Technology / Engineering Timeline

During the Lower Paleolithic era prehistoric hominins manufactured stone tools, characterized scientifically as Acheulean (Acheulian), across Africa and much of West Asia and Europe. Acheulean tools are typically found with Homo erectus remains.

"The Mode 2 (eg Acheulean or Biface) toolmakers also used the Mode 1 flake tool method but supplemented it by also using wood or bone implements to pressure flake fragments away from stone cores to create the first true hand-axes. The use of a soft hammer made from wood or bone also resulted in more control over the shape of the finished tool. Unlike the earlier Mode 1 industries, the core was prized over the flakes that came from it. Another advance was that the Mode 2 tools were worked symmetrically and on both sides (hence the name Biface) indicating greater care in the production of the final tool" (Wikipedia article on Stone tool, accessed 04-04-2009).

"Providing calendrical dates and ordered chronological sequences in the study of early stone tool manufacture is difficult and contentious. Radiometric dating, often potassium-argon dating, of deposits containing Acheulean material is able to broadly place the use of Acheulean techniques within the time from around 1.65 million years ago to about 100,000 years ago. The earliest accepted examples of the type, at 1.65 m years old, come from the West Turkana region of Kenya although some have argued for its emergence from as early as 1.8 million years ago.

"In individual regions, this dating can be considerably refined; in Europe for example, Acheulean methods did not reach the continent until around one million years ago and in smaller study areas, the date ranges can be much shorter. Numerical dates can be misleading however, and it is common to associate examples of this early human tool industry with one or more glacial or interglacial periods or with a particular early species of human. The earliest user of Acheulean tools was Homo ergaster who first appeared almost 2 million years ago. Not all researchers use this formal name however and instead prefer to call these users early Homo erectus. Later forms of early humans also used Acheulean techniques . . . .

"It was the dominant technology for the vast majority of human history and more than one million years ago it was Acheulean tool users who left Africa to first successfully colonize Eurasia. Their distinctive oval and pear-shaped handaxes have been found over a wide area and some examples attained a very high level of sophistication suggesting that the roots of human art, economy and social organisation arose as a result of their development. Although it developed in Africa, the industry is named after the type site of Saint Acheul, now a suburb of Amiens in northern France, where some of the first examples were identified in the 19th century" (Wikipedia article on Achulean, accessed 04-04-2009).

♦ "These kinds of Acheulean artifacts, as they are known, have been found in Africa dating back about 1.5 million years. But in Europe, the oldest hand axes that had been found dated to only half a million years ago. Scientists have wondered why it took so long for early humans with such refined toolmaking to show up in Europe.

"Now research from two sites in southeastern Spain provides an answer: it didn’t take that long, after all.

"Using paleomagnetic dating, Gary R. Scott and Luis Gibert of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California have determined that rather than being about 200,000 years old, the two sites, Solano del Zamborino and Estrecho del Quípar, are about 760,000 and 900,000 years old, respectively."

"Dr. Gibert said the finding, which was published in Nature, adds to mounting evidence that humans migrated to Europe from Africa earlier than previously thought.

" 'The question is, which route did they follow?' he said. Rather than coming through the Middle East and then westward, Dr. Gibert said he is convinced they came across at Gibraltar. 'We think the Gibraltar straits were a permeable barrier,' he said. 'It’s a provocative interpretation, but I think there is enough information to support it' " (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/science/08obaxe.html?scp=1&sq=stone%20tools&st=cse, accessed 09-12-2009).

Experiments and microscopic studies show that the ends of bone tools found in Swartkrans, Republic of South Africa, were used by early humans to dig in termite mounds.

"Through repeated use, the ends became rounded and polished. Termites are rich in protein and would have been a nutritious source of food for Paranthropus robustus" (http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/bone-tools, accessed 05-10-2010).

"The earliest hearths are at least 790,000 years old, and some researchers think cooking may reach back more than 1.5 million years. Control of fire provided a new tool with several uses—including cooking, which led to a fundamental change in the early human diet. Cooking released nutrients in foods and made them easier to digest. It also rid some plants of poisons.

"Over time, early humans began to gather at hearths and shelters to eat and socialize. As brains became larger and more complex, growing up took longer—requiring more parental care and the protective environment of a home. Expanding social networks led, eventually, to the complex social lives of modern humans" (http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/hearths-shelters, accessed 05-10-2010).

Fire-altered stone tools found in 2004 at Gesher Benot-Ya’aqov, Israel by a team led by Naama Goren-Inbar include stone tools scorched by fire close to concentrations of burnt seeds and wood, indicative of early hearths

Evidence from a former Thames river bed excavation site at Happisburgh in East Anglia, England, about 220 kilometers northeast of London, suggests that early humans were living in the cold climate of northern England between 780,000 and 950,000 years ago. These artefacts include 78 knapped flint specimens that the research team think were used by hunter-gatherers to pierce and cut meat or wood.

It is believed that the earliest humans moved to Europe from Africa around 1.8 million years ago, possibly crossing from Africa to Gibralter by a land bridge. It is also possible that early humans later crossed from Europe to Britain in a similar fashion. Recent evidence indicates that humans lived in Spain at Solano del Zamborino and Estrecho del Quípar, between roughly 780,000 and 950,000 years ago, but prior to the discovery of the Happisburgh site it was believed that early humans did not have the ability to adapt to the cold climates, similar to modern day Scandinavia, that would have existed in Britain at the time. Nor was it known that humans populated Britain so early. So far there is no evidence that these prehistoric inhabitants had mastered the use of fire for heating or cooking, although evidence from sites in the Middle East suggests that fire was used by other early humans at this date. 

"But because they were adapted to a warmer climate, archaeologists have so far believed that they didn't get as far north as Happisburgh — a comparatively cold, inhospitable place. Other studies at archaeological sites in Germany and France have shown signs of human activity in the north around the same time, but the dating of these sites is perhaps not as well established as that at Happisburgh.  

"The dating of the Happisburgh site is based on a combination of methods. The artefacts were entombed in sediment that records a reverse in the polarity of the Earth's magnetic field — the north and south poles switching places — at the time that they were laid down. The last polarity reversal is known to have been 780,000 years ago, making it probable that the Happisburgh artefacts are at least that old. . . ." (http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100707/full/news.2010.338.html, accessed 07-08-2010).

Human fossil remains have yet to be uncovered at the site, but the botanical and animal remains found there have proved very rich in detail.

Locating evidence of human habitation in a relatively cold and inhospital climate at this date is likely "to prompt a re-evaluation of the adaptations and capabilities of early humans" (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128361420, accessed 07-08-2010).

Simon A. Parfitt, Nick M. Ashton et al. "Early Pleistocene human occupation at the edge of the boreal zone in northwest Europe," Nature 466, 8 July 2010.

♦ You can watch a Nature video concerning these discoveries at this link:

http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/thefirstbritons/index.html

A fragment of a horse shoulder blade discovered by a team led by Mark Roberts at Boxgrove, England "contains a semicircular wound made by a weapon such as a spear, indicating it was killed by early humans. Other horse bones from the same site have butchery marks from stone tools" (http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/punctured-horse-shoulder-blade. accessed 05-10-2010).

Naturally occurring pigments such as ochres and iron oxides were used as colorants since prehistoric times. Archaeologists uncovered evidence that early humans used paint for aesthetic purposes such as body decoration. Pigments and paint grinding equipment believed to be between 350,000 and 400,000 years old were reported in a cave at Twin Rivers, near Lusaka, Zambia.

Four wooden spears found at Schöningen, Germany, by Hartmut Thieme in 1995, along with stone tools and the butchered remains of about 20 horses, are thought to date from c. 400,000 BCE. They are the oldest human-made wooden artifacts, as well as the oldest weapons ever found. Three of them were probably manufactured as projectile weapons, because the weight and tapered point is at the front of the spear making it fly straight in flight, similar to the design of a modern javelin. The fourth spear is shorter with points at both ends and is thought to be a thrusting spear or a throwing stick. One of the horse remains found with the spears included a pelvis that still had a spear sticking out of it. This is considered proof that early humans were active hunters with specialized tool kits.

"Hunting large animals was a risky business. Long spears were thrust into an animal, enabling our ancestors to hunt from a somewhat safer distance than was possible with earlier weapons" (http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/oldest-wooden-spear, accessed 05-10-2010).

Kyle S. Brown, a doctoral student at the University of Cape Town, and colleagues published "Fire as an Engineering Tool of Early Modern Humans," Science, 14 August 2009: 325, 859-62.

"The controlled use of fire was a breakthrough adaptation in human evolution. It first provided heat and light and later allowed the physical properties of materials to be manipulated for the production of ceramics and metals. The analysis of tools at multiple sites shows that the source stone materials were systematically manipulated with fire to improve their flaking properties. Heat treatment predominates among silcrete tools at ~72 thousand years ago (ka) and appears as early as 164 ka at Pinnacle Point, on the south coast of South Africa. Heat treatment demands a sophisticated knowledge of fire and an elevated cognitive ability and appears at roughly the same time as widespread evidence for symbolic behavior" (Science).

Brown et al report finding stone tools that show signs of being heated to about 600 degrees Fahrenheit. Heat-treating, most likely by burying a stone under a fire, made a stone easier to knap, or shape into a tool by striking it with another stone.

"Archaeologists were studying several sites on the South African coast, with artifacts dating from 72,000 to 164,000 years ago that would have been made by modern humans from the African Middle Stone Age. Mr. Brown, an archaeological knapper who tries to replicate ancient tools, said they noticed that blades found at the site, made from a stone called silcrete, did not match silcrete obtained from outcroppings in the area. 'We realized we were missing something,' he said.

"They experimented by heat-treating some of the stone themselves. 'When we pulled it out of the fire and flaked it, it did look like the kind of stone we were finding at our site,' Mr. Brown said. Their findings are published in Science.

"The researchers had to show that the tools they found were intentionally heated to improve workability, not accidentally through a bushfire or other means. They found tools in areas where there was no evidence of burning. And they conducted tests on some of the artifacts, including one that showed that flaked surfaces had a glossiness that occurs only when the stone has been heated, proving that the stones were heated first and then worked into tools" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18obfire.html?_r=1&hpw).

♦ "The find also adds weight to the argument that modern humans were acting in sophisticated ways long before they came to Europe about 35,000 years ago--and that they were engaged in far more complex behavior than were the Neandertals who lived at the same time, says anthropologist Alison Brooks of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. 'This is another piece of evidence that modern humans had made a lot of discoveries that Neandertals had not' "(http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/813/1).

Nassarius shell beads found in Es Skhūl, Israel are thought to be the earliest surviving forms of human adornment. Assemblages of perforated Nassarius shells, a marine species significantly different from local fauna, have been recovered from the area, suggesting that Es Skhul people may have collected and employed the shells symbolically as beads, as they are unlikely to have been used as food.

Stone or bone projectile points, such as those found in Omo Kibish, Ethiopia, attached to spears or darts, enabled humans to exploit fast-moving prey like birds and large, dangerous prey like mammoths.

In 1988 Allison Brooks and John Yellin discovered a bone harpoon point in Katanda, Democratic Republic of Congo.

"Humans in Central Africa used some of the earliest barbed points, like this harpoon point, to spear huge prehistoric catfish weighing as much as 68 kg (150 lb)–enough to feed 80 people for two days. Later, humans used harpoons to hunt large, fast marine mammals" (http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/katanda-bone-harpoon-point, accessed 0510-2010)

Discoveries of stone tools with fine edges made by pressure flaking at Blombos Cave in South Africa show that this highly skillful and delicate method of sharpening and retouching stone tools appears to have developed at least 75,000 years ago, more than 50,000 years earlier than previously thought.

"Pressure flaking has been considered to be an Upper Paleolithic innovation dating to ~20,000 years ago (20 ka). Replication experiments show that pressure flaking best explains the morphology of lithic artifacts recovered from the ~75-ka Middle Stone Age levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa. The technique was used during the final shaping of Still Bay bifacial points made on heat-treated silcrete. Application of this innovative technique allowed for a high degree of control during the detachment of individual flakes, resulting in thinner, narrower, and sharper tips on bifacial points. This technology may have been first invented and used sporadically in Africa before its later widespread adoption" (Mourre, Villa, Henshilwood, "Early Use of Pressure Flaking on Lithic Artifacts at Blombos Cave, South Africa," Science 29 October 2010: Vol. 330. no. 6004, pp. 659 - 662 DOI: 10.1126/science.1195550)

"The technique provides a better means of controlling the sharpness, thickness and overall shape of bifacial tools like spearheads and stone knives, said Paola Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and a study co-author. Prior to the Blombos Cave discovery, the earliest evidence of pressure flaking was from the Upper Paleolithic Solutrean culture in France and Spain roughly 20,000 years ago." 

"Pressure flaking adds to the repertoire of technological advances during the Still Bay (period) and helps define it as a time when novel ideas were rapidly introduced," wrote the authors in Science. "This flexible approach to technology may have conferred an advantage to the groups of Homo sapiens who migrated out of Africa about 60,000 years ago" (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101028141753.htm).

Basing his conclusions on the small toes of humans from prehistoric periods, physical anthropologist Erik Trinkaus concluded that because humans' small toes had become smaller by this time, sturdy shoes may have become the norm. 

