A Brief History of Writing

Copyright 2024 Kurt Cagle / The Cagle Report

This is a preview draft of a chapter of my upcoming book Ontology: A Layperson's Guide to Language. Comments and feedback are welcome.

Cave Art and Proto-Writing

We do not know the exact evolution of writing. There are several reasons for that:

??????????? Decay. Most writing media is organic - plant material, animals skins, and so forth - and these materials decay over time.

??????????? Repurposing. Even when such media is more permanent, such as clays, stone, metal, etc., people have a tendency to reuse and recycle anything of value, overwriting what may have been there before.

??????????? Lack of Context. The earliest forms of “written” communication often doubled as decoration, and separating out semantic meaning from aesthetics is not always easy. A Northwest Pacific Totem Pole, for instance, is a form of writing, with each carved “totem” a story, yet it is seldom considered as such.

Writing, at its core, is the creation of an intermediary “speaker” that tells a story or stakes a claim (“This is my territory, keep away.”) or provides instructions, when a real person can’t be there. As such it is perhaps the earliest manifestation of artificial intelligence.

For instance, some of the most well known Neolithic art - the cave paintings discovered in Lascaux, France in 1940, were very likely a very early form of writing, dating back around 20,000 years ago. It’s possible that the creator(s) of these painting said something like

“I’m bored and these cave walls are depressing, I think I’ll liven it up with some pretty pictures of horses and cows.”

However, it is more likely that there was a more utilitarian purpose to the art, with the most likely explanation being that this was a map or an assertion about good hunting grounds. At the time, most cultures were still at least somewhat nomadic, with various bands and tribes moving from area to area in pursuit of wandering herds.

By creating written “records” of their hunt, the various tribal groups could do an early form of analytics, trying to anticipate where and when such herds would be at certain locations. It may have been a way to test out hunting strategies (taking down a mastodon takes a certain amount of planning, for instance). It may also have been a way of commemorating tribe members who died or were killed as an aid to memory. (“This is where Thog got stepped on by the mastodon. Poor Thog.”)

Looked at in this light, the cave paintings can be seen as being one of the earliest known forms of a database.

This also hints at the idea that people had been exploring different media for a long time. The painters of Lascaux used ground-up pigments, probably a combination of different kinds of earths and organic materials, along with binders to ensure that they would stay affixed to the walls. There are also indications that they may have used air brushes—hollowed-out straws or reeds that would then be blown onto the walls with lung power.

One implication of this exploration is that different cultures have likely been moving towards written language for thousands of years.

Cunning Cuneiform

The Crescent Valley has been a waypoint connecting Africa, Europe, and Asia for an incredibly long time, and it is thus no surprise that it (especially Sumer and Ur) became the birthplace of civilization (literally, the rise of cities) and the Silicon Valley of its time. Kuwait City now sits on top of Ur, a name that has come to mean ancient or founding entity or concept.

Ur sat at the juncture of two river systems - the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. At the time, it was also on the coast of the Persian Gulf, and as such served as a major port (though silt build up has now made Ur considerably more inland). As a port, it served as a major trading center throughout the region. It is not surprising that writing may have evolved considerably there, as trade and record keeping seem to be inextricably linked.

Ur had one other significant advantage. Because it sat on a marshy, slow moving estuary, one thing that the area had plenty of was clay. It also had enough nearly trees (mainly pine and cedar) to build reinforcements for that clay, meaning that elaborate structures could be built that would bake to sufficient hardness to withstand human habitation and the occasional earthquake.

Because clay was so plentiful, it also meant that it could be framed in wood and used as tablets. A scribe or merchant would take the tablet and wet it down, then would use a special chisel like stylus to make a mark. By varying the direction, count and intersections of the stylus, a skilled scribe could create a large enough number of glyphs (picture patterns) to represent various concepts.

Several key innovations resulted from this. The first was the standardization of symbols. It is likely that the first?cuneiform (named for its rabbit-like tracks) were pictograms representing specific animals, people, and things, but over time, each pattern came to represent a particular word or sound. Cuneiform was likely not a true alphabet (where a symbol represented a sound), but the seeds were there.

