The first Interlingua periodical was Spectroscopia Molecular, a monthly overview of international work in … molecular spectroscopy. (It involves shooting energy at something in order to see what does or doesn’t bounce back—physicists, chemists, and astronomers do it.) Next came a newsletter, Scientia International, a digest of the latest goings-on in the world of science. Interlingua positioned itself as a way for scientists of different language backgrounds to keep up with their fields. They wouldn’t even necessarily have to speak the language. As long as they understood it, it would fulfill its businesslike function. By attaching itself to science, and refraining from grand claims, Interlingua spread a little further than it otherwise might have. Some major medical congresses and journals published abstracts in Interlingua throughout the 1950s and 1960s. But it failed to sustain interest. Interlingua was another one of those Greco-Latin least common denominator languages, and if you were interested in those kinds of things, you were probably already doing Esperanto. Everyone else just wasn’t interested in those kinds of things, science oriented or not.
Loglan, however, was doing a different kind of thing. Scientific detachment was only one part of the appeal of Loglan (the part that convinced people not to dismiss it immediately). What really got people interested was its new kind of design principle—the calibrated alignment of language with logic. Actually, the principle wasn’t new at all. It stretched all the way back to Leibniz and Wilkins and the seventeenth-century idea that we could somehow speak in pure logic. It was new in that great strides had been made in the field of logic since then, so the idea of “speaking logic” now meant something a bit different.
In the early twentieth century, philosophers such as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Rudolf Carnap had developed a preliminary mathematics of language, but it was not a mathematics of concepts—no breaking down the concept dog into the basic elements that defined its dogness. It was instead a mathematics of statements. It was a method of breaking down propositions like “The dog bit the man” or “All dogs are blue” into logical formulas. These formulas were not expressed in terms of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Instead, like mathematical formulas, they were expressed in terms of functions and arguments. Much like x(x + 5) is a function waiting for you to tell it what the argument x is, dog(x) is a function, “is a dog,” waiting for you to tell it what particular x is a dog. Blue(x) is a function, “is blue,” waiting to find out “what” is blue. Bite(x, y) is a function waiting for two arguments, the biter and the bitten. Give(x, y, z) is a function waiting for three arguments—x gives y to z.
The power of such a notation, both the mathematical and the logical, is that you can do a whole lot without ever knowing what x is. The formula x(x + 5) can itself become an argument in a larger formula; it can participate in the solving of equations and proofs. It may never return a specific number, but it can help you assess the general validity of the statements in which it plays a part. Logical formulas can do the same. “All dogs are blue” is represented by the logical statement 
x dog(x) → blue(x). Translated back into English, this means, “For every x, if x is a dog, then x is blue.” This logical breakdown can’t tell you whether or not the statement is true out there in the real world (we know it’s not true, but the logic doesn’t), but it can tell you, more precisely than the original English can, what conditions need to be met in order for it to be true. This type of logical notation is even more abstract, and more powerful, than the most complex formulas of arithmetic. Not only do you not need to know what specific x's are dogs or are blue; you don’t need to know exactly what “dog” and “blue” are, only that they are functions that take one argument (in logical terms, they are “one-place predicates”). This is very useful. It made whole new branches of theoretical mathematics possible, and it also gave rise to computer programming languages.
Brown’s idea was to make logical forms speakable. Then he could test whether this had a Whorfian effect on people who learned it. Would speaking in logic make people more logical? Would it facilitate thought? Of course logical forms already were speakable in the sense that you could give a long-winded paraphrase like “For every x, if x is a dog, then x is blue.” But in Loglan the translation would be compact and independent of the grammar of English (or any other language).
“All dogs are blue.”
Brown’s article generated a great deal of excitement in the Scientific American audience. He received hundreds of letters asking for more information.
Brown was not the only one in the late 1950s working with the idea that the apparatus of formal logic could serve as a language. A Dutch mathematician named Hans Freudenthal sought to apply the idea to the problem of finding an adequate means for communicating with beings in outer space. In his 1960 book, Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse, he proposed sending out, by means of varying radio wavelengths, messages that would begin with very simple statements of arithmetic and slowly introduce more and more complex types of statements in a way that would lead the space beings, one logical step at a time, to figure out how the Lincos symbols were related to meaning. They would start by deducing from examples that “>” represented “greater than” and progress to recognizing that this:
represented “whistling for one’s dog.”
Lincos was published by a highly respected international science publisher, and many academics found Freudenthal’s idea interesting, but it never went anywhere. Freudenthal’s dense, technical approach failed to attract a more general audience. A second planned volume was never completed.
The year after Brown published his Scientific American article, he expected to get a raise from the university, but the administration declined to give him one. He was insulted. He had brought scholarly recognition and money (in the form of a small government grant) to his department with his Loglan project, and he expected better treatment. Already bristling under the tension between his progressive politics and the conservative leadership of the university (at that time a Deep South university bracing itself against the growing civil rights movement), he wrote out a list of grievances and submitted it as his resignation. He didn’t need the job anyway. He was making a fortune from the success of a board game he had invented that had been published by Parker Brothers a few years earlier.
The board game was called Careers. Brown, a lifelong socialist, objected to the single-minded focus on money in the game Monopoly. So he developed a game where success is defined not by money alone but by a combination of money, fame, and happiness. The players accumulate points in these three areas by moving around the board, entering different career tracks. They decide before the game what proportion of money, fame, and happiness makes up their personal “success formula.” It does you no good to keep winning money if it is fame or happiness you are after. (Although if you land on the right square, you can buy a yacht to gain happiness points, or a statue of yourself to get fame points.) You win when you have fulfilled your own success formula.