An Encyclopedia of the History of Technology part 69 potx

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consisted of a winged Orbiter craft with three main engines using liquid oxygen
and hydrogen fuel, supplied by an external tank plus two solid fuel rocket
boosters. This hybrid rocket combination has a capability of carrying 29.5
tonnes into low earth orbit. The external tank is lost during launch, but the solid
boosters are re-used and the Orbiter re-enters the atmosphere after the mission,
and lands like a conventional aircraft on a runway. Orbiter’s main engines were a
major breakthrough in rocket technology. They were designed to be re-usable
and throttleable as well as having the largest specific impulse (thrust per kilogram
of propellant) of any previous engine. Up to the end of 1985 over 20 Shuttle
missions had been performed since the first launch on 12 April 1981.
Whereas the development history of American launch vehicles can be easily
traced, the same cannot be said for the other space power, the Soviet Union.
The early Sputniks were launched by a vehicle devised from the SS-6 Sapwood
ICBM, with a gross lift-off weight of 267,000kg (589,000lb). The A1, A2 and
A3 vehicles followed, each with a greater launch capability than the last. The
A2e was a basic SS-6 plus an additional stage on the A2 and was first flown in
1961 for the Venus fly-by missions. It was also used for the interplanetary,
lunar and other deep space probes such as Prognoz. Later vehicles have
designations C1, D1, F1, F2 and G, although few details have been released of
these. What is remarkable about Soviet rocketry is that many of the vehicles
used in the 1980s date back to the late 1950s and early 1960s, and it seems
that little real development took place after these earliest designs were
developed.
Other nations and consortiums of nations have developed their own launch
vehicles. Europe has the Ariane vehicle; a four-stage launcher capable of
placing a 1700kg (3750lb) satellite into low earth orbit. The UK’s only launch
vehicle, Black Arrow, successfully launched the X3 (Prospero) satellite in 1971,
but the project was cancelled soon after the launch. China, Japan and India
have also built and flown their own launch vehicles.

FURTHER READING
Baker, D. The rocket (New Cavendish Books, London, 1978)
—— The history of rocketry and space travel (Nelson, London, 1981)
Von Braun, W. and Ordway, F. The history of manned spaceflight (New Cavendish Books,
London, 1981)
Von Braun, W., Ordway, F. and Dooling, D. Space travel—a history (Harper and Row,
London, 1985)
Gatland, K. Space technology (Salamander, London, 1981)
Hart, D. The encyclopaedia of soviet spacecraft (Bison Books, Greenwich CT, 1988)
Spaceflight directory 1988 edited by R.Turnill (Jane’s Publishing, London, 1988)
Lewis, R. Illustrated encyclopaedia of space exploration (Salamander, London, 1983)
Ordway, F. and Sharpe, M. The rocket team (Heinemann, London, 1979)
PART FOU R

COMMUNICATION AND
CALCULATION



665
14

LANGUAGE, WRITING,
PRINTING AND GRAPHIC
ARTS

LANCE DAY
LANGUAGE
Man is distinguished from the animal world in no more striking way than in
his ability to communicate by means of language. All human activity, except