When left for too long, the clay tablets would completely harden and no longer be “recoverable”. When this happened, the hardened tables were extracted from their frames and then either stored for record-keeping purposes or tossed. Ironically, this represented a huge treasure trove for historians. Other cultures no doubt made use of similar writing technologies, but none had the permanence that Ur tablets did, so those cultures remain mostly dark to us.

Hired Glyphics

Egyptian Culture on the Nile dates back nearly six thousand years, with the iconic pyramids built in the third millennium (2600-2700 BC).

Unlike Babylon, the Nile’s banks were generally too sandy to produce good clays (the limestone content was too high), nor did they have many trees. What they did have, however, were reeds, lots and lots of reeds. Reeds were used as part of boat building, made up the structures of houses and other buildings, and were flattened and mashed to form a writing surface called papyrus.

Papyrus was not ideal as a medium—it was fairly waxy, meaning that liquids would tend to bead on it rather than sink into the surface. To overcome this, scribes would usually use a sanding stone to break up the wax and remove older inked content.

The Egyptians introduced another innovation: brushes. By taking hair from camels and encasing it on a stick by a metallic band, a scribe could create highly detailed images in a way that was simply not possible with clay. We have very few papyri from this earliest period, but the same brushes that let scribes capture notes in court also let them paint elaborate funerary symbols in the pyramids.

These strings of symbols became known as hieroglyphics or high pictures. At first, these symbols were very representational—they had a direct correlation with specific concepts. However, over time, these symbols were often combined to represent more complex concepts.

Like scribes throughout the ages, they began to use a shorthand to increase their speed, with the symbols increasingly abstract as the original meaning became lost. This became known as hieratic script (high writing), and was especially pronounced in the middle to late kingdom courts.

As the Greek influence grew stronger in Egypt, with Alexander of Macedon ultimately conquering Egypt in the 4th century BC and the rise of the Greek Ptolemies, the Greek alphabet became more widely used, especially in the Northern part of Eygpt. Court scribes adapted this versed in?Hieratic, creating a new writing style called?demotic?(the language of the people). This, in turn, would influence the emerging Coptic community as Christianity spread through Egypt. Coptic has largely replaced Demotic and was the first true alphabetic language used in Egypt.

Much of what we know of that era comes from the Rosetta Stone, a Stele (a kind of monument) that included the same message in Heirogphics, Hieratic, and Demotic Greek, which was rediscovered in the 18th century when the French invaded Egypt. While none of the three sections are fully undamaged, there was enough there for French (and later English and German) philologists to decipher both the Hieratic and the corresponding Hieroglyphics,.

The Evolution of Alphabets

In the third millennium BC, Mesopotamian and Assyrian tribes would expand westward, eventually settling on the banks of the Mediterranean in the region that would become known as the Levant, splitting into two main groups - the Israelites to the south and the Canaanites to the north.

They spoke similar languages—a form of Assyrian that would eventually become?Northwest Semitic?(and later?Aramaic), a dialect of the Assyrian Semitic language that would, in turn, evolve as trade increased with other Mediterranean cultures (most notably the expanding Greek empire).

The Israelis were primarily warriors initially, while the Canaanites were primarily shipwrights, sailors, and traders. The Egyptians referred to them as Phoenicians (the land of carpenters), and while the Canaanites did not use this term, it became their preferred foreign term.

As traders, the Phoenicians tended to borrow and blend innovations. They used papyrus and the brush from Egypt, combining them with the cuneiform shapes of Mesopotamia. They then associated each of the result glyphs with a particular sound or combination of sounds to create the first true alphabet around 1200 BC (from the Hebrew Aleph and Beth, the first two letters of the Israeli alphabet, which was very similar to that of the Canaanites).

From High Courts to the Marketplace

This innovation spread quickly as Phoenician trader ships stopped at ports of call in Antioch, Byzantium, Illium (Troy, on the Western coast of Turkey), then out to Crete and Athens, and possibly as far as Etruria in the Ionian Sea and Sicily in southern. From Tyre (in modern-day Lebanon), they also went south to Jerusalem and Cairo, eventually going as far west as Carthage, Cadiz in Spain, and Gibraltar. Some arguments have even been that they may have gone as far north as Cornwall in what is now the United Kingdom, but evidence to support that is scant and highly circumstantial.

