An Encyclopedia of the History of Technology part 71 pps

PART FOUR: COMMUNICATION AND CALCULATION 682 the three-colour theory to photography, and with that and the invention of the half-tone screen, the way was clear to convince the eye that it sees the range of colours in the original when what it really sees is a collection of dots of yellow, magenta (red) and cyan (blue) ink (known as process colours) of varying intensities. A fourth colour was added later—black, to give greater depth of tone. The first example of three-colour printing was exhibited by F.E.Ives at Philadelphia in 1885, and it became a practical proposition from 1892. It could be applied to any of the three printing processes. Four plates are made by photographing the coloured original four times through a half- tone screen, using a different coloured filter each time—blue, green, red and yellow for printing successively in yellow, magenta, cyan and black ink. More recently, the orthodox process camera began to be replaced by more sophisticated equipment, that is, by the photoscanner. It was in 1937 that Alexander Murray working for Eastman Kodak built the first scanner, in which a scanning head picked up light from a coloured transparency and a photomultiplier converted this into electronic signals. From these, various kinds of output can be derived, according to the printing process. Laser light is now used to expose the output film. OFFICE PRINTING A kind of typesetting has been carried out for over a century by non- printing operatives—on the typewriter. Ideas for ‘writing machines’ go back to the eighteenth century and many designs were conceived, including some that resulted in embossed marks on paper to enable the blind to read by touch. The first commercially successful typewriter was evolved by the American inventors Christopher Latham Sholes and Carlos Glidden to type letters on to paper. They persuaded the firm of gunmakers Remington to manufacture it and the job was given to their sewing machine division. Hence the first practical typewriter, when it appeared in 1873, bore a resemblance to a sewing machine. Development was at first slow, but during the 1880s many different designs appeared. Most, like the Sholes and Glidden, used type bars to carry the type, striking down, up or sideways on to the paper. Others carried the types on a wheel or a cylinder, but it was the Underwood No. 1 of 1897 with side-strike type bars, enabling the typist to see what she was typing, that proved to be the standard arrangement for many years to come. Sholes and Glidden first arranged the keys alphabetically, but found the type bars jammed. Sholes’s mathematician brother-in-law was asked to rearrange the keyboard so that the movements of the type bars did not conflict, bearing in mind the combinations of letters occurring in the English language and their frequency of occurrence. The result was the LANGUAGE, WRITING, AND GRAPHIC ARTS 683 ‘qwerty’ arrangement used ever since in spite of spasmodic attempts to reach a more logical layout. The New York YMCA bought six Remingtons in 1881 to begin classes for young ladies—eight turned up for the first lesson. Five years later there were an estimated 60,000 female typists in the USA. The typewriter, used jointly with shorthand, not only revolutionized office work; it brought about a social revolution providing millions of women with the possibility of paid employment where none existed before. Sholes said: ‘I feel that I have done something for the women who have always had to work so hard. This will more easily enable them to earn a living.’ The first of two major improvements to the typewriter was the application of electric drive. The first electric typewriter was made by Blickensderfer as early as 1902 (he had invented the portable in 1887). Other designs followed, but it was not generally in use in offices until the late 1950s. Then came a radical departure: the IBM 72 of 1961 abandoned the type bars and moving carriage and substituted a moving ‘golf ball’ typehead. Another improvement was the introduction of automatic control, first mechanically with punched paper tape and then electronically by the computer. The former became common in the 1960s but was soon replaced by computer control, and the typewriter becomes the word-processor, with no difference in principle between it and a computer-assisted composing machine. The single copy has rarely sufficed in offices and various processes were developed to make additional copies. James Watt invented a copying machine in 1780, whereby letters written in a special ink could be transferred to dampened tissue paper by pressure, and in 1806, Ralph Wedgwood patented his Stylographic Writer using ‘carbonic’ or ‘carbonated’ paper—the first recorded appearance of carbon paper. Ink transfer methods were in use until the present century, but for greater numbers of copies the stencil duplicator provided the answer. The first British patent was taken out in 1874 by Eugenio de Zuccato, employing varnished and then wax-coated paper. In 1881 the name of Gestetner enters the scene with his cyclostyle or wheeled pen for preparing the stencil. The stencil could be easily printed off on the single-cylinder duplicating machine invented by Harry W.Loowe in 1897 or the double-cylinder machine of Gestetner developed in 1900–2. The stencil and duplicator were a form of screen printing. In this process, ink is forced through the fine mesh of a silk screen, partly blanked off by a stencil plate. It was used in China and Japan long before printing arrived in Western Europe. In nineteenth-century France, it was adopted by a manufacturer in Lyons to print textiles. The process found other applications and in the 1930s in Great Britain and the USA, it was used to print on to a wide variety of materials, such as glass, wood and plastics, with various shapes. It was originally an entirely hand-process, but now screens are PART FOUR: COMMUNICATION AND CALCULATION 684 prepared by photosensitization and printing carried out on automatic presses. Much packaging, like the ubiquitous plastic bag, receives its striking and colourful designs by means of screen printing. The stencil and duplicator gave good service for many years and are still in use, but they have been in a large measure replaced by two processes. One is the small offset litho machine, introduced in 1927 and marketed by Rotaprint. The other