"He [Trinkaus] found Neanderthals and early moderns living in Middle Palaeolithic times (100,000 to 40,000 years ago) had thicker, and therefore stronger, lesser toes than those of Upper Palaeolithic people living 26,000 years ago.  

"A shoe-less lifestyle promotes stronger little toes, says Professor Trinkaus, because "when you walk barefoot, you grip the ground with your toes as a natural reflex". Because hard-soled shoes improve both grip and balance, regularly shod people develop weaker little toes.  

"To test the theory that the more delicate toes resulted from shoe use, the Washington University researcher compared the foot bones of early Native Americans, who regularly went barefoot, and contemporary Alaskan Inuits, who sported heavy sealskin boots.  

"Again, he identified chunkier toes in the population that routinely went without shoes. The research suggests shoe-wearers developed weaker toes simply because of the reduced stresses on them during their lifetime; it was not an evolutionary change" (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4173838.stm, accessed 01-16-2011).

Eliso Kvavadze, Ofer Bar-Yosef and 5 co-authors published "30,000-Year-Old Wild Flax Fibers," Science 11 September 2009, 325, no. 5946, 1359; DOI: 10.1226/Science.1175404.

The abstract read:

"A unique finding of wild flax fibers from a series of Upper Paleolithic layers at Dzudzuana Cave, located in the foothills of the Caucasus, Georgia, indicates that prehistoric hunter-gatherers were making cords for hafting stone tools, weaving baskets, or sewing garments. Radiocarbon dates demonstrate that the cave was inhabited intermittently during several periods dated to 32 to 26 thousand years before the present (kyr B.P.), 23 to 19 kyr B.P., and 13 to 11 kyr B.P. Spun, dyed, and knotted flax fibers are common. Apparently, climatic fluctuations recorded in the cave’s deposits did not affect the growth of the plants because a certain level of humidity was sustained."

The flax fibers were discovered following examination of clay extracted from the cave deposits, leading the archaeologists to speculate that they were the remains of manufactured items which long since disintegrated:

"Some of the fibers were twisted, indicating they were used to make ropes or strings. Others had been dyed. Early humans used the plants in the area to color the fabric or threads made from the flax.

"The items created with these fibers increased early humans chances of survival and mobility in the harsh conditions of this hilly region. The flax fibers could have been used to sew hides together for clothing and shoes, to create the warmth necessary to endure cold weather. They might have also been used to make packs for carrying essentials, which would have increased and eased mobility, offering a great advantage to a hunter-gatherer society

" 'This was a critical invention for early humans. They might have used this fiber to create parts of clothing, ropes, or baskets—for items that were mainly used for domestic activities,' says Bar-Yosef.

" 'We know that this is wild flax that grew in the vicinity of the cave and was exploited intensively or extensively by modern humans.'

"The items created with these fibers increased early humans chances of survival and mobility in the harsh conditions of this hilly region. The flax fibers could have been used to sew hides together for clothing and shoes, to create the warmth necessary to endure cold weather. They might have also been used to make packs for carrying essentials, which would have increased and eased mobility, offering a great advantage to a hunter-gatherer society" (http://www.physorg.com/news171811682.html, accessed 09-12-2009).

Bone and ivory needles found in  Xiaogushan, Liaoning Province, China, were used to sew warm, closely fitted garments.

The Venus of Lespugue, an ivory Venus figurine discovered by René de Saint-Périer in 1922 in the Rideaux cave of Lespugue (Haute-Garonne) in the foothills of the Pyrenees, is approximately 6 inches (150 mm) tall. It is preserved at the Musée de l'Homme, Paris.

"According to textile expert Elizabeth Wayland Barber, the statue displays the earliest representation found of spun thread, as the carving shows a skirt hanging from below the hips, made of twisted fibers, frayed at the end" (Wikipedia article on Venus of Lespugue, accessed 05-14-2009). 

Barber, Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (1994) 44.

Early humans may have made bags from skin long ago. By around 24,000 BCE they were weaving plant fibers to make cords and perhaps baskets. Some of the oldest known pottery, from Japan’s Jomon culture, Lake Anenuma, Honshu, Japan, are about 18,000 years old.

The eight so-called founder crops of agriculture— plant species domesticated by early Holocene (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and Pre-Pottery Neolithic B) farming communities in the Fertile Crescent region of southwest Asia— formed the basis of systematic agriculture in the Middle East, North Africa, India, Persia and (later) Europe. They included flax, three cereals and four pulses (legumes), and are the first known domesticated plants.

First emmer wheat and einkorn wheat were domesticated, then hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch (an ancient grain legume crop), chick peas and flax. These eight crops occur more or less simultaneously on Pre-Pottery Neolithic B sites in the Levant, although the consensus is that wheat was the first to be sown and harvested on a significant scale.

Göbekli Tepe (Turkish for "Potbelly Hill"), a hilltop sanctuary erected on the highest point of an elongated mountain ridge some 15 km northeast of the town of Şanlıurfa (formerly Urfa / Edessa) in southeastern Turkey, is the earliest surviving human-made place of worship, and the earliest surviving religious site in general. It was discovered in 1964; excavations began in 1994.

The site was erected by hunter-gatherers in the 10th millennium BCE, before the advent of the transition from nomadic to permanent year-round settlement. Together with Nevalı Çori, a site dating from the ninth or tenth millenium BCE, but which was inundated by the dammed waters of the Euphrates, Göbekli Tepe has revolutionized understanding of the Eurasian Neolithic.

"Göbekli Tepe is regarded as an archaeological discovery of the greatest importance since it profoundly changes our understanding of a crucial stage in the development of human societies. It seems that the erection of monumental complexes was within the capacities of hunter-gatherers and not only of sedentary farming communities as had been previously assumed. In other words, as excavator Klaus Schmidt puts it: 'First came the temple, then the city.' This revolutionary hypothesis will have to be supported or modified by future research" (Wikipedia article on Göbekli Tepe, accessed 05-18-2011).

Spectacular renderings and photographs of the site are in Mann, "Göbekli Tepe," National Geographic 219, no. 6, 39-59.

Between 2007 and September 2010 archaeologists found the earliest known wine press for stomping grapes, fermentation and storage vessels, drinking cups, and withered grape vines, skins and seeds--the earliest, most reliable evidence of wine production--in the Areni-1 cave near the village of Areni, Armenia.

"The cave has also offered surprising new insights into the origins of modern civilizations, such as evidence of a wine-making enterprise and an array of culturally diverse pottery. Excavations also yielded an extensive array of Copper Age artifacts dating to between 6,200 and 5,900 years ago. The new discoveries within the cave move early bronze-age cultural activity in Armenia back by about 800 years. Additional discoveries at the site include metal knives, seeds from more than 30 types of fruit, remains of dozens of cereal species, rope, cloth, straw, grass, reeds and dried grapes and prunes.

"In January 2011 archaeologists announced the discovery of the earliest known winery, seven months after the world's oldest leather shoe, the Areni-1 shoe, was discovered in the same cave. The winery, which is over six-thousand years old, contains a wine press, fermentation vats, jars, and cups. Archaeologists also found grape seeds and vines of the species Vitis vinifera. Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, commenting on the importance of the find, said, 'The fact that winemaking was already so well developed in 4000 BC suggests that the technology probably goes back much earlier' " (Wikipedia article on Areni, accessed 01-16-2011).

An image of the "wine press" and "fermentation vat" found at Areni was illustrated in the following article in National Geographic News: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/01/110111-oldest-wine-press-making-winery-armenia-science-ucla/, accessed 01-16-2011)

Horse domestication revolutionized transportation, accelerated communication, and transformed warfare in prehistory.  Yet the identification of early domestication processes has been problematic.

In a paper published in the journal Science on March 6, 2009 archaeologist Alan K. Outram and seven co-authors published "three independent lines of evidence demonstrating domestication in the Eneolithic Botai Culture of Kazakhstan, dating to about 3500 B.C.E. Metrical analysis of horse metacarpals shows that Botai horses resemble Bronze Age domestic horses rather than Paleolithic wild horses from the same region. Pathological characteristics indicate that some Botai horses were bridled, perhaps ridden. Organic residue analysis, using δ13C and δD values of fatty acids, reveals processing of mare's milk and carcass products in ceramics, indicating a developed domestic economy encompassing secondary products" (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/323/5919/1332, accessed 03-06-2009).

Prior to discovery of this evidence horse domestication was thought to have occurred around 2500 BCE.

♦ Before horses were domesticated it appears that prehistoric people mainly killed horses for food.  One of the most celebrated collections of horse and reindeer bones was found beneath the precipice at the paleolithic site of Solutré in France.  Though prehistoric people primarily hunted the reindeer for food and other necessities of life, an explanation for the immense deposit of bones at Solutré is that prehistoric people stampeded reindeer and horses over the cliff as a means of killing them.

The Areni-1 shoe, a 5,500-year-old leather shoe, found in 2008 in excellent condition in the "Areni-1" cave located in the Vayots Dzor province of Armenia, is a one-piece leather-hide shoe that has been dated as a few hundred years older than the one found on Ötzi the Iceman, making it the oldest piece of leather footwear in the world known to contemporary researchers.

"Much older footwear, 10,000 year old sandals made of sagebrush fiber, has been discovered in the United States at Fort Rock Cave in Oregon. By evidence found to date, the use of shoes arose between 40,000 and 26,000 years ago. The discovery was made by a team led by archaeologist Ron Pinhasi of University College Cork in Ireland.

"The shoe was found in near-perfect condition due to the cool and dry conditions in the cave and a thick layer of sheep dung which acted as a solid seal. Large storage containers were found in the same cave, many of which held well-preserved wheat, barley, and apricots, as well as other edible plants. The shoe contained grass and the archaeologists were uncertain as to whether this was because the grass was used as insulation to keep the foot warm, or used to preserve the shape of the shoe while not being worn. Lead archaeologist Ron Pinhasi could not determine whether the shoe belonged to a man or a woman. While small, approximately a woman's U.S. and Canada size 7, European size 37, or UK size 6, he stated that "the shoe could well have fitted a man from that era". The shoe laces were preserved as well.

"Major similarities exist between the manufacturing technique and style of one-piece leather-hide shoes discovered across Europe and the one reported from Areni-1 Cave, suggesting that shoes of this type were worn for millennia across a large and environmentally diverse geographic region. According to Pinhasi, the Areni-1 shoe is similar to the Irish pampooties, a shoe style worn in the Aran Islands up to the 1950s. The shoes are very similar to the traditional shoes of the Balkans, still seen today in festivals, known as Opanci (Opanke)." (Wikipedia article on Areni-1 shoe, accessed 01-16-2011).

Archaeological evidence and the analysis of ancient sources point to a Mesopotamian origin for glassmaking around 2500 BCE. This craft and its makers migrated to Egypt around 1400 BCE where glassmaking soon developed as an independent technology.

"Glass beads are known from the 3rd millennium BC but it is only in the late 2nd millennium that glass finds start occurring more frequently, primarily in Egypt and Mesopotamia. This is not to say that it was a widespread commodity, quite the contrary. It was a material for high-status objects with archaeological evidence for the Late Bronze Age (LBA) also showing an almost exclusive distribution of glass finds at palace complexes such as that found in the city of Amarna - Egypt. Texts listing offerings to Egyptian temples would start with gold and silver, followed by precious stones (lapis lazuli) and then bronze, copper and other not so precious stones with glass mentioned together with the lapis lazuli. In this period it was rare and precious and its use largely restricted to the elite.

"Production of raw glass occurred at primary workshops of which only 3 are known, all in Egypt: Amarna, Ramesside [place?] and Malkata. At the first two sites cylindrical ceramic vessels with vitrified remains have been identified as glass crucibles where the raw materials (quartz pebbles and plant ash) would be melted together with a colourant. Interestingly the two sites seem to show a specialisation in colour, with blue glass, via the addition of cobalt, being produced at Amarna and red, through copper, at Piramesse. The resulting coloured glass would then be fashioned into actual objects at secondary workshops - far more common in the archaeological record. It seems certain that glass making was not exclusive to Egypt (in fact current scholarly opinion resides with the industry having originally been imported into the country) as there are Mesopotamian cuneiform texts which detail the recipes for the making of glass. Further supporting this hypothesis are the Amarna Letters, a contemporaneous diplomatic correspondence detailing the demand and gift giving from vassal princes in Syro-Palestine to the Egyptian King, in these the most asked for item is glass.

The evidence then points to two regions that were making and exchanging glass. It seems logical to believe that at an initial stage it was glass objects, as opposed to raw glass, that were exchanged. The major element composition of glass finds from Mesopotamia and Egypt is indistinguishable with as much variation found within a specific assemblage than between different sites. This is indicative of the same recipe being used in both regions. As analytical techniques develop the presence of trace elements can be more accurately determined and it has been found that glass is compositional identical within each region, but it is possible to discriminate between them. This could be a huge step in uncovering trade patterns, however at present no Egyptian glass has been found in Mesopotamia, nor have any Mesopotamian glasses been found in Egypt.

"Across the sea, Mycenaean glass beads were found to have been made with glass from both regions. The fact that the beads are stylistically Mycenaean would imply an import of raw glass. Archaeological evidence for this trade comes from the Uluburun shipwreck, dated to the 14th century BC. As part of its cargo it carried 175 raw glass ingots of cylindrical shape. These ingots match the glass melting crucibles found at Amarna and Piramesse [Pi-Rammesse] " (Wikipedia article on Ancient Glass Trade, accessed 01-12-2012).