The Greeks very quickly adapted the Phoenician alphabet to their own needs, with Crete using it as the foundation of the Linear B script that also influenced the inhabitants of Rhodes (which was, in turn, probably settled by Cretan refugees after the explosion of Thera around 1600 BC) and the Athenian version of Greek that became dominant in the region around the 7th century BC.

Alexander the Great expanded the Greek (technically the Macedonian) empire through the Mediterranean in the 4th century BC, eventually taking over Sicily before the Carthaginian Phoenicians reclaimed it. When Rome started its expansion, it encountered the Greek culture both to the south and to the east. It adapted the Greek Alphabet, throwing out a few letters such as ? (phi), theta (Θ) and Ψ (psi) that didn’t have exact analogues in the Roman language, and adding a couple, such as the letter V replacing the Greek Ψ (upsilon) with the Phoenician Waw (which looks like a Y).

By the early Christian Era, most of the Mediterranean region had settled on one of four alphabets - Western and Northern Europe had standardised mainly on the Roman Alphabet, Eastern Europe, Byzantium (later Constantinople), and Russia had standard on variations of the Greek alphabet (In Russia and the Balkans via Cyrillic), The Levant was mostly variations of Aramaic (Hebrew), with much of the Arab countries then adopting the Semitic language and script.

Majuscules and Miniscules

During this period, there were also three key innovations in writing technology. The first was the introduction of vellum, which was made by taking a young goat's or sheep's skin, scraping off the hair, then flattening and curing the vellum and cutting it into sheets that could then be stitched together. Vellum was expensive but a much better writing surface than papyrus, especially with carbon-based inks.

The second was the refinement of the quill pen (mainly through a better understanding of capillary actions and fabrication of inks, but also due to experimentation with different kinds of materials for nibs (the surface that draws the ink onto the page from a well).

The final change was a transition from scrolls to books, which occurred sometime around the fourth century AD. Scrolls required that the reader had to unroll one side and roll up the other to read, and that in turn made scrolls awkward to search. They also tended to occupy a large amount of space on shelves. However, you could stack scrolls on top of one another in pyramids (these pyramids also tended to collapse if you didn’t have them properly buttressed).

Conversely, books could be read sequentially, but they could also be randomly accessed (opened at any page). Moreover, books allowed for a certain amount of metadata that scrolls didn’t, often metadata that could end up as a cover - a title, an author, a publisher, publication date, etc. Finally, many books were frequently annotated via marginalia, notes that ran alongside the main body of text.

Different regions tended to develop different standard writing styles, also known as fonts or hands, which were typically determined by different characteristics - angle of the pen on the page, the inclusion of hooks or bases (serifs) or their lack (sans-serif), the use of primary straight elements (textura) or curved elements (uncials) and so forth.

The court of Charlemagne (in the 9th century AD), the Frankish emperor established both laws and standards that helped to unify his empire. One of those standardization efforts was the creation of a particular style of court hand which made use of curved uncials that could be rendered more quickly and with better clarity than the frequently difficult to read Fractura style used farther to the East. This hand, known as Carolingian, spread throughout much of Western Europe and the British Isles. However, initials were usually in a style more reminiscent of the Roman letters used on the Trajan temple in Rome.

This distinction soon carried through to less formal writing and eventually, the convention of starting a sentence with a Roman capital (a?majuscule, from the Latin majuscule littera, larger letters) followed by Carolingian letters (minuscule, smaller letters).

By the time printing came around, typesetters would place the box containing the various capital lead letters above the small letters because you were more likely to need to reach the smaller letters more frequently. Over time, this became known as the?upper case?and?lower case?letters, respectively, a convention that still exists today even though the art of typesetting has mostly disappeared.

