Charles K. Bliss (German: Karl Kassel Blitz; September 5, 1897 – July 13, 1985) was an Austrian-Australian chemical engineer and semiotician, best known as the inventor of Blissymbols, an ideographic writing system.

Bliss was born Karl Kasiel Blitz on September 5, 1897 to a Jewish family in Czernowitz (Chernivsti), Duchy of Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Ukraine.

The area of his birth and early life was influenced by the Habsburg monarchy, as Czernowitz was home to a diverse population including Germans, Romanians, Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and Romani.

There was no need for a little boy like me to realize how stupid it was to speak six different languages.”[1] Blitz’s early life was filled with poverty, cold and starvation.

When Blitz was eight years old, Russia lost the Russo-Japanese War and pogroms against the Jews intensified, and refugees from the town of Kishinev came into Czernowitz seeking sanctuary.

At the same time, Blitz saw a slide show of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition which inspired him to study engineering to improve technology for ordinary people.

During World War I, Blitz volunteered first as a helper with the Red Cross field ambulance, then as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army.

He joined Telefunken, a German radio apparatus company, where he successfully worked all the way to be promoted as chief of the patent department.

In England, Bliss tried to bring his wife to him, but the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 made that impossible.

Bliss arranged for Claire to escape Germany via his family in Cernăuți, Romania (now called Chernivtsi in present day Ukraine).

Originally Bliss had called his system "World Writing" because the aim was to establish a series of symbols that would be understood by all, regardless of language.