Measuring 43.67 m (143 ft.) long and 5.9 m (19.5 ft) wide, the funerary boat of King Cheops (Khufu, Khêops), the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, is one of the oldest, largest, and best-reserved vessels from antiquity. Around 2500 BCE the boat was sealed into a pit in the Giza Necropolis at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

"The ship was one of two rediscovered in 1954 by Kamal el-Mallakh – undisturbed since it was sealed into a pit carved out of the Giza bedrock. It was built largely of Lebanon cedar planking in the 'shell-first' construction technique, using unpegged tenons of Christ's thorn. The ship was built with a flat bottom composed of several planks, but no actual keel, with the planks and frames lashed together with Halfah grass, and has been reconstructed from 1,224 pieces which had been laid in a logical, disassembled order in the pit beside the pyramid" (Wikipedia article on Khufu ship, accessed 01-18-2013)

Though the Khufu ship is categorized as a solar barge or sun boat, intended for use in the afterlife, perhaps to allow the king to cross the sky every day with Re (Ra), the sun-god, it seems to have been used at least once—perhaps to carry the funeral cortêge of the king by river or canal to the pyramid complex for burial.

Having been restored over many years, the Khufu ship is preserved in the Giza Solar Boat Museum.

The earliest printing was the stamping of inscriptions into the soft clay of bricks before firing, done under the rule of the Sumerian king Naram-Sîn of Akkad  (Narām-Sîn, Naram-Suen), ruler of the Akkadian Empire, who built the Temple of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of sexual love, fertility, and warfare. Prior to Naram-Sîn the inscriptions on the bricks were written by hand.

MS 5106 in the Schøyen Collection is a brick printing block, 13x13x10 cm, 3 lines in a large formal cuneiform script with large loop handle from the period of Naram-Sîn.

Only two other brick printing blocks of Naram-Sîn are known: one intact with a cylindrical handle in Istanbul, and a tiny fragment in British Museum.

The Nebra Sky Disk, attributed to a site near Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, is a bronze disk about 30 cm in diameter, with a blue-green patina inlaid with gold symbols which have generally been interpreted as a sun or full moon, a lunar crescent, and stars, including a cluster interpreted as the Pleiades. The disk is associated with Bronze Age Unetice Culture.

"Two golden arcs along the sides, making the angle between the solstices, were added later. A final addition was another arc at the bottom surrounded with multiple strokes (of uncertain meaning, variously interpreted as a Solar Barge with numerous oars, as the Milky Way or as a rainbow)" (Wikipedia article on Nebra sky disk, accessed 11-04-2010).

When it appeared on the antiquities market in 2001 the disk was widely suspected to be a forgery. Scientific research summarized in the Wikipedia article provided evidence for its authenticity that was widely accepted in 2010.

Water clocks, along with sundials, are, with the exception of the vertical gnomon and the day-counting tally stick, the oldest time-measuring instruments. Where and when water clocks were first invented is not known. Until the development of the pendulum clock (1656), water clocks were the most accurate timekeeping devices.

"The oldest water clock of which there is physical evidence dates to c. 1417-1379 BC, during the reign of Amenhotep III where it was used in the Temple of Amen-Re at Karnak. The oldest documentation of the water clock is the tomb inscription of the 16th century BC Egyptian court official Amenemhet, which identifies him as its inventor. These simple water clocks, which were of the outflow type, were stone vessels with sloping sides that allowed water to drip at a nearly constant rate from a small hole near the bottom. There were twelve separate columns with consistently spaced markings on the inside to measure the passage of "hours" as the water level reached them. The columns were for each of the twelve months to allow for the variations of the seasonal hours. These clocks were used by priests to determine the time at night so that the temple rites and sacrifices could be performed at the correct hour. These clocks may have been used in daylight as well" (Wikipedia article on water clock, accessed 12-25-2011).

The Uluburun shipwreck, a Late Bronze Age shipwreck discovered off Uluburun (Grand Cape) about 6 miles southeast of Kas in south-western Turkey, contained one of the most extensive surviving cargos excavated from the Mediterranean sea. As a result of 22,413 dives from 1984 to 1994 a multitude of items of raw material used in trade were excavated. Prior to the discovery of this shipwreck most of these items had been known primarily from ancient texts or Egyptian tomb paintings. The cargo matches many of the royal gifts listed in the Amarna letters.

The cargo, preserved in the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology in Bodrum Castle, Bodrum, Turkey, included the following:

"♦ Copper and tin ingots

Raw copper cargo totaling ten tons, consisting of a total of 354 ingots of the oxhide (rectangular with handholds extending from each corner) type. Out of the total amount of ingots at least 31 unique two-handled ingots were identified that were most likely shaped this way to assist the process of loading ingots onto specially designed saddles or harnesses for ease of transport over long distances by pack animals. 121 copper bun and oval ingots. The oxhide ingots were originally stowed in 4 distinct rows across the ship’s hold, which either slipped down the slope after the ship sank or shifted as the hull settled under the weight of the cargo. Approximately one ton of tin (when alloyed with the copper would make about 11 tons of bronze). Tin ingots were oxhide and bun shaped.

"♦ Canaanite jars and Pistacia resin

At least 149 Canaanite jars (widely found in Greece, Cyprus, Syria-Palestine, and Egypt). Jars are categorized as the northern type and were most likely made somewhere in the northern part of modern-day Israel. One jar filled with glass beads, many filled with olives, but the majority contained a substance known as Pistacia (terebinth) resin. Recent clay fabric analyses of Canaanite jar sherds from the 18th-Dynasty site of Tell el-Amarna have produced a specific clay fabric designation, and it is seemingly the same as that from the Uluburun shipwreck, of a type that is exclusively associated in Amarna with transporting Pistacia resin.

"♦ Glass ingots

Approximately 175 glass ingots of cobalt blue turquoise and lavender were found (earliest intact glass ingots known). Chemical composition of cobalt blue glass ingots matches those of contemporary Egyptian core-formed vessels and Mycenaean pendant beads, which suggests a common source.

"♦ Miscellaneous cargo

Logs of blackwood from Africa (referred to as ebony by the Egyptians), Ivory in the form of whole and partial elephant tusks, More than a dozen hippopotamus teeth Tortoise carapaces (upper shells), Murex opercula (possible ingredient for incense),Ostrich eggshells, Cypriot pottery, Cypriot oil lamps. Bronze and copper vessels (four faience drinking cups shaped as rams’ heads and one shaped as a woman’s head), Two duck-shaped ivory cosmetics boxes, Ivory cosmetics or unguent spoon, Trumpet, More than two dozen sea-shell rings, Beads of amber (Baltic origin), Agate, Carnelian, Quartz, Gold, Faience, Glass

"♦ Jewelry, gold, and silver

Collection of usable and scrap gold and silver Canaanite jewelry. Among the 37 gold pieces are: pectorals, medallions, pendants, beads, a small ring ingot, and an assortment of fragments. Biconical chalice (largest gold object from wreck). Egyptian objects of gold, electrum, silver, and steatite (soap stone). Gold scarab inscribed with the name of Nefertiti. Bronze female figurine (head, neck, hands, and feet covered in sheet gold).

"♦ Weapons and tools

Arrowheads, Spearheads, Maces, Daggers, Lugged shaft-hole axe, A single armor scale of Near Eastern type, Four swords (Canaanite, Mycenaean, and Italian(?) types), Large number of tools: sickles, awls, drill bits, a saw, a pair of tongs, chisels, axes, a ploughshare, whetstones, and adzes.

"♦ Pan-balance weights

19 zoomorphic weights (Uluburun weight assemblage is one of the largest and most complete groups of contemporaneous Late Bronze Age weights) 120 geometric-shaped weights

"♦ Foodstuffs

Almonds, Pine nuts, Figs, Olives, Grapes, Safflower, Black cumin,  Sumac, Corianderm Whole pomegranates, A few grains of charred wheat and barley" (Wikipedia article on Uluburn shipwreck, accessed 01-12-2012).

Tyrian Purple, or royal purple, imperial purple or imperial dye — a purple-red dye made from the mucus of one of several species of Murex snail — was first produced by the Phoenicians in the city of Tyre (now Lebanon) for use as a fabric dye around 1200 BCE. It's production was continued by the Greeks and Romans until the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

The pigment was expensive and complex to produce, and items colored with it became associated with power and wealth. The Greek historian Theopompus, writing in the 4th century BCE, reported that "purple for dyes fetched its weight in silver at Colophon [in Asia Minor]."

The earliest Chinese inscriptions in bronze date from the late Shang period (c. 1200-1045 BCE), the same period in which the oracle bone inscriptions were produced.

"Discovered at Anyang in Henan province and at sites in the central Yangzi region, Shang bronze objects belonged to members of the royal family and the political elite. Under Zhou rule (104-221 BC) this social level of ownership continued and even widened. In existence today are probably over ten thousand inscribed vessels, weapons, bells and other bronze objects made before the Qin unification of 221 BC.

"Inscriptions on most weapons are prominent and easily visible. By contrast, inscriptions on vessels of the Shang, and the following Western Zhou period (1045-770 BC) were usually placed on the vessels' interior surfaces, where they are much less clearly seen. . . .

"Precise practices at different bronze foundries varied, but nearly all inscriptions were prepared on a clay mould and cast from this on to the metal surface of an object. Most inscriptions are countersunk and positive. That is, characters do not rise above the surrounding metal surface, and the text is not a form of mirror-writing (a negative inscription). Inscriptions in relief were occasionally cast, but they became widespread only in association with ironwork in a much later period. Negative inscriptions are extremely rare. Texts were usually arranged in columns reading from right to left.

"In order to obtain a positive inscription the surface of the mould had to be prepared with the text in a negative form. To do this, the text was written with a stylus on the surface of wet clay. When hardened, this positive version could be pressed into a new supply of wet clay to provide a negative relief. Next, the hardened clay of the second version in negative could be trimmed and fitted as a block into an excavation on the mould core of the whole vessel. The mould and this fitting were then ready to receive the molten metal, which would re-form the inscription back into positive appearance. This method comprises the fewest transfer operations needed to cast a countersunk, positive inscription and allows for the text to be written out freehand in the same form that it will assume in metal.

"Bronze inscriptions are thus preservations of calligraphy in the medium of clay. Writing in wet clay offered a wide range of possibilities for variation and liveliness, and even quite early inscriptions show a concern for style" (Oliver Moore, Chinese [2000] 33, 36).

In Nineveh and its Remains: with an Account of a Visit to tile Chaldaean Christians of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or Devil-worshippers; and an Inquiry into the Manners and Arts of the Ancient Assyrians (2 vols., 1848–1849) British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard illustrated on Vol. II, p. 32 a bas-relief "originally in the most ancient palace of Nimroud," showing a bucket that appeared to be attached to a rope passing over a pulley, revolving on an iron or wooden pin, and "precisely similar in form to those now in common use."

Greek philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, statesman, and strategist Archytas (Ἀρχύτας ο Ταραντίνος or Archytus of Tarentum, now Taranto, Southern Italy) "was reputed to have designed and built the first artificial, self-propelled flying device, a bird-shaped model propelled by a jet of what was probably steam, said to have actually flown some 200 meters. This machine, which its inventor called The Pigeon, may have been suspended on a wire or pivot for its flight" (Wikipedia article on Archytas, accessed 12-25-2011).

Nocks, The Robot. The Life Story of a Technology (2008) 11.

Greek inventor and mathematician Ctesibius (Ktesibios,Tesibius; Κτησίβιος), probably the first head of the Museum at Alexandria, invented the first artificial automatic self-regulatory system by designing an improved water clock or clepsydra (water thief) that required no outside intervention between the feedback and the controls of the mechanism. Ctesbius's clepsydra kept more accurate time than any clock invented until the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock, and studied the use of a pendulum to regulate a clock in the 17th century.

"During the first Alexandrian period, it [Ctesibius's clock] was adapted as a way for physicians to count the pulse. It was also used in law courts to time speeches. A long tube was plunged into the water and when it was full, the opening at the top was closed. When it was reopened, the water dripped through a small opening at the lower end. A person was free to speak until the tube was empty. Theoretically, the interval between drips marked a specified time; however, the rate of flow increased when there was more water in the trube. As it emptied, the decrease in pressure slowed the dripping. Ctesbius' objective was to regulate the clock so that the water level did not have to be continually tended. He used a three-tier system in which a large body of water emptied into the clepsydra to insure it remained full. A float and pointer set in a third container indicated the time elapsed. Ctesibus' clepsydra remained the most accurate clock until the fourteenth century when mechanical clocks using a system of leaded weights and levers replaced hydraulic ones.  The float in the clepsydra represents an early example of a feedback mechanism" (Nocks, The Robot. The Life Story of a Technology [2008] 12-13).

The Greek inventor and mathematician of Ctesibius (Ktesibios, Tesibius,  Κτησίβιος) of Alexandria, supposedly originally a barber, and also possibly the first head of the Museum of Alexandria, made several contributions to hydraulic engineering. He invented the hydraulis, a water organ that is considered the precursor of the modern pipe organ. This instrument was not an automaton since it required a human player.