The Press of Printing

Contrary to popular belief, Johannes Gutenberg was not the printing press inventor. Using blocks of wood or rubber as a stamp has been around for centuries, as had the idea of a press to flatten objects (grapes into wine, for instance). As with so many inventions, the idea of shifting to something harder for letterforms that could be secured or compressed without splitting was something that some different inventors were working on, primarily because of innovations in creating moulds for leads,

What Gutenberg did, however, was to make the process stable enough that a printer could make many impressions of a book before the metal degraded too far. Gutenberg’s first published work (in 1455) was the Bible, as was the second. The third was a book of erotic poetry (likely done on a second press) as well as indulgences for the Catholic Church trade.

Another change he introduced was the preference for cloth and wood-pulp-based papers rather than vellum. While vellum was generally hardier, it also took a long time to prepare (a single page of vellum could take several weeks to produce. Paper, on the other hand, involved taking a mash of cotton (from rags) or wood pulp produced as part of the lumbering process, dicing it, turning it into a mash, ladeling this into a wood-frame mould, then pressing it to remove the water. This meant that a paper press could produce several dozen pages a day, even with the fairly crude equipment of the time. Manz (which would eventually become incorporated into Cologne) became a major paper manufacturing centre.

Gutenberg became well known but struggled financially as other printers realized what he was doing and began building their printing presses, often improving significantly on Gutenberg’s original designs. In many respects, it was the Internet of its age—there were dozens of startups even in the Free City of Mainz (now in Germany), and the demand for books skyrocketed.

To put this into perspective, until the rise of the Moveable Type printing press, the only way to get a copy of a book was to go to the monastery and commission one to be created by trained scribes (writers) and calligraphers. This meant that a copy of a single book could set even a wealthy person back dozens of golds (hundreds for something like a bible).

With the printing press, the time to “publish” went from years to weeks, and for the first time, books became affordable enough that the moderately well-to-do could purchase hundreds of them. Not surprisingly, as the implications of what the printing press became known, the Catholic Church pushed back, in part because, up until that point, they had a monopoly on publishing.

Eventually, this had an even more significant implication. Catholic liturgical services were conducted in Latin, which only the wealthiest (with private tutors) could afford to learn. With printed books, however, it soon became feasible to create German translations of the Bible and related works. In many respects, you can draw a direct line from Gutenberg’s press to Martin Luther’s publication of the Ninety-five Theses in 1517 and, consequently, the rise of Protestantism in Europe.

William Caxton?was an English businessman and courtier of the royal court in Brugges who made a trip to Cologne, Germany, in the early 1450s. There, he came upon the explosive printing industry and quickly returned to Brugge, where he set up his printing press, this time producing books in English. While Caxton became known for his English language Bible, he also produced the earliest printed version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and other famous books. In Italy, Aldus Manutius started his press, Aldine Press, in Venice, ushering in the Italian Renaissance and helping to found the Humanist philosophy that was so core to that era.

The printing press was an accelerant. While it was not the only reason for the Italian and English Renaissance, it played a significant role. Beyond breaking the stranglehold that the Catholic Church had upon information and learning, the printing press also made it possible to publish and disseminate laws (giving rise to an entirely new class of professionals called lawyers) to spread scientific and technical information.

Pencil Ruminations

Another significant innovation occurred during this period: the pencil. We tend to think of pencils as having been around forever, but they are actually very recent innovations. During the Mediaeval period, scriptors would use lead plumb-bobs to score the vellum page, in order to set up guide lines, but the line that they produced was very light, and was usually easily removed by rubbing with pumice or similar materials. When artists need to plan out works, they typically used sticks of compressed carbon, which were fairly messy and quite fragile.

For fine line work, they typically would use camel-hair brushes and ink that date back to the Egyptians (though squirrel hair was far more commonly used in Europe for such brushes). Indeed, the very word pencil derives from the Old French pincel , meaning little tail (which also happens to be the origin of the word penis, so take that as you will). The romans used a hard stylus on a wax tablet, not all that different than our current use of tables, but this was used primarily for note taking.

In the 1560s, miners found a large seam of graphite in Cumbria, England. Graphite has advantages over both charcoal (it's harder, darker and much less likely to snap) and lead (it's darker and non-toxic). However, graphite is also still too soft to be used as is, so people began encasing the graphite in wooden sleeves, at first going with an oval shape (still used with carpenter's pencils) but eventually settling on the hexagonal shape used today, with two semi-hexagonally shaped pieces glued together a graphite core. One of the earliest to do so was a company in Derwent, England, close to the mines, and Derwent pencils are still produced today.