the simplest and most primitive, requires co-operation, and that is not possible
without language. Animals do of course communicate by sound, but their cries
are inarticulate and general, whereas it is of the essence of human language
that the sounds uttered are articulate, that is, they have a structure that can be
divided into words having precise and specific meanings.
Language is a system of vocal sounds that are symbolic, that is, they are
arbitrarily related to the thing they stand for. Animal gestures and cries, on the
other hand, are non-symbolic. An animal seeks to prevent the approach of
another by frightening sounds and gestures, even brute force, while man,
although not always forswearing these methods, uses sound to symbolize his
intention: ‘Keep out’. By writing, he has a means of communicating his
intention without the necessity of his continued presence. From such basic
needs, language has been developed into a highly sophisticated instrument for
the expression of the most complex thoughts and the most subtle and uplifting
aesthetic emotions.
The origins of language lie hidden in the remote past and are a matter of
plausible speculation. The language of present-day primitive peoples offers
few clues, since their spoken word is still relatively sophisticated compared
with man’s earliest attempts at speech. Studying the way babies learn to
speak is also hardly relevant, because their speech is derived from adults who
have already learned a highly developed language. It is most likely that
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human language had its beginnings around a million years ago, at about the
same time as the earliest toolmaking and distinctively human forms of co-
operation. Several theories have been proposed to explain how language
arose, some with such curious names as the ‘bow-wow’, the ‘pooh-pooh’ and
‘yo-he-ho’ theories.
The first suggests that primitive language imitated the sounds of nature,
particularly animal cries, the second that it arose from the instinctive emotional

cries of pain or joy. As the sounds thus emitted are inarticulate, neither
explains how man arrived at articulate sounds. The ‘yo-he-ho’ is better in this
respect. Proposed by Noiré in the nineteenth century, it suggests that language
arose from involuntary sounds uttered by men engaged in some joint muscular
effort as heaving a tree trunk. While heaving they trapped the breath in the
lungs, closing the vocal cords, and on relaxing the cords opened and the air
was expelled in a grunt or some other sound. This would have given rise to
the basic consonant-vowel structure of language and has the additional
advantage of associating the origin of language with human co-operative
activity. The need to communicate during such activity is most likely to have
provided the motivation to derive and develop this method of communication.
But whether there was a single point of origin, or development at scattered
times and places, and what forms primitive language took must remain
virtually guesswork, until we reach the era of written records.
WRITING
Writing is, strictly, derived from speech, but the symbols used in writing are
derived from pictures. The use of pictures to convey messages or keep records
has been widely used among primitive peoples from the New Stone Age
onwards and finds a place in civilized society today, as with the figures of a man
and a woman to denote the appropriate toilets. Writing evolved by simplifying
the pictures and then conventionalizing them until they were scarcely
recognizable as pictures. Next, the signs were made to stand for linguistic
components, first words, then syllables and finally individual sounds or groups
of sounds (phonemes). The form taken by the signs depended to some extent on
the nature of the materials used. If the signs were scratched into clay or incised
into wood, the writing tended to be angular and avoid curves. The earliest
writing of this, or indeed of any kind, appears to have been that developed by
the Bronze Age Sumerians in Southern Mesopotamia between 4000 and
3000BC. At first they drew pictures in clay with the tip of a stylus made from a
reed. It was then found easier to press the head of the stylus into the clay,

producing a wedgeshaped mark about 8mm long. Signs with different meanings
were formed by various combinations of these wedge shapes. The script is
known as cuneiform, from the Latin cuneus, a wedge. Later the Babylonians and
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Assyrians supplanted the Sumerians, but took over and developed their writing
and cuneiform came to be the almost universal script in the Near East.
In ancient Egypt, on the other hand, scribes painted marks usually on
papyrus, made of strips of the stem of a sedge plant glued together, by means of
a kind of brush pen and ink. The original pictorial writing goes back to around
3000BC and is known as hieroglyphic, from the Greek ‘Holy carved’.
Hieroglyphics were used throughout the Egyptian world for religious purposes,
but a more conventionalized form was developed for everyday use, known as the
hieratic, or priestly, script. By 700BC this had been further simplified to demotic,
or popular, script. In other times and places, this stage had been reached;
Chinese characters, ideograms, are similarly simplified and conventionalized
derivations of picture writing. The really crucial development, the alphabet,
derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Egyptians, like the Babylonians and
Assyrians, developed a syllabic system with signs for consonants, singly or in
groups, and omitting vowels. There were 24 signs for single consonants. When
the western Semitic peoples, almost certainly the Phoenicians, developed a script,
they took over these signs. The result was not so much a syllabic system but an
alphabetic one with the vowels omitted. Around 900BC the Greeks assimilated
this alphabet and took the final step of adding signs for the vowels. At last we
have arrived at a real alphabet, or system of signs standing for phonemes, so that
all sounds of speech can be represented by a mere 25 or thereabouts easily
memorized signs. Universal literacy was hardly possible before the Greek
achievement, from which other alphabets have stemmed, including the Latin,
used in Western Europe and cultures derived therefrom, and the Cyrillic used in
Russia and some other countries in Eastern Europe.