Ctesibius described one of the first force pumps for producing a jet of water, or for lifting water from wells, examples of which have been found at various Roman sites, such as at Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester) in Britain. The principle of the siphon has also been attributed to him. In his De architectura Vitruvius described the water organ and credited the force pump to Ctesbius.

"The hydraulis was the world's first keyboard instrument and was, in fact, the predecessor of the modern church organ. Unlike the instrument of the Renaissance period, which is the main subject of the article on the pipe organ, the ancient hydraulis was played by hand, not automatically by the water-flow; the keys were balanced and could be played with a light touch, as is clear from the reference in a Latin poem by Claudian (late 4th century), who uses this very phrase (magna levi detrudens murmura tactu . . . intonet, “let him thunder forth as he presses out mighty roarings with a light touch”) (Paneg. Manlio Theodoro, 320–22)" (Wikipedia article on Hydraulis [Water organ], accessed 12-25-2011).

An original hydraulis from the first century BCE was excavated at Dion, Pieria, Greece, and is preserved in the Museum of Dion.

The earliest liquid-driven escapement was described by the Greek engineer and writer on mechanics Philo of Byzantium (Φίλων ὁ Βυζάντιος) in his technical treatise Pneumatica (πνευματικά; Pneumatics) chapter 31 as part of a washstand. Philo's Pneumatica was part of a larger work, Mechanike syntaxis (Compendium of Mechanics).

Philo's device worked as follows: a counterweighted spoon, supplied by a water tank, tipped over in a basin when full, releasing a spherical piece of pumice in the process. Once the spoon emptied, it was pulled up again by the counterweight, closing the door on the pumice by the tightening string. Philo's comment that "its construction is similar to that of clocks" indicates that such escapement mechanisms were already integrated in ancient water clocks.

The Greeks invented the two main components of watermills, the waterwheel and toothed gearing, and were, along with the Romans, the first to operate undershot, overshot and breastshot waterwheel mills.

The earliest evidence of a water-driven wheel is probably the Perachora wheel  excavated from Perachora, an inland settlement in the Loutraki-Perachoras municipality of the Corinthia prefecture in the periphery of Peloponnese in Greece. The earliest written reference to a water-driven wheel is in the technical treatises Pneumatica and Parasceuastica of the Greek engineer Philo of Byzantium (Φίλων ὁ Βυζάντιος).  

Qin Shi Huang ((Chinese: 秦始皇; pinyin: Qín Shǐhuáng; Wade-Giles: Ch'in Shih-huang) (Ying Zheng) the first Emperor of China, who ruled a unified China from 221 BCE to his death in 210 BCE at the age of 50, ordered construction of the Terracotta Warriers and Horses, otherwise known as the Terracotta Army, near Xi'an, Shaanxi province, ostensibly to help him rule in the afterlife from his vast mausoleum. 

"Qin Shi Huang remains a controversial figure in Chinese history. After unifying China, he and his chief adviser Li Si passed a series of major economic and political reforms. He undertook gigantic projects, including the first version of the Great Wall of China, the now famous city-sized mausoleum guarded by a life-sized Terracotta Army, and a massive national road system, all at the expense of numerous lives. To ensure stability, Qin Shi Huang outlawed and burned many books. Despite the tyranny of his autocratic rule, Qin Shi Huang is regarded as a pivotal figure" (Wikipedia article on Qin Shi Huang, accessed 12-30-2009).

♦ The Emperor and the Assassin, a Chinese film directed by Chen Kaige based on a screenplay by Wang Peigong and Chen Kaige, depicts the life of Ying Zheng. 

Varying in height from 183 to 195 cm (6ft–6ft 5in), according to their role, with generals being tallest, the terracotta figures include warriors, chariots, horses, officials, acrobats, strongmen, and musicians.

"Current estimates are that in the three pits containing the Terracotta Army there were over 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses and 150 cavalry horses, the majority of which are still buried in the pits."

Creation of this vast collection of painted statuary involved one of the earliest implementations of assembly line production:

"The terracotta figures were manufactured both in workshops by government laborers and also by local craftsmen. The head, arms, legs and torsos were created separately and then assembled. Studies show that eight face moulds were most likely used, and then clay was added to provide individual facial features. Once assembled, intricate features such as facial expressions were added. It is believed that their legs were made in much the same way that terracotta drainage pipes were manufactured at the time. This would make it an assembly line production, with specific parts manufactured and assembled after being fired, as opposed to crafting one solid piece of terracotta and subsequently firing it. In those days, each workshop was required to inscribe its name on items produced to ensure quality control. This has aided modern historians in verifying that workshops that once made tiles and other mundane items were commandeered to work on the terracotta army. Upon completion, the terracotta figures were placed in the pits in precise military formation according to rank and duty" (Wikipedia article on Terracotta Army, accessed 06-01-2009).

The Antikythera Mechanism discovered off the island of Antikythera, Greece in 1900 or 1901, includes the only specimen preserved from antiquity of a scientifically graduated instrument. It may also be considered the earliest extant mechanical calculator. The device is displayed at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, accompanied by a reconstruction made and donated to the museum by physicist and historian of science Derek de Solla Price.

"The Antikythera mechanism must therefore be an arithmetical counterpart of the much more familiar geometrical models of the solar system which were known to Plato and Archimedes and evolved into the orrery and the planetarium. The mechanism is like a great astronomical clock without an escapement, or like a modern analogue computer which uses mechanical parts to save tedious calculation . . . . It is certainly very similar to the great astronomical cathedral clocks that were built. . . ." in Europe beginning in the fourteenth century.

Applying high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography, in 2008 experts deciphered inscriptions and reconstructed functions of the bronze gears on the mechanism. The results of this research, illustrated in a video (accessed 01-2012) revealed details of dials on the instrument’s back side, including the names of all 12 months of an ancient calendar. Scientists found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.

In December 2008, Michael Wright described a more complete reconstruction of the device which he built, in a video (accessed 01-2012).

The new findings also suggested that the mechanism’s concept originated in the colonies of Corinth, possibly Syracuse, in Sicily. The scientists said this implied a likely connection with Archimedes, who lived in Syracuse and died in 212 BCE. It is known that Archimedes invented a planetarium which calculated motions of the moon and the known planets. It is also believed that Archimedes wrote a manuscript, which did not survive, on astronomical mechanisms. Some evidence had previously linked the complex device of gears and dials to the island of Rhodes and the astronomer Hipparchos, who had made a study of irregularities in the Moon’s orbital course.

———————

♦ On December 12, 2010 a video showing the operation of a remarkable working reconstruction of the Antikythera Mechanism using plastic Lego parts could be viewed on the blog of Make Magazine.

The rudimentary astrolabe was invented in the Hellenistic world and is often attributed to Hipparchus, who was probably born Nicaea (now Iznik, Turkey) and probably died on the island of Rhodes. A combination of the planisphere and dioptra, the astrolabe was effectively an analog calculator capable of working out several different kinds of problems in spherical astronomy.

Among the numerous writings by Greek mathematician and engineer Hero (Heron) of Alexandria Ἥρων ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς that survived are designs for automata—machines operated by mechanical or pneumatic means. These included devices for temples to instill faith by deceiving believers with "magical acts of the gods," for theatrical spectacles, and machines like a statue that poured wine. 

Among his inventions were:

♦ A windwheel operating a pipe organ—the first instance of wind powering a machine.

♦ The first automatic vending machine. When a coin was introduced through a slot on the top of the machine, a set amount of holy water was dispensed. When the coin was deposited, it fell upon a pan attached to a lever. The lever opened up a valve which let some water flow out. The pan continued to tilt with the weight of the coin until the coin fell off, at which point a counter-weight would snap the lever back up and turn off the valve.

♦ Mechanisms for the Greek theater, including an entirely mechanical puppet play almost ten minutes in length, powered by a binary-like system of ropes, knots, and simple machines operated by a rotating cylindrical cogwheel. The sound of thunder was produced by the mechanically-timed dropping of metal balls onto a hidden drum.

An elaborate bronze tablet with enamel and silver inlay mimicking Egyptian style, the Mensa Isiaca or Bembine Tablet or Bembine Table of Isis was probably created in Rome during the first century CE. It was discovered after the sack of Rome in 1527, soon after which Cardinal Pietro Bembo acquired it at an exhorbitant price.

"After Bembo's death in 1547 the Tablet was acquired by the House of Mantua, remaining in their museum until the capture of Mantua in 1630 by Ferdinand II's troops. The Tablet eventually came into the hands of Cardinal Pava, who presented it to the Duke of Savoy, who in turn presented it to the King of Sardinia. With the French conquest of Italy in 1797 the Tablet came to Paris, and Alexandre Lenoir wrote in 1809 that it was on exhibition in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It was later returned to Italy after peace was established. Karl Baedeker in his Guide to Northern Italy mentions that the tablet was a central exhibit in Gallery 2 in the Museum of Antiquities at Turin, where it is today."

In the seventeenth century the fame of the Bembine Tablet was such that Athanasius Kircher used it as the primary source for his attempt to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, reproducing an engraving of the table in his misconceived Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652-55).

The first scholarly study of the table was by the Padovan scholar and antiquarian Lorenzo Pignoria in Vetustissimae tabulae aeneae sacris Aegyptiorum simulachris coelatate accurata explicatio descriptio (Venice, 1605). This was the first detailed printed account of the table. In his description Pignoria compared the table to other known archeological objects, particularly Egyptian amulets and engraved gems. Unlike some of his contemporaries, who saw the table as a mystical relic from the dawn of creation, Pignoria concluded that the table was a Roman work of the Augustan period. The large folding plates of this edition were engraved by the Venetian engraver and publisher Giacomo Franco in 1600 to replicate the various parts of the Table, and were included, variously assembled and folded, in a handful of copies of the first edition, published by Franco in 1605. In later editions the large woodcuts were reproduced as copperplate engravings.

"Egypt held great appeal for the Romans, who eagerly absorbed the Isis cult. However, after, the battle of Actium (31 BC) and the deaths of Cleopatra and Mark Antony (30 BC), the cult was persecuted until later in the first century AD When the Emperor Caligula (AD 12-41), descendant of Augustus and of Mark Antony, built a great temple to Isis Campus Martius: the Iseum Campense. Also it was sometime in the first century AD When this remarkable table was produced, probably in Rome. The hieroglyphs are nonsense and the cult scenes are Egyptianising, but do not depict true Egyptian rites. Some of the bizarre attributes make it unclear Whether the figures are divinities or kings and queens, and Whether or not a god, instead of the king, is depicted making an offering to another god. Egyptian motifs Appear helter-skelter throughout. Nevertheless, the central figure in a chapel can be Recognised as Isis, suggesting That the table comes from a place where the Isis cult was Celebrated, possibly even the Iseum Campensis. The table is an important example of metallurgical knowledge in the ancient world, with its surface decoration of different colored precious (silver, gold, copper and gold with much) and base metals. Perhaps the most interesting color on the table is the black, usually incorrectly as described on niello. In fact, analysis on similarly inlaid black-Roman objects reveal That this was made by alloying copper and tin with small amounts of gold or silver (about 2%) and then 'pickling' the object in organic acid. Pliny (Natural. History) and Plutarch (Moralia) both described on a prestigious black bronze alloy, 'Corinthian bronze', Which contained gold and silver" (http://www.museoegizio.org/pages/isiaca_en.jsp, accessed 02-19-2013).

James Stevens Curl, Egyptomania. The Egyptian Revival: a Recurring Theme in the History of Taste  (1994) 57-58.

Lead water pipes from the Roman Empire sometimes contain inscriptions on their surfaces. For example, a section of pipe from the reign of the Emperor Vespasian preserved in the Grosvenor Museum in Chester, England, and illustrated in the Wikipedia article on Roman lead pipe inscriptions, contains an inscription one meter long. The technology of creating these inscriptions was only recently understood.

"A recent investigation by the typesetter and linguist Herbert Brekle, however, concludes that all material evidence points to the use of common text stamps. Brekle describes the manufacturing method as follows:

"A stamp (punch) which has the text carved in high-relief and in right reading is pressed into the slightly moist sand or clay of the mould, thus producing a reverse image of the text (matrix) in bas-relief. After the molten lead is poured out in the mould, the inscription appears raised in high-relief on the surface of the lead pipe. This is today considered the most plausible hypothesis for the creation of such inscriptions (full text stamp).

"Brekle lists the following reasons for the employment of stamps and against that of movable type: for printing on lead sheets the way the Romans created them, it would be much more practical to use single stamp blocks than sets of individual letters, since the latter would be unstable and would have required a clamp or some similar mechanism to maintain the necessary cohesion. Neither impressions of such clamps nor of the fine lines between the individual letters typical for the use of movable type are discernible in the inscriptions. By contrast, the outer rim of one examined stamp block left a raised rectangular edge running around the inscription text, thus providing positive evidence for the use of such a printing device.

"In addition, evidence of the poor positioning of movable type, such as individual letters tilting to the right or left or deviating from the baseline – something which could have been expected to occur at least in a few extant specimens – is notably absent. In those inscriptions where the letters are not properly aligned, the entire text is blurred, which clearly points to the use of full text stamps. Finally, it needs to be considered that archaeological excavations have never unearthed ancient sets of movable type, whereas moulds with reversed inscription texts for stamp printing have indeed been recovered" (Wikipedia article on Roman lead pipe inscription, accessed 10-31-2012).