For all that Henry David Thoreau evokes the return to nature, it's worth noting that he was also the heir to a family whose company produced pencils for a living. Indeed, he held a number of patents himself, including one for combining the graphite that was available in New York at the time (which wasn't terribly good) and mixing it with clay to create a far superior experience. These were graded from #1 (soft) to #4 (very hard), with the #2 "lead" becoming standard for generations of school children who were instructed to pick up a #2 pencil and fill in the blanks.

West vs. East

This is a short survey of a topic that covers Millennia, and is strongly Eurocentric. However, its worth taking a diversion to explore how the same evolution has taken place elsewhere, often in interconnected ways.

Writing began in the Crescent valley, and was, for a long while pictographic in nature. This means that narratives were generally provided in explicit conceptual terms - the hunter chasing the aurochs, the farmer planting grains, the trader tracking urns of spices and olive oils. Pictographic languages often end up with thousands of symbols representing various concepts, and because of this such languages tend to be metaphorical - a mountain followed by a sun could represent a sunrise, while inverting the order indicates a sunset.

Sometime around four to five thousand years ago, pictographic writing emerged. The exact dates and times (and even which events occurred) are not well known for the very simple fact that the evidence usually consists of brief fragments of inscriptions on walls or funerary remains, but what is known is that during this period, population expansion became the norm, which in turn drove both trade and cultural intermixing.

During this period, there were several extant linguistic groups - the Indo-Iranian group which constitutes both Persian and Sanskrit and which bled into the Indo-European Group centered around Hittite and Luwian languages spoken in central Turkey (Anatolia). The Afroasian group included both Egyptian and the various Semitic languages (including Hebrew and Canaanite/Phoenician (both descended from Aramaic), as well as what would become Arabic and East African. Finally, there was the Sinitic group, which included Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and much of Southeast Asia.

Writing systems emerged more or less simultaneously across these three groups, and it is still unclear whether this was a case of convergent evolution or whether new ideas were communicated via trade and emigration. What does become clear is that pictographic systems evolved into logographic ones (such as Hieratic in Egypt, Cuneiforms in Sumeria, of ancient Sinitic into contemporary Chinese, and Kanji in Japanese). A logographic language is one where each symbol (or glyph) represents a particular syllable, rather than a discrete symbol. Logographic languages seem to be an intermediate stage to a pure alphabetic language, where each letter represents a different vowel or consonant.

In Europe and West Asian, most logographic written languages have gone extinct, though in the Sinitic languages of East and Southeast Asia, that process is still underway (for instance, Japanese Kanji was derived from Chinese in the 5th century BC, but is increasingly being replaced by Katakana and Hirakana, which are syllabery language, as well as by Romanji, which is used primarily as a way of expressing Western alphabetic languages such as English or German (it's likely that within a thousand years, Kanji by itself will be extinct).

This evolution has also affected the mechanisms used for transcription of oral to written languages, such as printing. China saw woodblock printing first emerge in the 6th century AD, and mechanical printing systems analogous to the screw press printers developed by Johann Gutenberg were already in place in China by the 12th century, a necessity given the large number of symbols that the Chinese language utilized.

Similarly, the Chinese never went through a vellum phase, instead inventing paper made from textile wastes and bamboo in the second century AD, by notable scholar Ts'ai Lun, a court official during the Han Dynasty. They also created ink sticks bound with oils that could then be remoistened to get liquid ink, and rather than evolving pen technology both the Chinese and the Japanese continue to use brushes for calligraphy up to the present day (though they have taken the lead with sponge based pens). The oldest known book in the world was also produced in China in 868 AD called the Diamond Sutra, a book of Buddhist teachings.

