SPENCER, Platt Rogers [1800-1864] -- American calligrapher

When he published his Spencerian Method in 1848 it soon became the de facto standard, taught in virtually every school in America for a century, until having "a nice hand" fell out of fashion. Nowadays it seems that we vie for the least intelligible scrawl possible, but there was a time that, sadly, few now remember, when good penmanship was a common and desirable attribute of social intercourse. Perhaps the need for handwriting that could be read by someone else was done in by the typewriter and the "two teles", the telephone and telegraph. And more recently by "e-mail".