Ts’ai Lun, an official of the Imperial Court, reported to the Emperor of China that paper had been invented.

Twentieth century discoveries of ancient paper fragments in North and Northwest China have pushed the date of the invention of paper back about two hundred years earlier. By the second century China was producing paper made from rags.

♦ Paper was not invented specifically for writing. “It was extensively used in China in the fine and decorative arts, at ceremonies and festivals, for business transactions and records, monetary credit and exchange, personal attire, household furnishings, sanitary and medical purposes, recreations and entertainments and so on” (Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin, Science and Civilisation in China, V, pt. 1: Paper and Printing [1985] 2).

The anonymous illustrated pamphlet De rebus bellicis, which survived in the late ninth century Codex Spirensis, consists of a series of suggestions for reforming the Roman Empire. It was written after the reign of Constantine but before the battle of Adrianople fought between an army of the Eastern Roman Emperor Valens and Gothic rebels.

"Reforms of Imperial financial policy, of the currency, of provincial administration, of the army, and of the law are proposed in turn. The writer describes a number of new mechanical contrivances which in his opinion ought to form part of the equipment of the Roman army. To facilitate the task of constructing them he included in his treatise coloured drawings of what these contrivances should look like when completed. More or less faithful copies of his drawings have survived in several of the manuscripts" (Thompson, A Roman Reformer and Inventor. Being a New Text of the Treatise De Rebus Bellicis with a Translation and Introduction [1952] 1).

A brief work which would have had small chance of survival on its own, De rebus bellicis survived in the Codex Spirensis, a collection of thirteen different texts, which was noticed by scholars in the early 15th century, and copied several times. Though the Codex Spirensis was later lost, De rebus bellicis, and some of the other texts in the codex which did not exist elsewhere, including the Notitia dignitatum, survived through the copies made at that time.  These copies appear to have included faithful renditions of the numerous colored illustrations.

Thompson cited above includes black and white reproductions of the images of imaginative machines in De rebus bellicis. The images, some of which are available on the web, are especially notable because they are copies of late Roman book illustrations, very few of which survived.

The earliest Egyptian printed cloth dates from the 4th century.

"In his Natural History, Pliny states that this technique [printing on textiles] was particularly utilized in Egypt. Printed material is only represented by fabrics of the fourth century at the earliest and continues until the Arab period.  In those days, there were great textile centers such as Alexandria, Panopolis, Oxyrhynchus, Tinnis [Tennis] and Damietta, but regrettably we know this only from texts, because any trace of weaving shops and their fragile wooden looms has vanished.  However, by studying the fabrics themselves, scholars are often able to derive their origins. 

"Actually, only two groups of fabrics have been dated with any certainty. One group was a pair of medallions and a band of flax and purple wool coming from a tomb in Hwara in the Fayoum Oasis, which were found together with a coin dated to 340 AD. These medallions are adorned in a manner that is virtually identical with that of painted Egyptian shrouds of the Roman period and fabrics discovered in Syria. Next to the body of Aurelius Colluthus, in his tomb at Antinoe, were discovered sales contracts and his will, all written in Greek between 454 and 456 AD. He was wrapped in a large tapestry with an upper tier showing two busts under arcades supported by two large columns. A geometrical network with florets and leaves covers the space between the columns, which is a composition very similar to the decorations in paintings and mosaics of the same period" (http://touregypt.net/featurestories/fabrics.htm, accessed 01-29-2010).

About 390 CE Roman writer Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus issued Epitoma rei militaris (also referred to as De re militari), and the lesser-known Digesta artis mulomedicinae, a guide to veterinary medicine.

"The latest event alluded to in his Epitoma rei militaris is the death of the Emperor Gratian (383); the earliest attestation of this work is a subscriptio by one Flavius Eutropius, writing in Constantinople in the year 450, which appears in one of two families of manuscripts, suggesting that a bifurcation of the manuscript tradition had already occurred. Despite Eutropius' location in Constantinople, the scholarly consensus is that Vegetius wrote in the Western Empire. Vegetius dedicates his work to the reigning emperor, who is identified as Theodosius, ad Theodosium imperatorem, in the manuscript family that was not edited in 450; the identity is disputed: some scholars identify him with Theodosius the Great, while others . . . identify him with the later Valentinian III, dating the work 430-35.

"Vegetius's epitome mainly focuses on military organization and how to react to certain occasions in war. Vegetius explains how one should fortify and organize a camp, how to train troops, how to handle undisciplined troops, how to handle a battle engagement, how to march, formation gauge, and many other useful methods of promoting organization and valour in the legion.

"As G. R. Watson observes, Vegetius' Epitoma 'is the only ancient manual of Roman military institutions to have survived intact.' Despite this, Watson is dubious of its value, for he 'was neither a historian nor a soldier: his work is a compilation carelessly constructed from material of all ages, a congeries of inconsistencies.' These antiquarian sources, according to his own statement, were Cato the Elder, Cornelius Celsus, Frontinus, Paternus and the imperial constitutions of Augustus, Trajan, and Hadrian.

"The first book is a plea for army reform; it vividly portrays the military decadence of the Late Roman Empire. Vegetius also describes in detail the organisation training and equipment of the army of the early Empire. The third contains a series of military maxims, which were (rightly enough, considering the similarity in the military conditions of the two ages) the foundation of military learning for every European commander from William the Silent to Frederick the Great. When the French Revolution and the "nation in arms" came into history, we hear little more of Vegetius. Some of the maxims may be mentioned here as illustrating the principles of a war for limited political objectives with which he deals:

" * 'All that is advantageous to the enemy is disadvantageous to you, and all that is useful to you, damages the enemy.'

" * 'the main and principal point in war is to secure plenty of provisions for oneself and to destroy the enemy by famine. Famine is more terrible than the sword.'

" * 'No man is to be employed in the field who is not trained and tested in discipline.'

 " * 'It is better to beat the enemy through want, surprises, and care for difficult places (i.e., through manoeuvre) than by a battle in the open field.'

" * 'Let him who desires peace prepare for war.'

"These are maxims that have guided the leaders of professional armies for most of recorded history, as witness the Chinese generals Sun Tzu and Wu. His 'seven normal dispositions for battle,' once in honor among European students of the art of war, are equally useful if applied to more modern conditions. His book on siegecraft is important as containing the best description of Late Empire and Medieval siegecraft. From it, among other things, we learn details of the siege engine called the onager, which afterwards played a great part in sieges, until the development of modern cannonry. The fifth book is an account of the materiel and personnel of the Roman navy.

"The author of the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article states that 'In manuscript, Vegetius's work had a great vogue from its first advent. Its rules of siegecraft were much studied in the Middle Ages.' N.P. Milner observes that it was 'one of the most popular Latin technical works from Antiquity, rivalling the elder Pliny's Natural History in the number of surviving copies dating from before AD 1300.' It was translated into English, French (by Jean de Meun [1284] and others), Italian (by the Florentine judge Bono Giamboni [circa 1250] and others), Catalan, Spanish, Czech, and Yiddish before the invention of printing. The first printed editions are ascribed to Utrecht (1473), Cologne (1476), Paris (1478), Rome (in Veteres de re mil. scriptores, 1487), and Pisa (1488). A German translation by Ludwig Hohenwang appeared at Ulm in 1475." (Wikipedia article on Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, accessed 05-26-2009).

"English translations [of Vegetius] precede printed books. Manuscript 18A.Xii in the Royal Library, written and ornamented for Richard III of England, is a translation of Vegetius. It ends with a paragraph starting: "Here endeth the boke that clerkes clepethe in Latyne Vegecii de re militari." The paragraph goes on to date the translation to 1408. The translator is identified in Manuscript No. 30 of Magdalen College, Oxford, as John Walton, 1410 translator of Boethius." (Wikipedia article on De re militari, accessed 05-26-2009).

Vegetius' work may frequently be confused with the work with the same title, De re militari, written by the 15th century humanist Roberto Valturio (Valturius). That work, first published in print in 1472, was the first printed work on technology and the first book with informational rather than decorative illustrations.  Vegetius' Epitoma rei militaris was first published in print in an undated edition, probably issued one or two years later in 1473 or 1474 by Nicolaus Ketelaer and Gerardus de Leempt in Utrecht. Their edition had no illustrations. ISTC no. iv00104000.

First mention of printing in China: "an imperial decree of 593 in which Sui emperor Wen-ti ordered the printing of Buddhist images and scriptures, but no details with regard to this enterprise were given."

Papermaking was established in Baghdad.

By 750 it had reached Damascus and Cairo on its way westward from China.

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio wrote De architectura, the only surviving classical treatise on architecture, between 31 and 27 BCE, while he was employed as military engineer for the Emperor Augustus. The work, which Vitruvius claimed to be the first comprehensive study on its subject, comprised ten books on the theory and practice of architecture, which in ancient times encompassed not only building construction but also many aspects of mechanical engineering, including construction management, construction engineering, chemical engineering, civil engineering, materials engineering, mechanical engineering, military engineering and urban planning. The work contained much useful information on ancient materials and techniques, but it was the theoretical aspects of De architectura that were most influential. Drawing on his own preferences and a selective study of Greek architectural writings, most of which are no longer extant, Vitruvius defined architectural perfection in quantitative terms, and derived from these definitions finite rules governing planning and perfection. These rules had little effect on the architecture of his day, but were adopted as true doctrine during the Renaissance.

Of the eighty or so extant manuscripts of De architectura the great majority descend from a manuscript in the British Library known as Harley 2767 (H). This was written on the border between east and west Francia about 800. "Its splendid caligraphy, and its dominant influence on the later tradition suggest that it might well have been written at the palace scriptorium of Charlemagne. This is supported by the fact that the first two men to show any knowledge of Vitruvius after the Dark Ages are Alcuin, in a letter written to Charlemagne between 801 and 804, and Einhard, who in addition to his close association with the court, had a practical interest in building. The whole tradition shows signs of a derivation from an archetype in Anglo-Saxon script, and it has been suggested that Alcuin had imported a text from England.

"Among the descendants of H are a number of early manuscripts, all dating from the twelfth century, which show that by then this form of the text had spread over a wide area ranging from north-west Germany, through the Low Countries and France to England. . . .

"Germany obviously dominated the vital phase of Vitruvius' transmission, and we know that there were copies, too. in the ninth century at Reichenau, and its daughter house Murbach. It is difficult not to see such figures as Einhard lurking in the background, men equally at home in the workshop as in the library and scriptorium. An interest in technology has fused at an early age the α tradition of Vitruvius with that of a series of technical recipes known as the Mappae clavicula. This remarkable collection tells one how to gild metals and distill alcohol, how to make various compounds, from pigments and varnish to incendiary bombs. It has a particular bearing on the making of stained glass and the illumination of manuscripts. These recipes appear in various degrees, and combinations in H (and some of its descendants). . . ." (Reynolds, Texts and Transmission [1983] 441-42).

The Banu Musa brothers, three Persian scholars active in the library and translation institute called the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, published the Book of Ingenious Devices. This described and illustrated a number of automata, including some derived from Hero of Alexandria.

Among the original inventions by the Banu Musa brothers were a feedback controller,  and "the earliest known mechanical musical instrument, in this case a hydropowered organ which played interchangeable cylinders automatically. According to Charles B. Fowler, this 'cylinder with raised pins on the surface remained the basic device to produce and reproduce music mechanically until the second half of the nineteenth century.' "

The Banu Musa brothers also invented an automatic flute player, which appears to have been the first programmable machine.

The astrolabe, an astronomical instrument used for observing planetary movements, was indispensable for navigation. A type of analog calculator, brass astrolabes were developed in the medieval Islamic world, and were also used to determine the location of the Kaaba in Mecca, in which direction all Muslims face during prayer. Planispheric, or flat, astrolabes, were more common than the linear or spherical types. In planispheric astrolabes the celestial sphere was drawn on a flat surface and represented on one plate.

The earliest known dated astrolabe is of the planispheric type. Made of cast bronze, it bears the name of its maker. The inscription at the back of the kursi, or throne, is written in Kufic , the oldest calligraphic form of the various Arabic scripts, and states that the astrolabe was made by Nastulus (or Bastulus) and gives the date, which corresponds to 927/28. The date is rendered in Arabic letters, whose numerical values total 315, signifying the year in the Islamic calendar in which the astrolabe was made. It is preserved in the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

"With the decline of the whole central administration [in Japan] during the Heian period the Zushoryo [the first national library of Japan in Nara] ceased to have such extensive importance and the slave-like guild of papermakers, which had heretofore been kept apart from their contemporaries, gradually merged with the common people and it was not long before the entire Imperial staff was reduced in number and talent. Because of the absence of materials, paper, and skilled workers, the owners of private estates began the erection of small paper mills and they endeavoured to induce the former Zushoryo papermakers to resume their work for them in the fabrication of paper. Up to this time about the only materials used for the making of paper in Japan were the mulberry, gampi (Wikstroemia canescens), and hemp (Cannabis sativa), but as early as 1031 it was recorded that waste paper became a useful material for remaking into sheets of paper. The Chinese, no doubt, had used the method of reclaiming material much earlier, and inasmuch as the Japanese received nearly all of their ideas from China it is reasonable to surmise that there was no exception in this instance. In Japan the remade paper became the sole commodity of the paper-shops (kamiya) and was known by the name of kamiya-gami, literally paper-shop paper. The reclaimed material used in the making of the kamiya-gami was charged with ink and pigment and therefore the paper manufactured from the used material was of a grey tone. It has been stated that even books from the Imperial Library were macerated into pulp to be formed into sheets of the shukushi paper, always of a dull colour due to the writing on the paper from which it was fabricated" (Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, 2nd ed, 1957, 54).

