, agents and merchants would also find a great advantage in possessing a simple and practical means of communication."23