To write the new Greek characters required a finer tool than the old brush
pen. The Romans took over the reed pen, writing on papyrus, from the
Egyptians, but for casual jottings, a handier implement was available—a stylus
for making incisions on a wax-coated tablet. In Europe during the Dark Ages
the practice of writing inherited from the ancient world was kept alive in the
monasteries, a part of which, the scriptorium, was reserved for the scribes who
laboriously wrote out the learned and practical works required by the
community. It was during the early mediaeval period that quill pen and vellum
(originally fine, smooth calfskin: from Old French velin, calf) replaced the
Roman materials. A number of illustrations in contemporary manuscripts
show scribes at work at their desks, surrounded by their writing materials and
implements. The quill pen remained in use until well into the nineteenth
century. It was made from one of the primary feathers taken from the wing of
a bird, usually a goose, sometimes a raven or swan. This pen (Latin penna, a
feather) was flexible and could be sharpened repeatedly in different ways to
produce various kinds of script, yet was not sharp enough to penetrate the
writing surface. It was also in plentiful supply. Parchment, also made from
animal skins, proved to be a durable, if rather expensive material. Paper was
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cheaper. It had been invented by the Chinese in AD 105, although recent
studies suggest an even earlier origin in the second century BC. The art of
making it drifted westwards through Islam until it reached Western Europe, by
contact with the Moors in Spain in the twelfth century, but its use was not
widespread until the fifteenth century, when a massive increase in productive
capacity made possible the practice of printing.
The third essential ingredient in writing is ink and the word itself provides a
clue to the earliest kinds of ink. The word is derived from the Latin encaustum,
‘something burnt in’, for the ink used throughout the mediaeval period consisted
of iron salt and oak galls, which literally burned itself into the writing surface.

With these simple means, for over a millennium, the learned and literary
works of Greece and Rome were recorded and communicated, along with the
theological, philosophical and scientific works of the Middle Ages. They
sustained the intellectual tradition of antiquity and the Middle Ages that the
modern world is heir to.
The quill pen, with all its virtues, had many drawbacks: it was fragile and
wore out quickly, it could retain enough ink to write only a few words at a
time. However, it long reigned supreme in spite of attempts to substitute metal
nibs, certainly as early as the sixteenth century. They suffered from the
crippling defect of inflexibility, making it impossible to achieve the subtle
differences of thickness that are such a feature of early script. The other
difficulty was that the metal was rapidly corroded by the ink. The steel pen
was to solve these problems. It was on general sale around 1829, but was still
uncommon ten years later, being found too scratchy and stiff. By 1849,
however, it was in widespread use, thanks to the improvements effected by the
leading manufacturer Joseph Gillott: two slits were pierced in the shoulder of
the nib, in addition to the one in the centre, greatly improving its flexibility.
The mass production of steel nibs, centred in Birmingham, brought down the
price, so they could be simply discarded when corrosion set in. After the
Second World War the steel nib declined rapidly and now survives only for a
few specialized tasks.
Writing with quill or steel pen was always a disjointed business, even with the
addition of a small ink reservoir behind the nib. The answer was the fountain
pen, which made its first appearance in a work on mathematical instruments by
Bion, the English translation of which was published in 1723. But it remained
primitive and unreliable for over a century, and it was not until the second half
of the nineteenth century that improvements in design and construction made it
satisfactory. The patent by John Joseph Parker of 1832 for ‘improvements in
fountain pens’ makes the first mention of a self-filling pen and ushered in a
whole spate of patents seeking to perfect the arrangements for filling the barrel of