India's evolution was somewhat different. Sanskrit is an Indo-Aryan language - splitting off very early on before the Indo-Aryan language itself collided with the proto-Hittite language of Anatolia (Turkey), and is a distant cousin of Persian. It is also likely that Persian immigrants to Western India also brought the written form of their language back into Sanskrit around 1500-1000 BC. It's worth noting that India, in general, tended to follow European technology evolution fairly closely, as the above period was also notable for the emergence of alphabetic writing throughout much of the Eastern Mediterranean, with mechanical printing then being introduced about 2500 years later (16th century AD).

Defining Dictionaries

In 1604, Robert Cawdry, a school teacher in England, published A Table Alphabetical,?widely recognized as the first English printed dictionary. While very primitive compared to later works, Cawdry’s dictionary precipitated another trend - the standardization of spelling and meaning in language.

Before this time, English spelling was primarily convenient and tended to vary wildly depending on the writer’s education level, place of origin, and audience. With books, however, there was finally a vehicle to ensure consistent spelling, though it would take another couple of hundred years to have that big of an impact.

Indeed, it wouldn’t be until Samuel Johnson published his dictionary,?A Dictionary of the English Language?(1755), that all of the elements of modern dictionaries came together—the alphabetical ordering of words, basic?etymology, usage, multiple definitions, and, most critically, curation.

Johnson’s language precision was second only to his lack of hygiene. There is an apocryphal story about when Samuel Johnson was invited to a wealthy noble’s dinner party, where he sat next to a young lady who finally said, “Mr.?Johnson, you smell!”

Johnson corrected her immediately. “No, madam, you have it wrong. You smell. I stink.”

You can make a case that Samuel Johnson may have been one of the first ontologists.

In the United States, Noah Webster, a pioneering lexicographer (creator of lexicons or dictionaries), built on the work of Samuel Johnson to create a set of children's textbooks intended to teach spelling, writing, and grammar. These would eventually be expanded into An American Dictionary of the English Language (also known by its publisher's name as Merriam-Webster Dictionary) in 1828. This went far in establishing a common standard for both spelling and grammar in the new country.

The?Oxford English Dictionary?(or?OED) is perhaps the most exhaustive dictionary. First produced by Oxford University Press in 1884, the full OED would eventually come to more than 21 large volumes. One of my favourite stories is about when I was living in Washington, DC, after graduating from college, where I spent a great deal of time in the Library of Congress. Once, I wandered around the underground tunnels trailing the area beneath the capital and came across the LoC Music Library. I was browsing the card catalogue there when a well-dressed English woman came up to the desk, and I had an opportunity to hear the following conversation:

"Excuse me," the woman said to the librarian. "I wonder if you could help me?"

"Certainly, what do you need."

"I'm trying to find the origin of the word chorale."

The librarian cocked an eyebrow. "Oh, that should be easy enough. Let's check the Oxford English Dictionary."

"Oh dear," the woman replied." That may be a bit of a problem. You see, I'm FROM the Oxford English Dictionary."

The librarian's expression was priceless.

This is also a good segue to the topic of libraries.

Libraries, Indexes and Relevancy

As any good bibliophile knows, one book is a book, two books are a collection, and three books are a library. Libraries have been around for a long time. The Library at Alexandria in Egypt was founded during the reign of Ptolemy II, around 250 BC, and housed upwards of 400,000 scrolls. This collection of works attracted scholars, and for several centuries, the Mouseon (or Temple to the Muses) became an important centre of learning.

Finding relevant scrolls, however, soon proved problematic. As such, the library was eventually broken down into multiple thematic sections, with the appropriate scrolls placed in the room closest to their underlying theme. The librarians likely created a master index that indicated which scroll was in which room.

The word “index” itself is interesting, deriving from the Latin either as indicere or indicare, meaning “say about” or “make known” respectively. The index finger consequently becomes the “pointer” finger, and an index then can be thought of as a “pointer” to various resources. This has huge implications for ontologies, as much of ontological design revolves around pointers or references.

As books replaced scrolls, the nature of libraries changed. Shelves slowly dominated, and the notion that you could create an order based upon some key began to emerge. Multiple stacked shelves could also represent both alphabetical and thematic groupings. For instance, you could arrange bookshelves in a history section by country or time period, then alphabetically by title within that organizational scheme.