was the electrostatic copying machine which emerged in the 1950s under the name of xerography (Greek: ‘dry writing’) and heralded the photocopying revolution. Here, an image of the document is reflected or projected on to an electrically-charged selenium surface. Light from the non- text areas of the document removes the charge, leaving the surface charged where the image of the text falls on it. Carbon powder with an opposite electric charge is cascaded on to the selenium, adhering to the charged portions. This powder is then transferred to paper, also electrically charged, and is fused on to the paper by heating, leaving a permanent image of the original text. OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION So far, all the typesetting methods we have considered have required human agency for the conversion of, say, an author’s manuscript or typescript into type. Now, even that has been rendered unnecessary by the process known as optical character recognition (OCR). Here, the original copy is scanned optically and the light signals converted into electronic impulses that operate a computer-controlled photosetter. However, there are strict limitations over the nature of the copy the scanner can ‘read’ and a human agency is likely to be needed for most copy for the foreseeable future. At the receiving end, too, the long reign of printed page and book appears threatened. For many purposes information is held in remote computer databases and may be called up when required on a computer terminal or micro-computer. The vast collection of references to scientific literature hitherto available only in the form of published abstract journals is now stored in this way; library catalogues are consulted on a VDU (visual display unit) and the public can access useful information on their television screens at home using broadcast Viewdata services. But all this is for reference to specific information. For most reading purposes, ranging from serious study to light entertainment, the printed page and the book seem set to survive. FURTHER READING Adler, M.H. The writing machine (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1973) LANGUAGE, WRITING, AND GRAPHIC ARTS 685 Barber, C.L. The story of language, rev. edn (Pan Books, London, 1979) Dudek, L. Literature and the press (Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1960) Kubler, G.A. A new history of stereotyping (privately published, New York, 1941) Moran, J. The composition of reading matter (Wace, London, 1964) —— Printing presses (Faber & Faber, London, 1973) Proudfoot, W.B. The origin of stencil duplicating (Hutchinson, London, 1972) Steinberg, S.H. Five hundred years of printing 3rd edn (Penguin Books, London, 1974) Wakeman, G.V. Victorian book illustration (David & Charles, Newton Abbot, 1973) Whalley, J. Writing implements and accessories (David & Charles, Newton Abbot, 1975) 686 15 INFORMATION: TIMEKEEPING, COMPUTING, TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND AUDIOVISUAL TECHNOLOGIES HERBERT OHLMAN INTRODUCTION Information technologies (which we will take to include communications) may be regarded as extensions of human sensory-motor capabilities: particularly, the senses of sight and hearing; and memory, speech and manipulative skills, such as writing. For seeing, up until a few hundred years ago there were few means of enhancing human vision. However, in prehistory man had discovered means to represent his own activities and those things important in his life, such as game animals. The earliest representations have been found on the walls of caves: in Spain in 1879, and in France beginning in 1896. The most important find was in the Lascaux caves in France in 1940. Whereas the Spanish paintings in the Altamira caves have been dated between 8000 and 3000 BC, those in Lascaux are the earliest human creations ever found, dating from 15,000 to 13,000 BC. Artists covered and recovered these walls, not with primitive scratched drawings, but with paintings sophisticated in conception and masterful in execution; their longevity is a tribute to their choice of INFORMATION 687 materials. This evidence indicates that the mastery of materials and techniques needed to record accurately observed experiences, as well as the urge to make such records, occurred much earlier than other marks of civilization. Also, in prehistory the heavens were mapped, and the movements of sun, moon and planets tracked with only the naked eye. However, it was only with the scientific revolution in Europe, and particularly in the seminal seventeenth century that the inventions of the telescope by Galileo, and the microscope by Leeuwenhoek and Hooke, extended the range of human vision outwards to the macrocosm, and inwards into the microcosm. For hearing, artificial aids also may be traced into prehistory. Human cries and shouts to signal the finding of game or warn of danger were soon supplemented by beating sticks on hollow logs (the drum), and blowing on hollow shells (the trumpet). The cries of primitive man eventually led to speech, and the noisemakers to music. The Greeks were among the earliest to understand the mathematical basis of music, and developed scales and means of recording melodies. Also, they built amphitheatres for the performance of music and drama, concentrating and reinforcing sound towards their audiences. Early aural inventions were the ear trumpet to help the hard of hearing and, its inverse, the megaphone, to direct the human voice towards an assembled crowd. Human memory was vastly extended by the inventions of counting and writing. With the coming of writing, the human race no longer had to depend upon oral-history transmission from generation to generation. The first counting was probably done on the fingers (our words digit and digital indicate this history), and with piles of small, natural objects such as pebbles (our words calculate and calculus). To count beyond ten, toes and other bodily members were added, and then the tally stick was brought into use. The recording of numerical quantities goes back to the Babylonians who devised cuneiform ‘writing’ on clay tablets before 3000 BC. Even older are positional notation and the use of zero, probably developed first in northern India, and passed on to the West via the Arabic culture which flourished from AD 600 to 1200. The earliest mechanical aid, the abacus, goes back at least to 450 BC, and was in use in some form in the East thousands of years earlier. It was the first digital computer, enabling users to add and subtract quantities using beads as counters. THE EVOLUTION OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES The scheme of organization depicted in Table 15.1 will help in understanding the evolution of information technologies. The table is divided horizontally into three parts: 1. Theoretical disciplines and discoveries which underlie invention, such as philosophy, mathematics, logic and psychology; and the pure sciences, particularly physics and chemistry; PART FOUR: COMMUNICATION AND CALCULATION 688 Table 15.1 : The evolution of information technologies. INFORMATION 689 Table 15.1 (cont.). PART FOUR: COMMUNICATION AND CALCULATION 690 2. Applied sciences, engineering and invention; particularly those based upon the phenomena of optics, electricity and magnetism. 