the pen with ink and, more difficult, for feeding the nib with an even and
controlled flow. By the end of the century names such as Swan, Parker and
Waterman had brought fountain pens into popular use. More modern
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669
developments are the interchangeable nib and the ink cartridge—a great help
towards the elusive ideal of a leak-proof fountain pen. The search for inks less
corrosive than the iron-based one then in use began with Henry Stephens in
1834 and succeeded with the discovery of aniline dyes in 1856 (see p. 201).
The steel pen has been almost entirely, and the fountain pen to some extent,
superseded by the ball-point pen. The present form of ball-point derives from
the invention by the Hungarian brothers Ladisla and Georg Biró, who applied
for a patent in 1938 but moved to the Argentine at the outbreak of war.
Development followed, especially in the USA where the Defense Department
required a pen that would work at high altitude, with an ink unaffected by
climatic changes and yet quick drying. The ball-point came near to meeting
these requirements and it swept the board. Its more recent rival, the felt-tip, has
complemented and not supplanted the biro.
Both these pens serve also for note-jotting as well as more formal writing.
The wax tablets of the Romans were still in use in the sixteenth century; when
Hamlet exclaims: ‘My tablets, meet it is I set it down’, he may well have been
referring to them. The schoolboy then struggled with slate and slate pencil, but
the discovery of the black lead or graphite mine in Cumberland in the
sixteenth century led to the use of this material, first in holders, then in slender
columns encased in wood—the pencil.
THE INVENTION OF PRINTING
A massive effort was put into the hand-copying of texts in the Middle Ages, in
monasteries and, later, secular scriptoria as well, but it was a laborious and
expensive operation, and each time a text was copied there was a fresh chance of
error. No two copies were exactly alike. Printing as a means of making many

identical copies arose in the late Middle Ages. Playing cards were printed from
wood-blocks in which the areas to appear white were cut away, leaving the ink-
bearing portions standing out in relief. Pictures with captions were printed from
these wood-blocks, the earliest surviving examples being of the Virgin with four
saints of 1418 and the St Christopher of 1423, in the John Rylands Library in
Manchester. From around 1430 sheets such as these were collected and bound
into books, known as block-books or xylographica. For around half a century
block-books, produced mainly in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands
went some way towards satisfying a demand for multiple identical copies. But
the number of copies that could be printed from a block of wood was limited
and, far more serious, when the print run was finished, the wood blocks had to
be discarded and fresh blocks made for a different text.
The invention of printing from movable type was immeasurably superior
and led to the early demise of the block-book. Here, the text is assembled from
individual type, one for each character. After printing off, the type is
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distributed ready for use in a fresh work. Movable type was in use in Korea in
the thirteenth century and in Turkey some time later, but there is no evidence
that its use influenced Johann Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg of Mainz, who is
generally accepted as the inventor in Europe of printing with movable type
around 1450—an invention that has exerted a more profound and widespread
influence on mankind than any other. All useful inventions have been
conceived to satisfy a blatant, or latent, need. With printing, a number of
factors converged around the mid-fifteenth century to make it highly likely that
someone would invent it. Literacy, confined to the clerics in the early Middle
Ages, had by then spread to the laity. The development of education, cultural
traditions and prosperity led not only to a desire for literature of all kinds but,
in the case of the richer classes, to a taste for collecting fine manuscripts. A
brisk trade grew up to satisfy this demand and a way was sought to widen the