In 1875, Melville Dewey, a librarian at Amherst College at the time, came up with what would prove to be a brilliant concept. He created a taxonomy (see Chapter 3) that divided all of knowledge into ten primary categories, then ten subcategories per category, and ten sub-subcategories per subcategory. Further subcategorization was also possible, in this case by creating subdecimal partitions, meaning that the categorization scheme could be arbitrarily deep. Once a book is received, it is then categorized, given a Dewey Decimal Number, (DDN) and shelved accordingly.

This approach is so brilliant because the system maps to a number between zero and one, meaning that every concept has a (mathematical) address. Shelves in a library can then be seen as a folded version of parts of that line. A library becomes a compressed information space.

There are multiple well-known problems with the Dewey Decimal System (DDS), many having to do with the very Angle-American perspective of the system that can seem uncomfortably dated after 150 years, but the idea of making an index to an actual (decimal) number still holds considerable value. Newer systems, such as that used by The Library of Congress (invented by Charles Cutter with Dewey’s encouragement), use a two-letter designator for the topmost categories. Still, the same association between a book’s topic and a linear space remain.

The principle issue from an organizational standpoint is that most books are about multiple thematic topics, so librarians often have to make hard decisions about the primary topic of a given book. Maintaining multiple copies of a book in different shelf locations is simply not feasible most of the time.

Ironically, as books become increasingly virtualized, this is becoming less of an issue: the “virtual” bookshelves can handle multiple DDN numbers for a book just fine, as they are simply pointers to the resource itself.

The key takeaway is that similar books tend to cluster together in an information space (also known as a?latent space). This provides a means to determine?relevance,?as similar works are?usually relevant to one another.

This?is how?search?works at its core. Most search algorithms use a variation of the above approach to determine books and other media that may be germane to a given set of keywords specified for a given book. This approach is often faster and more relevant than looking for direct?keyword?searches, though the latter can also be germane.

Keywords and relevancy was one form of finding information, but sometimes the best way was simply to pick up a newspaper:

All the News That's Fit to Print

The first recognized newspaper in Europe was Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, usually known by its short name Relation, published in Strasbourg, Austria, in 1605 by Johann Carolus. This first “newspaper” would likely be unrecognisable as such today, as it was more properly a newsbook (so perhaps more akin to a magazine). Still, it contained the important elements of pulling together timely topical stories from a variety of cities throughout Europe.

Newsbooks eventually gave way to newspapers and broadsides, typically printed on cheaper paper than books and often containing announcements of everything from news of the courts to announcement dates for ships departing and arriving to business news, and not surprisingly, the Press became synonymous (for better or worse) with journalistic efforts.

In the US, the first newsletter was Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, by Benjamin Harris in 1690. However, it lasted only one letter before the governor of Massachusetts shut him down. The Boston Gazette, by John Campbell, became the first newspaper to stay in business, followed shortly after that by The New England Courant, by James Franklin (father to Benjamin Franklin, who also ran the newspaper for some time, and who was perhaps the biggest champion for Freedom of the Press when the Bill of Rights were written).

While people had kept journals for centuries, the rise of the printing press made journalism and fiction writing feasible, and it is perhaps no surprise that the period from the late seventeenth century through the nineteenth century marked the emergence of novels and literary endeavours on both sides of the Atlantic. By the mid-19th century, most cities had their own newspapers (many had several), and by the 1880s, there was a rise in the number of highly dubious newspapers selling advertising accompanied with stories of dubious origin, mostly printed on the cheapest paper available, one with a very high acid content made from sawdust that yellowed quickly. In time, the news so produced became known as yellow journalism, the 19th-century equivalent of Fake News.

Rise and Fall of the Secretarial Pool

However, there was still a significant gulf between the writer and the typesetter. What was needed was a "personal typesetter", a device that could be used to create print-like output without the need to maintain a complex typesetting system. In 1868, Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel W. Soule applied for a patent for a Type-Writer, with production ramping up through the 1870s as businesses and professional writers vied for the new devices. By the late 1870s, Sholes and Glidden merged with Remington (manufacturers of sewing machines), and the S&G type-writers soon became known as the Remington Typewriter.