The Chinese alchemist Pi Sheng invented movable type made of an amalgam of clay and glue hardened by baking, similar to Chinese porcelain. He composed texts by placing the types side by side on an iron plate coated with a mixture of resin, wax, and paper ash.

Because the Chinese alphabet is primarily pictographic and ideographic rather than alphabetic, movable type did not advance in China at this time.

"Shen Kuo wrote that during the Qingli reign period (1041–1048), under Emperor Renzong of Song (1022–1063), an obscure commoner and artisan known as Bi Sheng (990–1051) invented ceramic movable type printing.

"Although the use of assembling individual characters to compose a piece of text had its origins in antiquity, Bi Sheng's methodical innovation was something completely revolutionary for his time. Shen Kuo noted that the process was tedious if one only wanted to print a few copies of a book, but if one desired to make hundreds or thousands of copies, the process was incredibly fast and efficient. Beyond Shen Kuo's writing, however, nothing is known of Bi Sheng's life or the influence of movable type in his lifetime.

"Although the details of Bi Sheng's life were scarcely known, Shen Kuo wrote:

" 'When Bi Sheng died, his fount of type passed into the possession of my followers (i.e. one of Shen's nephews), among whom it has been kept as a precious possession until now.

"There are a few surviving examples of books printed in the late Song Dynasty using movable type printing. This includes Zhou Bida's Notes of The Jade Hall (玉堂雜記) printed in 1193 using the method of baked-clay movable type characters outlined in the Dream Pool Essays" (Wikipedia article on Shen Kuo, accessed 01-25-2012).

Chinese scholar and scientist of the Song Dynasty Shen Kua (Shen Gua) wrote Dream Pool Essays while virtually isolated on his lavish garden estate near modern-day Zhenjiang, in the southwest of Jiangsu province.

Dream Pool Essays contained the earliest description of the principle of the compass—magnetizing a needle by rubbing its tip with lodestone, hanging the magnetic needle with one single strain of silk with a bit of wax attached to the center of the needle. Shen Kua pointed out that the needle prepared this way sometimes points south, sometimes points north.

Through the Arab conquest of North Africa and Southern Spain, papermaking first reached the Moorish parts of Spain (Al-Andalus) in the 12th century. A paper mill is recorded at Fez (Fes) in Morocco in 1100, and the first paper mill on the Spanish mainland is recorded at Xàtiva, near Valencia, which was still under Arab rule, in 1151.

"Paper seems to have advanced less rapidly in Europe than it had advanced either in China or in the Arabic world. The European parchment with which paper had to compete was a far better writing material than either bamboo slips or papyrus. Furthermore, there were few in Europe who read, and the demand for a cheaper writing material, until the advent of printing, was small. While it was the coming of paper that made the invention of printing possible, it was the invention of printing that made the use of paper general. After Europe began to print, first from blocks and then from type, paper quickly took its place as the one material for writing as well as for printing, though, strange to say, the first paper mill in England was not set up until seventeen years after Caxton began to print at Westminster" (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 137-38).

Benedictine (?) monk Theophilus Presbyter (possibly same as Roger of Helmarshausen) wrote Schedula diversarum artium ("List of various arts") or De diversibus artibus ("On various arts"), containing detailed descriptions of various medieval applied arts, including drawing, painting,  manuscript illumination, and bookbinding.

"The work is divided into three volumes. The first covers the production and use of painting and drawing materials (painting techniques, paints, and inks), especially for illumination of texts and painting of walls. The second deals with the production of stained glass and techniques of glass painting, while the last deals with various techniques of goldsmithing. It also includes an introduction into the building of organs. Theophilus contains perhaps the earliest reference to oil paint."

Volume 1 includes directions for making glue and gold leaf.

"Vol. III on metal work covers: openwork sheets of silver and copper for book covers inter alia (chapter 72); die-stamping, also used for book covers (chapter 75); studs for fastening leather covers to the boards (chapter 76) and repoussé work for book covers (chapter 78)" (Pollard, Early Bookbinding Manuals [1984] no. 3).

Theophilus also provides some of the earliest instructions for the use of metalpoints in drawing:

"Indications of the use of metalpoints for artistic purposes, other than those mentioned in connection with manuscripts, were rare until the late fourteenth century, a period which can be associated with the early fourishing of drawing as an important art form. Therefore, instructions for the use of metalpoints by the monk Theophilus, written sometime during the tenth to twelfth centuries, were exceptional. In Diversarum Artium Schedula Theophilus wrote that preparatory designs for windows were delineated upon large boards or 'tables' which had been rubbed with chalk. Over this surface one drew images with lead or tin. Moreover, in his directions for design figures to be incised on ivroy Theophilus recommended that the ivory tablet be covered with chalk, upon which one drew figures  with a piece of lead. These medieval 'grounds' of chalk dust were antecedents of a rudimentary method of preparing metalpoint surfaces with the dust of bones, chalk, or white lead which was described by Cennino in the late fourteen or early fifteenth century, and of a similar practice used during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries for quickly preparing a metalpoint ground for sketching outlines for miniatures or for writing on little ivory sheets.

"It is impossible to determine when metalpoint media were first used for producing sketches and studies in the form and character we now assign to master drawings. But during the fourteenth century both Petrarch and Boccaccio mention drawing with the stylus. The former, in his sonnets to Laura, wrote of Simone (Martini) taking the likeness of his love with the metalpoint and the latter in the Decamerone expressed his admiration for the skill of the incomparable Giotto in the statement that there was nothing in nature which the master could not draw or paint with the stylus, pen, or brush. Although we may hesitate to accept these statements at face value, nevertheless they indicate that the metallic stylus was an accepted instrument for drawing by artists of the late middle ages" (Watrous, The Craft of Old Master Drawings [1957] 4).

The oldest surviving copies of Theophilus's work are Codex 2527 preserved at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, and Codex Guelf 69 preserved at the Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel.

For centuries after the Middle Ages Theophilus's work was forgotten until the poet, philosopher, and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing rediscovered the text while he worked as librarian in Wolfenbüttel around 1770.

Chinese author Zhu Yu 's book Pingzhou Ke Tan (Pingzhou Table Talks), named after his country house in Huanggang(黄岗), Hubei province, named "Pingzhou," contains the earliest record of the use of the mariner's magnetic needle compass in navigation.

Andalusian geographer, cartographer and Egyptologist Abu Abd Allah Muhammad al-Idrisi al-Qurtubi al-Hasani al-Sabti or simply Al Idrisi (Arabic: أبو عبد الله محمد الإدريسي‎; Latin: Dreses) wrote "of the Spanish city of Xátiva (now Játiva or S. Felipe de Játiva):

'Paper is there manufactured, such as cannot be found anywhere else in the cilvilized world, and is sent to the East and to the West" (Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, 2nd ed [1947] 473).

Muslim polymath: a scholar, inventor, mechanical engineer, craftsman, artist, mathematician and astronomer Ibn Ismail Ibn al-Razzaz Al-Jazari from Al-Jazira, Mesopotamia created the first recorded designs of a programmable automaton and a set of humanoid automata.

"al-Jazari created a musical automaton, which was a boat with four automatic musicians that floated on a lake to entertain guests at royal drinking parties. Professor Noel Sharkey has argued that it is quite likely that it was an early programmable automata and has produced a possible reconstruction of the mechanism; it has a programmable drum machine with pegs (cams) that bump into little levers that operated the percussion. The drummer could be made to play different rhythms and different drum patterns if the pegs were moved around. According to Charles B. Fowler, the automata were a 'robot band' which performed "more than fifty facial and body actions during each musical selection" (Wikipedia article on al-Jazari, accessed 12-19-2011).

Abū al-'Iz Ibn Ismā'īl ibn al-Razāz al-Jazarī built a his castle clock, a most sophisticated water-powered astronomical clock, which has been called the earliest programmable analog computer. 

"It was a complex device that was about 11 feet high, and had multiple functions alongside timekeeping. It included a display of the zodiac and the solar and lunar orbits, and a pointer in the shape of the crescent moon which travelled across the top of a gateway, moved by a hidden cart and causing automatic doors to open, each revealing a mannequin, every hour. It was possible to re-program the length of day and night everyday in order to account for the changing lengths of day and night throughout the year, and it also featured five robotic musicians who automatically play[ed] music when moved by levers operated by a hidden camshaft attached to a water wheel. Other components of the castle clock included a main reservoir with a float, a float chamber and flow regulator, plate and valve trough, two pulleys, crescent disc displaying the zodiac, and two falcon automata dropping balls into vases" (Wikipedia article on Al-Jazari, accessed 04-02-2009).

The portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt, preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (MS Fr. 19093), consists of 33 sheets of parchment containing about 250 drawings.

Villard's portfolio ". . . appears to be a model-book, with a wide range of religious and secular figures suitable for sculpture, and architectural plans, elevations and details, ecclesiastical objects and mechanical devices, with copious annotations. Other subjects such as animals and human figures also appear.

"Among the devices Villard sketched is a perpetual-motion machine, a mill-driven saw, a number of automata, one of which depicts a simple escapement mechanism, the first known in the west, lifting devices, war engines as well as a number of anatomical, architectural and geometric sketches for portraiture and architecture.

"Villard apparently traveled through many of the cathedral building-sites in 13th century France and recorded in his sketchbook in great detail work in construction. Of particular interest are drawings of the Laon cathedral bell towers and the Reims cathedral nave being built, which provide a valuable clue for building techniques of High Gothic architecture" (Wikipedia article on Villard de Honnecourt, accessed 08-20-2009).

"Who Villard was, and what he did, must be postulated from his drawings and the textual addenda to them on 26 of the 66 surfaces of the 33 leaves remaining in his portfolio. In these sometimes enigmatic inscriptions Villard gave his name twice (Wilars dehonecort [fol. 1v]; Vilars dehoncort [fol. 15r]), but said nothing of his occupation and claimed not a single artistic creation or monument of any type. He addressed his portfolio, which he termed a 'book,' to no one in particular, saying (fol. 1v) that it contained 'sound advice on the techniques of masonry and on the devices of carpentry . . . and the techniques of representation, its features as the discipline of geometry commands and instructs it.' . . . .

"During a period of perhaps five to fifteen years, Villard made sketches of things he found interesting. At some unknown time in his life, he decided to make his drawings available to an unspecified audience. He arranged them in the sequence he wished, and then inscribed certain of them, or had them inscribed. These inscriptions are all by one professional scribal hand, and fit around the drawings with some care. The language is the basically the Picard dialect of Old French, with some Central French forms rather than Picard forms used consistently, for example, ces and ceus rather than ches and cheus. Occasionally, the different dialects exist side by side: on fol. 32r both the Picard chapieles and Central French capieles, 'chapels,' are found. The inscriptions vary in nature, some being explanations (e.g., fol. 6r: "Of such appearance was the sepulchre of a Saracen I saw one time"), others being instructions (e.g., fol. 30r: 'If you wish to make the strong device one calls a trebuchet, pay attention here').

"The Villard portfolio was rediscovered and first published in the mid-19th century during the height of the Gothic Revival movement in France and England. For this reason, Villard's architectural drawings, which comprise only about 16% of the total, attracted the greatest attention. This led writers to conclude that he was an architect, an assumption based on a fundamental error: the practical, stereotomical formulas on fols.20r and 20v were taken as proof that Villard was a trained mason, and it was not discovered until 1901 that these drawings and their inscriptions are by a later hand.

"Since the 1970s there has been growing suspicion that Villard was not an architect or mason. It has been proposed that he may have been 'a lodge clerk with a flair for drawing' or that his training may have been in metalworking rather than in masonry. The question is not yet resolved, but it may no longer be automatically assumed that he was a mason. It may be that Villard was not a professional craftsman of any type, but simply an inquisitive layman who had an opportunity to travel widely and took the seemingly unusual step of recording some of the things he saw during his travels" (Carl F. Barnes, Jr., "Villard de Honecourt," MacMillian Dictionary of Art, 32 (1996),  569-571).

James I the Conqueror, King of Aragon, Count of Barcelona, and Lord of Montpellier,  promulgated a "sumptutary law" forbidding certain groups of the population from wearing "estampados" or printed fabrics. This is the earliest documentation that printed textiles existed in Europe.

Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed (1955) 198, footnote 8.

In 1190, with the permission of comte Raymond V of Toulouse, a sort of dam (chaussée) and adjacent mills were built in and on the banks of the River Garonne in Toulouse. 

Around 1250 96 shares of the Société des Moulins du Bazacle, or Bazacle Milling Company, were traded in Toulouse at a value that depended on the profitability of the mills the society owned. The name Bazacle derived from the Latin vadaculum, or "little ford." The original stock offering was underwritten by a group of local seigneurs who shared the profits according to the number of shares they possessed. The shares of this society came to be traded on the open market in Toulouse, and their value fluctuated according to the profitability of the mills. In the sixteenth century Rabelais stated that the Bazacle mills were the most powerful in the world. The company, which survived until 1946, is sometimes claimed as the earliest example of a joint-stock company.