trade by multiplying texts.
While vellum was the only available medium, printing would have been too
expensive and the supply was hardly adequate for large-scale work. Fortunately
the textile industries of Western Europe were booming, producing a plentiful
supply of waste rag, an admirable material from which to make paper. This
made it sensible to look for a way to make multiple copies. Gutenberg appears to
have begun his search while a political exile in Strasburg towards 1440. He
returned to Mainz between 1444 and 1448 and two years later had perfected his
invention to the point of commercial exploitation. In this he was none too
successful, for financial difficulties led to foreclosure on his equipment in 1455
and it passed to Peter Schöffer, the son-in-law of the lawyer who had lent
Gutenberg the money to set up his business. One book only can be confidently
attributed to Gutenberg’s workshop—the great 42-line Bible, begun in 1452 and
published before August 1456—the first book to be printed from movable type
and a magnificent piece of printing by any later standards.
Gutenberg’s achievement lay in the successful combination of existing
techniques rather than the devising of new ones—not the last such case in the
history of technology. Of these various components, paper has already been
mentioned. The others were the press, the type and the ink. The wooden
press, with variations in detail, had long been used for wine pressing, in
bookbinding and for other purposes, and was only slightly modified for
printing. For ink, Gutenberg substituted an oil-based one for the water-based
inks of the scribes; it was taken over from the material devised for painting by
the Van Eycks. The type was formed by metal-casting techniques which were
well established, although the design of mould, of variable size to suit the
different sizes of the characters, was ingenious. However, Gutenberg’s
contribution in respect of the composition of type metal should not be
overlooked. He seems to have spent years searching for an alloy with certain
properties, such as low melting point for convenience of casting yet strength
enough to resist the wear of thousands of impressions. No existing alloy

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possessed the required combination of properties and the type metal arrived at
by Gutenberg, doubtless after much trial and error, appears to have consisted
mainly of lead and tin with some antimony. Gutenburg thereby achieved a
remarkable technological, if not commercial, success, for the earliest products
do not show the usual signs of primitive, halting work but are fine examples,
equalled later but hardly surpassed. Also, the fact that the equipment and the
process survived virtually unchanged except for minor details for three and a
half centuries cannot be entirely due to printers’ conservatism. It is a striking
testimonial to the soundness of Gutenberg’s invention.
THE GROWTH OF PRINTING
Printing spread rapidly, first to German centres of trade and banking such as
Cologne (1464), Nuremberg (1470) and Augsburg (1472), rather than seats of
learning. By the early 1480s German printers had taken the invention into
most of the countries of western and central Europe. Italy was first, with a
press at Subiaco as early as 1465, while Paris received its first press in 1470. In
Italy the press was given a fresh direction by the new Renaissance learning
which it would not have received in essentially mediaeval Germany, for it was
Italy that gave us the two faces on which nearly all western types have been
based to this day: roman and italic. It was here too that the title-page,
pagination and the pocket or handy edition emerged. Rome and Venice
followed hard on the heels of Subiaco; Venice was to be the seat of the
illustrious Aldine Press, with its dolphin and anchor mark, set up by Aldus
Manutius about 1490. He conceived the idea of disseminating scholarly
editions of Greek and Roman authors to as wide a public as possible by
printing in compact type in small handy volumes no fewer than 1000 copies,
whereas the usual print run was a few hundred—500 at most. Such editions
were renowned throughout Europe and did much to spread the knowledge of
classical authors that was of the essence of the Renaissance. The printed book

was shaking itself free of the manuscript whose appearance it had so faithfully
mirrored, and was presenting a distinctive image of its own.
In England printing was introduced in 1476 not by a German but by a
native, William Caxton. Having succeeded in commerce as a member of the
Mercers’ Company, he diversified in late middle age into the manuscript trade
and learned the art of printing in Cologne. He set up his press at the Sign of
the Red Pale at Westminster, the seat of government and court, rather than the
commercial centre of London, in order more profitably to serve the clientele
who would be most likely to buy the kinds of books he was most interested in
printing—courtly romances and devotional works.
The printed book also proved instrumental in the spread of scientific
knowledge. Apart from the encyclopaedic works of natural knowledge such