An Encyclopedia of the History of Technology part 69 potx

PART THREE: TRANSPORT 662 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 PART FOUR: COMMUNICATION AND CALCULATION 666 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 LANGUAGE, WRITING, AND GRAPHIC ARTS 667 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 PART FOUR: COMMUNICATION AND CALCULATION 668 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 LANGUAGE, WRITING, AND GRAPHIC ARTS 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 PART FOUR: COMMUNICATION AND CALCULATION 670 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 LANGUAGE, WRITING, AND GRAPHIC ARTS 671 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 . 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. 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. 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