Pierre de Maricourt (Petrus Peregrinus) an engineer in a French army besieging Lucera in southern Italy, was in charge of fortifying the camp, laying mines and constructing machines to hurl stones and fireballs into the besieged city.  In his spare time he attempted to solve the problem of perpetual motion.  He devised a diagram to show how a wheel might be driven round forever by the power of magnetic attraction.  Excited by his discovery, he wrote a treatise in the form of a letter on the properties of the lodestone which he had discovered during his experiments.  This letter, which circulated in manuscript, was given the title Epistola de Magnete. In it Peregrinus was the first to assign a position to the poles of a lodestone.  He proved that unlike poles attract, while like poles repel. He also established by experiments "that every fragment of a lodestone, however small, is a complete magnet, and determined the position of an object by its magnetic bearing . . . ." Peregrinus also described how a compass is constructed.

The Epistola is considered the earliest known European work of experimental science, and the foundation of the study of electricity and magnetism. It was first issued as a printed book in 1558.

"Prior to the introduction of the compass, wayfinding at sea was primarily done via celestial navigation, supplemented in some places by the use of soundings. Difficulties arose where the sea was too deep for soundings and conditions were continually overcast or foggy. Thus the compass was not of the same utility everywhere. For example, the Arabs could generally rely on clear skies in navigating the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean (as well as the predictable nature of the monsoons). This may explain in part their relatively late adoption of the compass. Mariners in the relatively shallow Baltic made extensive use of soundings.

"In the Mediterranean, however, the practice from ancient times had been to curtail sea travel between October and April, due in part to the lack of dependable clear skies during the Mediterranean winter (and much of the sea is too deep for soundings). With improvements in dead reckoning methods, and the development of better charts, this changed during the second half of the 13th century. By around 1290 the sailing season could start in late January or February, and end in December. The additional few months were of considerable economic importance; it enabled Venetian convoys, for instance, to make two round trips a year to the eastern Mediterranean, instead of one."

Wang Zhen, (simplified Chinese: 王祯; traditional Chinese: 王禎; pinyin: Wáng Zhēn; Wade–Giles: Wang Chen, fl. 1290 – 1333), an official of the Yuan Dynasty working in Jingde County in Anhui province,  and author of the Nong Shu, developed movable type carved from wood in China. The wood type was more durable than clay type, but worn pieces could only be replaced by carving new ones.

"In improving movable type printing, Wang Zhen mentioned an alternative method of baking earthenware printing type with earthenware frame in order to make whole blocks. Wang Zhen is best known for his usage of wooden movable type while he was a magistrate of Jingde in Anhui province from 1290 to 1301. His main contribution was improving the speed of typesetting with simple mechanical devices, along with the complex, systematic arrangement of wooden movable types. Wang Zhen summarized the process of making wooden movable type as described in the passage below:

“ 'Now, however, there is another method [beyond earthenware type] that is both more exact and more convenient. A compositor's form is made of wood, strips of bamboo are used to mark the lines and a block is engraved with characters. The block is then cut into squares with a small fine saw till each character forms a separate piece. These separate characters are finished off with a knife on all four sides, and compared and tested till they are exactly the same height and size. Then the types are placed in the columns [of the form] and bamboo strips which have been prepared are pressed in between them. After the types have all been set in the form, the spaces are filled in with wooden plugs, so that the type is perfectly firm and will not move. When the type is absolutely firm, the ink is smeared on and printing begins.'

"Wooden movable type had been used and experimented with by Bi Sheng in the 11th century, but it was discarded because wood was judged to be an unsuitable material to use. Wang Zhen improved the earlier experimented process by adding the methods of specific type cutting and finishing, making the type case and revolving table that made the process more efficient.In Wang Zhen's system, all the Chinese writing characters were organized by five different tones and according to rhyming, using a standard official book of Chinese rhymes. Two revolving tables were actually used in the process; one table that had official types from the book of rhymes, and the other which contained the most frequently used Chinese writing characters for quick selection. To make the entire process more efficient, each Chinese character was assigned a different number, so that when a number was called, that writing character would be selected. Rare and unusual characters that were not prescribed a number were simply crafted on the spot by wood-cutters when needed.

"While printing new books, Wang Zhen described that the rectangular dimensions of each book needed to be determined in order to make the corrected size of the four-sided wooden block used in printing. Providing the necessary ink job was done by brush that was moved vertically in columns, while the impression on paper the columns had to be rubbed with brush from top to bottom.

"Two centuries before Hua Sui pioneered bronze-type printing in China in 1490 AD, Wang Zhen had experimented with printing using tin, a metal favored for its low melting point while casting. In the Nong Shu, Wang Zhen wrote:

“ 'In more recent times [late 13th century], type has also been made of tin by casting. It is strung on an iron wire, and thus made fast in the columns of the form, in order to print books with it. But none of this type took ink readily, and it made untidy printing in most cases. For that reason they were not used long.  

"Thus, Chinese metal type of the 13th century using tin was unsuccessful because it was incompatible with the inking process. Although unsuccessful in Wang Zhen's time, the bronze metal type of Hua Sui in the late 15th century would be used for centuries in China, up until the late 19th century.

"Although Wang Zhen's Nong Shu was mostly printed by use of woodblock printing, his innovation of wooden movable type soon became popularly used in the region of Anhui. Wang Zhen's wooden movable type was used to print the local gazetteer paper of Jingde City, which incorporated the use of 60,000 written characters organized on revolving tables. During the year of 1298, roughly one hundred copies of this were printed by wooden movable type in a month's time" (Wikipedia article on Wong Zhen (official, accessed 01-25-2012).

Twelve metal Chinese characters, which may be the earliest movable type in the world, predating those used to print the Jikji Simche Yojeol in 1377, were located in a private collection in Korea in January 2012, according to Prof. Nam Kwon-heui of Kyungpook National University (KNU) (경북대학교), abbreviated as Kyungdae(경대), in Daegu, South Korea.

"The owner of the movable type was quoted as saying he bought them around 10 years ago and was told they were discovered during Japan's occupation of Korea and that a Japanese collector smuggled them out of Korea after World War II.

"The only other movable metal type presumed to date back to the Koryo Kingdom [The Goryeo Dynasty or Koryŏ] is in the National Museum of Korea[Seoul] and the Kaesong Museum of History [Kaesŏng, North Hwanghae Province, southern North Korea (DPRK)] which have one sample each. The type used to print the "Jikji" has yet to be discovered. The "Jikji," an anthology of the teachings of the Buddha for meditation, is held by the National Library of France since the country looted them during a botched invasion in the late Chosun Dynasty.

"In order for the newly found movable type to be dated correctly, experts need to analyze composition, metal craftsmanship and how they were handed down through history" (http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2010/09/02/2010090200639.html

Spectacles, so essential for reading and writing, and an important factor in the spread of literacy, are thought to have been invented in thirteenth century Europe; however, their inventor is unknown. Various unsubstantiated theories were proposed over the centuries concerning possible inventors—none supported by satisfactory evidence. Some of the theories are mentioned in the Wikipedia article on Glasses.

Other contenders and snippets of evidence regarding possible inventors are listed on the London College of Optometrists web page on the Invention of Spectacles. Even though the name of the inventor or inventors of spectacles may never be confirmed, there is sufficient reason to believe that spectacles were invented toward the end of the thirteenth century, and that they became more widely used as the fourteenth century advanced.

"Venice was a major centre of glass production, and by the end of the thirteenth century eyeglasses had certainly become an object of general use there, as we can tell from an ordinance dated 2 April 1300 aimed at makers of glass and crystal. It prohibited them from perpetrating a fraud that must have become widespread: 'acquiring or causing to acquired, and selling or causing to be sold, ordinary lenses of colourless glass, under the pretense that they are crystal, for example buttons, handles, discs for kegs and for the eyes ('roidi de botacelis et da ogli'), tablets for altar pictures and crosses, and magnifying glasses ('lapides ad legendum'). The penalty was a fine and the smashing of the fraudulent object. The precise distinction made in the document between eyeglasses and magnifying glasses establishes clearly just what each of the named objects is, and since words preserve their own past like fossils preserved in amber, I note that the term Brille, which means eyeglasses in German, is derived from berillium, the medieval latin word for crystal (Frugoni, Inventions of the Middle Ages [2007] 7 and footnote 25).

In 1307 Persian physician of Jewish origin, polymathic writer and historian from Hamadan, Rashīd al-Dīn Tabīb (Persian: رشیدالدین طبیب) also Rashīd al-Dīn Fadhl-allāh Hamadānī (Persian: رشیدالدین فضل‌الله همدانی), a convert to Islam, wrote in the Persian language an enormous history entitled Jami al-Tawarikh.  

"It was in three volumes with a total of approximately 400 pages, with versions in Persian, Arabic and Mongol. The work describes cultures and major events in world history from China to Europe; in addition, it covers Mongol history, as a way of establishing their cultural legacy. The lavish illustrations and calligraphy required the efforts of hundreds of scribes and artists, with the intent that two new copies (one in Persian, and one in Arabic) would be created each year and distributed to schools and cities around the Ilkhanate, in the Middle East, Central Asia, Asia Minor, and the Indian sub-continent. Approximately 20 illustrated copies were made of the work during Rashid al-Din's lifetime, but only a few portions remain, and the complete text has not survived. The oldest known copy is an Arabic version, of which half has been lost, but one set of pages is currently in the Khalili Collection, comprising 59 folios from the second volume of the work. Another set of pages, with 151 folios from the same volume, is owned by the Edinburgh University Library. Two Persian copies from the first generation of manuscripts survive in the Topkapi Palace Library in Istanbul. The early illustrated manuscripts together represent 'one of the most important surviving examples of Ilkhanid art in any medium' and are the largest surviving body of early examples of the Persian miniature"( Wikipedia article on Jami al-Tawarikh, accessed 01-25-2012).

This history contained a discussion of printing in China.

"This is the earliest notice of Chinese printing, aside from the making of paper money, outside of East Asiatic sources. It is evident that Rashid had a reasonably reliable source of information and that the printing in which he was interested was the printing of books, especially historical records. Where he failed was in not grasping the importance of the new art as an economical means of disseminating literature and in seeing it merely as a means of authenticating the exact text—a characteristic of Chinese official printing that has already been noticed . . . ." (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed[1955] 173).

In 1980, an illuminated version of Rashīd al-Dīn's manuscript in Arabic was sold at Sotheby's to Nasser David Khalili of London for £850,000, then the highest price ever paid for an Arabic manuscript.

Following in the foot steps of Wang Zhen, in 1322 the magistrate of Fenghua, Zhejiang province, named Ma Chengde, printed Confucian classics with movable type of 100,000 written characters organized on revolving type tables.

Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 5, Part 1, 208.

The Chaucer astrolabe, preserved in the British Museum, remains the dated astrolabe made in Europe. It is of the type described by the poet Geoffrey Chaucer in his A Treatise on the Astrolabe, written circa 1390. That text is considered the earliest technical manual written in English. No specific surviving astrolabe has been identified as the one used by Chaucer.

The first rudimentary astrolabes were invented in the Hellenistic world, circa 150-100 BCE, and were often attributed to Hipparchus.

An astronomical instrument used for observing planetary movements, the astrolabe was indispensable for navigation. Brass astrolabes, a type of analog calculator, were developed in the medieval Islamic world, and were also used to determine the location of the Kaaba in Mecca, in which direction all Muslims face during prayer. Planispheric, or flat, astrolabes, were more common than the linear or spherical types. In planispheric astrolabes the celestial sphere was drawn on a flat surface and represented on one plate.

The earliest surviving dated astrolabe of the planispheric type dates from 927 or 928. Coincidentally it is also preserved in London, at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

"Under this date it is recorded that a paper mill was established in the Saint-Julien region near Troyes, perhaps the earliest mill in France" (Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft 2nd ed [1947] 475).

In spite of the obvious fragility of spectacles (eyeglasses), a reasonable number of extremely early examples have survived from the mid-fourteenth century onward. Images and information about them have been collected by David A. Fleishman on his website, Antique Spectacles and other Vision Aids.

"The earliest depiction of spectacles [eyeglasses] in a painted work of art occurs in a series of frescoes dated 1352 by Tommaso da Modena in the Chapter House of the Seminario attached to the Basilica San Nicolo in Treviso, north of Venice. Cardinal Hugo of Provence [Hugh de St. Cher] is shown at his writing desk wearing a pair of rivet spectacles that appear to stay in place on the nose without additional support. The Cardinal actually died in the 1260s and could never have worn spectacles! Across the room Cardinal Nicholas of Rouen is depicted using a monocular lens in the style of later quizzing glasses. The artist has even tried to represent the physical effort of straining to see the book through the lens. The men depicted in this series of paintings are Dominicans (like Fra Rivalto), members of a dynamic monastic order founded in 1217 and regarded as 'the carrier of the sciences'. It is notable that visual aids are portrayed as devices for the use of literate men as well as aesthetes - they had, after all, commissioned this important work of early Renaissance art" (London College of Optometrists web page on the Invention of Spectacles, accessed 06-22-2009).

Jikji Simche Yojeol, a Korean Buddhist document written by the Buddhist monk Baegun (Buddhist name Gyeonghan), was printed in Heungeok Temple in Cheongju, South Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty.