3. Service innovations, particularly social inventions such as trade, finance, and advertising. Vertically, the chart is divided into broad time periods. Because most information-related inventions are relatively recent, we have put all early developments under the heading ‘up to 1800’, and divided the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into six segments of ever-decreasing duration. There is also a three-fold classification of discovery and invention: first, by broad discipline or skill; second, by specific scientific or technological area; and third, by earliest reported discovery or invention date. Logically, there should be a cause-effect relationship from theory/discovery to invention to dissemination; however, in many cases an invention preceded theoretical understanding of how it works, as well as practical applications. There are other examples where imagination, expressed through writings and drawings of a fantasy or science-fiction nature, preceded either. The day of the fabled lone inventor working for decades in his basement or garage, and by an unlikely combination of skill and luck getting his invention successfully to market, is probably gone for ever. In truth, most successful inventors of the nineteenth and early twentieth century had partners or assistants, but it was not until the organizational genius of Edison, with his ‘invention factory’, that we see the beginning of the end of cottage-industry invention. Today, with few exceptions—mostly in microcomputer software— inventions are the result of corporate efforts. Where individuals receive credit, it usually goes to a team of from three to ten. In this article and on the chart, more than 100 of the most important discoveries, inventions and service innovations are listed; hundreds of others could not be included in a limited survey. But how to choose which inventions are the most important ones is a contentious question. We all have our favourites and what may seem a frivolous luxury to one may be thought a necessity to another. However, it is possible to suggest objective criteria with which to rank inventions. We will not consider the entire range of inventions, but only those related to information technologies (including communications in the older, generic sense, where it includes transportation): 1. Suppose we ask, ‘How much of our life is affected by a certain invention?’ By this criterion, the most important would be the generation and distribution of electricity, and particularly the electric light; television, to which the average family devotes several hours every day; and the motor car and road system, which has given personal transport dominance over older, public forms such as the railway. INFORMATION 691 2. Another pertinent question would be, ‘How much of our income is spent using an invention?’ Here the motor car would no doubt come out on top; typically, it accounts for more than 10 per cent of disposable personal income. 3. Still another measure might be, ‘What percentage of the population own the invention?’ Here, the radio receiver might come out on top, probably followed by television, and then the motor car. 4. From a less personal point of view, we could ask, ‘What would be the effect on society if we had to do without the invention?’ Here, electricity, the telephone and motorized transport would be the most significant. However, newer inventions, such as the computer and the aeroplane, although not used by most people directly, greatly affect their lives. 5. Another way, as shown in Table 15.2, is in terms of how many people are employed world-wide in industries which have developed from electrical or electronic inventions. To the ten largest (category III), we could add clock and watch production; photography and motion pictures; data (nonvoice) communications; and the transportation industries, particularly automotive and aerospace. THE TIMING OF INVENTIONS An invention must be considered in the context of its time. No matter how great its ingenuity or ultimate worth, it cannot succeed without certain prerequisites: 1. The necessary materials, elements and components must be available; for example, transistors only became possible after we understood the solid state of materials, and integrated circuits only after transistors became common and cheap. 2. There must be entrepreneurs or venture capitalists ready to fund the development, early production and dissemination of the product; there is always a high risk of failure no matter how much of a breakthrough the invention seems to offer, and conservatism of vested interests must be overcome. 3. There must be an unmet, even though unexpressed, need for the invention. And there must be opinion leaders ready to take a chance on accepting a new idea, even though neighbours may scoff at their foolishness—who could have been brave enough to sign a subscription for the first telephone? . speech, and the noisemakers to music. The Greeks were among the earliest to understand the mathematical basis of music, and developed scales and means of recording melodies. Also, they built amphitheatres. 1950s. Then came a radical departure: the IBM 72 of 1961 abandoned the type bars and moving carriage and substituted a moving ‘golf ball’ typehead. Another improvement was the introduction of automatic. the nature of the copy the scanner can ‘read’ and a human agency is likely to be needed for most copy for the foreseeable future. At the receiving end, too, the long reign of printed page and book