Remington typewriters proved a godsend for writers, editors and typesetters. There is still some argument about where the QWERTY keyboard arrangement came from, though the usual explanation is that it was designed to minimize keys jamming together as people typed. By the mid-20th century, the typewriter had given rise to the secretarial pool, in which many (most female) employees transcribed hand-written messages to "professional" typed missives, with good secretaries often able to type more than 200 words a minute, so such jams were not altogether uncommon.

By the early 1960s, electric typewriters such as the IBM Selectric replaced the older mechanical models. They increasingly drove the creation of Hollerith Punch Cards, used as input and output to the newly introduced commercial computers. This would presage a refactoring of the keyboard's design until, by the 1980s, most of the mechanical aspects of the typewriter mainly had disappeared (the long striker keys became contact point sensors beneath the keys themselves.

By the late 1980s, typesetters had all but disappeared (I worked for a typesetter in that period, and watched as our revenues dropped from several million dollars a year to maybe $40K in that fateful year. Aldus Pagemaker (named after the aforementioned Aldus Minutius) quickly became a new form of typesetting and layout software and kick-started an era of Computer driven layout.

Ironically, this also proved to be the death knell for the office secretarial pool, especially as managers realized that they could do far more with computers than they could with typewriters (and that their colleagues who had adapted them were the ones who were getting the promotions).

Inky Evolution

A similar innovation also had a long-term effect - the ballpoint pen. The 19th century and on saw a dramatic increase in metallurgical engineering, primarily due to the needs arising from the railroads in both Europe and the US. Crowquill nibs had been used to deposit ink on paper for centuries, but such nibs usually dulled quickly and had to be trimmed with a pen knife. In the 1820s, several companies in England and the US began to produce steel nibs, which used a thin channel to draw ink into the pen. Such pens lasted considerably longer and didn't need to be sharpened as often, and it likely also proved a relief to local crow populations.

Over time, more and more novel ways emerged to store the ink in wells on the pen itself. By the late 19th century, fountain pens were being produced that could draw ink into the well and then dispense it without having to repeatedly dip the nib into ink. Because of the detailed engineering required, such pans were typically expensive and tended to splatter if improperly used.

In 1938, László Bíró, a Hungarian editor living in Germany, came across an idea by John Loud, written fifty years before, to use a ball within a pen casing to control the flow of ink, rather than a nib. While the idea was novel, the chemistry of the ink proved to be the problem, which became the problem that Bíró and his brother Gy?rgy (a dentist with a reasonably deep knowledge of chemistry) solved.

With the rise of the Nazis, both Bírós fled to Argentina, where they started mass-producing the Bíró pens. They had limited success there, but by the 1950s, they had teamed with Marcel Bich (who had become quite wealthy selling razors and cigarette lighters) to push the pens (now renamed Bic pens) into the American market and from there, worldwide.

The 1950s also saw the rise of sponge-tip-based pens, drawing their ink from an ammonia base (magic markers). At the same time, similar approaches with different chemistries produced Pentel and Copic brands (both out of Japan) and permanent markers that used indelible ink for writing on more complex surfaces. Finally, NASA developed their ball-point marker specifically designed to use capillary action exclusively to draw ink from a saturated sponge well for writing in zero-G environments (or anywhere that you couldn't count on gravity to draw down the ink.

Ironically, we've come full circle with the emergence of computer tablets. Such tables can use fingers, but for drawing and writing, they can also use plastic styluses that would not have looked unfamiliar to Roman legionnaires or Babylonian scribes. These styluses have a small magnetic tip, either permanently installed or controlled by circuitry driven by software, that can then be sensed by the ambient magnet field of the tablet itself.

Conclusion

With the advent of Generative AI in 2017, the whole process of writing shifted again, this time to the point where computer neural net models called Transformers were able to create responses based upon text (and eventually image, sound, or video)- based prompts. The implications of this are still being debated and will, in fact, be a critical question of this particular series.

In Media Res,

Kurt Cagle

Editor, The Cagle Report

If you want to shoot the breeze or have a cup of virtual coffee, I have a Calendly account at https://calendly.com/theCagleReport . I am available for consulting and full-time work.