Baegun's work, intended as a guide for students of Buddhism, comprised a collection of excerpts from the analects of the most revered Buddhist monks throughout successive generations. Originally issued in 2 volumes, only a single copy of the second volume survived, preserved in the division of Manuscrits orientaux in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Provenance

"The Jikji 'had been in the collection of [Victor Emile Marie Joseph] Collin de Plancy, a chargé d'affaires with the French Embassy in Seoul in 1887 during the reign of King Gojong. The book then passed into the hands of Henri Véver [in an auction at Hotel Drouot in 1911], a collector of classics, and when he died in 1950, it was donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, where it has been ever since.' Today only 38 sheets of the second volume of the metal print edition are extant.  

"In May 1886, Korea and France concluded a treaty of defense and commerce, and as a result in 1887 official diplomatic relations were entered into by the treaty's official ratification by Kim Yunsik (1835-1922) and Victor Emile Marie Joseph Collin de Plancy (1853-1924). Plancy, who had majored in law in France and went on to study Chinese, had for six years served as translator at the French Legation in China between 1877 and 1883. In 1888 he came to Seoul as the first French consul to Korea, staying until 1891. During his extended residence in Korea, first as consul and then again as full diplomatic minister from 1896-1906, Victor Collin de Plancy collected Korean ceramics and old books. He let Kulang, who had moved to Seoul as his official secretary, classify them" (Wikipedia article on Jikji, accessed 09-09-2010).

Ulman Stromer, a member of the Senate governing the city of Nuremberg, recorded in a manuscript that he was converting a mill on the Pegnitz river just outside the western wall of the city to the production of paper.

The manager of a trading company which had been importing paper from Italy, Stromer established his paper mill to meet the growing demand for paper in his country. To produce paper he hired Italian workers with technical experience in the trade. Stromer's diary, preserved in the Germanisches National Museum in Nuremberg, is the earliest European document on the production of paper. It also includes an account of the earliest known labor strike in the history of papermaking.

Dard Hunter, The Literature of Papermaking 1390-1800 [1925] 9-11.

German physician and military engineer Konrad Kyeser wrote Bellifortis, an illustrated book on mechanical machinery, weapons, instruments, and techniques for attack and defense, mainly of towns.

Though he originally conceived the work for King Wenceslaus, Kyeser dedicated the finished book to Rupert III of Germany. Bellifortis summarized material from classical writers on military technology, including Vegetius' De re militari and Frontinus' anecdotal stratagems or Strategemata, emphasizing poliorcetics, or the art of siege warfare, but treating magic as a supplement to the military arts.

"Konrad Kyeser wrote his treatise between 1402 and 1405 when he was exiled from Prague to his hometown of Eichstätt. Many of the illustrations for the book were made by German illuminators who were sent to Eichstatt after their own ousting from the Prague scriptorium. The work, which was not printed until 1967, survived in a single original presentation manuscript on parchment at University of Göttingen, bearing the date 1405, and in numerous copies, excerpts and amplifications, both of the text and of the illustrations, made in German lands" (Wikipedia article on Bellifortis, accessed 10-31-2010).

The catalogue of the Niedersächische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen lists various facsimiles and editions of Bellifortis. 

In Korea a set of 100,000 copper types were cast by command of the king. 

These were used for printing "many books" in Korea until 1544.

Jan de Printere of Antwerpe is earliest textile printer whose name is documented in Europe.

Carter, History of Printing in China 2nd ed (1955), 198.

Italian administrator, artist and engineer Mariano di Jacopo detto il Taccola of Siena, sometimes called the "Sienese Archimedes," published the illustrated technological treatises De ingeneis and De machinis. These manuscripts were widely studied and copied by artists and engineers during the Renaissance, but never seem to have gained the attention of printers, and were not published in print until the 20th century.  Taccola’s original manuscripts, the style of which was more sophisticated than that of their manuscript copies, were rediscovered and identified in the state libraries of Munich and Florence in the 1960s, leading to revival of interest in Tacola and publication of facsimile editions of his manuscripts.

"Taccola left behind two treatises, the first being De ingeneis (Concerning engines), work on its four books starting as early as 1419. Having been completed in 1433, Taccola continued to amend drawings and annotations to De ingeneis until about 1449. In the same year, Taccola published his second manuscript, De machinis (Concerning machines), in which he restated many of the devices from the long development process of his first treatise. 

"Drawn with black ink on paper and accompanied by hand-written annotations, Taccola depicts in his work a multitude of 'ingenious devices' in hydraulic engineering, milling, construction and war machinery. Taccola’s drawings show him to be a man of transition: While his subject matter is already that of later Renaissance artist-engineers, his method of representation still owes much to medieval manuscript illustration. Notably, with perspective coming and going in his drawings, Taccola seemed to remain largely unaware of the ongoing revolution in perspective painting. This is the more curious, since he is the only man known to have interviewed the 'father of linear perspectivity' himself, Filippo Brunelleschi. Despite these graphic inconsistencies, Taccola’s style has been described as being forceful, authentic and usually to be relied upon to capture the essential" (Wikipedia article on Taccola, accessed 01-27-2012).

The Bellicorum instrumentorum liber, cum figuris et fictitys litoris conscriptus, written and drawn by the Italian engineer, self-styled magus, and physician to the Venetian army in Brescia, Giovanni Fontana, may be the earliest extant illustrated Italian manuscript on technology and war machines.

Fontana accompanied each of his roughly 140 illustrations of siege engines, fountains and pumps, lifting and transporting machines, defensive towers, dredges, combination locks, battering rams, a "rocket-powered" craft, the first ever depiction of the magic lantern, scaling ladders, alchemical furnaces, clockwork, robotic automata, and measuring instruments with a caption that was partially encoded with a substitute cypher system.

♦ You can view a digital facsimile of Fontana's manuscript at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek website at this link: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0001/bsb00013084/images/index.html?id=00013084&fip=67.164.64.97&no=4&seite=21, accessed 01-16-2010).

Another manuscript by Fontana, preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Nouvelles Acquisitions Latin 635), entitled Secretum de thesauro experimentorum ymaginationis hominum, concerned mnemonic devices and memory: 

"The entire manuscript, excepting the table of contents, title and concluding formula is in cipher; this consists  almost entirely of straight lines and circles. Abbreviation marks are  placed under the script. . . .

"where one sees several projects of combiantorial machines, concentric disks, cylinders, rolls that allow the permutation of isolated elements of writing (letters or words): and engineer's realization of the Lullian dream. However the connection between the theater in the first book and the devices of the second is not one of mere juxtaposition: the Secretum is actually a treatise of mnemotechnics, or, as Battisti put it, "the blueprint for a compact database of the mind (http://www.voynich.net/Arch/2002/09/msg00136.html, accessed 01-16-2010).

In 1434 Michael of Rhodes, a Venetian galley commander, wrote a manuscript describing his knowledge of mathematics, ships and shipbuilding, navigation, and time reckoning. It contains some of the earliest surviving portolan aids to navigation and the world's first known treatise on shipbuilding.

Il Libro dell Arte, often translated as "The Craftsman's Handbook," by Italian painter Cennino d' Andrea Cennini of Colle Val d'Elsa, Tuscany

"is a "how to" on Renaissance art. It contains information on pigments, brushes, panel painting, the art of fresco, and techniques and tricks, including detailed instructions for underdrawing, underpainting and overpainting in egg tempera. Cennini also provides an early, if somewhat crude, discussion of painting in oils. His discussion of oil painting was important for dispelling the myth, propagated by Giorgio Vasari and Karel Van Mander, that oil painting was invented by Jan van Eyck (although Theophilus (Roger of Helmerhausen) clearly gives instructions for oil-based painting in his treatise, On Divers Arts, written in 1125)" (Wikipedia article on Cennino Cennini, accessed 01-26-2012).

Cennini's handbook includes a description of methods used by Europeans for textile printing.  The work was first published in print in Italian by Tambroni (Rome, 1821) from a codex dated July 31, 1437 discovered in the Vatican Library by the Italian cardinal and humanist Angelo Mai. It was first translated into English by Mrs. Merrifield and published (London, 1844) as A Treatise on Painting. . . .containing practical directions for painting in Fresco, Secco, Oil, and Distmper with the art of Gilding and Illuminating Manuscripts adopted by the Old Italian Masters. The first English translation contained an elaborately chromolithographed and gilt frontispiece emulating the design of medieval manuscripts.

In Strasbourg, Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith, working with partners, produced small cast metal mirrors for the  "great Aachen pilgrimage." As many as 100,000 of these mirrors were cast from a mixture of lead, tin and antimony—the three basic ingredients that Gutenberg later used in the casting of metal type. The Aachen pilgrimage of 1439-40 was postponed because of an outbreak of plague.

Much of what is known about Gutenberg comes from the collection of 28 legal documents that mention him by name. These records were transcribed verbatim before the originals were destroyed in a fire in Strasbourg in 1870. The documents were first published in Festschrift zum fünfhundertjährigen geburtstage von Johann Gutenberg, im auftrage der stadt Mainz, 1900. A revision and amplification of two of the texts was published in Gutenbergfestschrift zur feier des 25jährigen bestehens des Gutenbergmuseums in Mainz, 1925. The documents were translated into English in McMurtrie, The Gutenberg Documents. With translations of the texts into English, based with authority on the compilation by Dr. Karl Schorbach (1941).

Lehmann-Haupt, Gutenberg and the Master of the Playing Cards (1966) 58-60.

Henry VI of England granted the earliest known English patent for invention to Flemish-born John of Utynam through an open letter marked with the King's Great Seal called a Letter Patent.

The patent gave John a 20-year monopoly for a method of making stained glass that had not previously been known in England,  for creating the stained glass windows of Eton College.

Though English patent system is the world's oldest continuously operating system of patents, the first English patent was not the oldest patent, as Venice was granting patents to glass makers in the 1420s.

Johannes Gutenberg, working with merchant and money-lender Johann Fust and printer Peter Schöffer, completed printing the 42-line Bible (B42) (Gutenberg Bible), the first book printed in Europe from movable type, in Mainz during 1455 and 1456.

To accomplish this monumental task Gutenberg, previously a goldsmith, invented a special kind of printing ink, a method of casting type, and a special kind of press derived from the wine or oil press. This complex set of integrated technologies has been called the first invention in Europe attributed to a single individual. Printing books was also the first process of mass production—the process that centuries later became the model for the Industrial Revolution.

Yet the process of printing from movable type, for centuries attributed to Gutenberg, without supporting documents on the technical aspects of the process, except for the surviving examples of his printing, seems to have evolved in stages from the early 1450s, and may or may not have involved other inventors besides Gutenberg. In 2002 physicist and software developer Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Paul Needham, Librarian of the Scheide Library at Princeton University, working on original editions in the Scheide Library, used high resolution scans of individual characters printed by Gutenberg, and image processing algorithms to locate and compare variants of the same characters printed by Gutenberg.

"The irregularities in Gutenberg's type, particularly in simple characters such as the hyphen, made it clear that the variations could not have come from either ink smear or from wear and damage on the pieces of metal on the types themselves. While some identical types are clearly used on other pages, other variations, subjected to detailed image analysis, made for only one conclusion: that they could not have been produced from the same matrix. Transmitted light pictures of the page also revealed substructures in the type that could not arise from punchcutting techniques. They [Agüera y Arcas and Needham] hypothesized that the method involved impressing simple shapes to create alphabets in "cuneiform" style in a mould like sand. Casting the type would destroy the mould, and the alphabet would need to be recreated to make additional type. This would explain the non-identical type, as well as the substructures observed in the printed type. Thus, they feel that 'the decisive factor for the birth of typography', the use of reusable moulds for casting type, might have been a more progressive process than was previously thought. . . . " (Wikipedia article on Johannes Gutenberg, accessed 02-08-2009).

When the punch-matrix process of typefounding which became dominant was introduced, and by whom, remained an unsolved problem in 2010.

References:

Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Paul Needham, "Computational analytical bibliography," Proceedings Bibliopolis Conference The future history of the book', The Hague: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, (November 2002).

Agüera y Arcas, "Temporary Matrices and Elemental Punches in Gutenberg's DK type", in: Jensen (ed) Incunabula and Their Readers. Printing , Selling, and Using Books in the Fifteenth Century (2003) 1-12.

ISTC no. ib00526000

It has been determined that there were three phases in the printing process of the B42:

1. The first sheets were rubricated by being passed twice through the printing press, using black and then red ink. This process was soon abandoned, with spaces left for rubrication to be added by hand.

2. Some time later, after more sheets had been printed, the number of lines per page was increased from 40 to 42, presumably to save paper. Therefore, pages 1 to 9 and pages 256 to 265, presumably the first ones printed, have 40 lines each. Page 10 has 41, and from there on the 42 lines appear. The increase in line number was achieved by decreasing the interline spacing, rather than increasing the printed area of the page.

3. The print run was increased, probably to 180 copies, necessitating resetting those pages which had already been printed. The new sheets were all reset to 42 lines per page. Consequently, there are two distinct settings in folios 1-32 and 129-158 of volume I and folios 1-16 and 162 of volume II. 

It is believed that  approximately 180 copies of the Bible were produced, 135 on paper and 45 on vellum. When illuminated, the vellum copies would have even more closely resembled traditional medieval manuscripts. 47 or 48 copies survived, but of these only 21 are complete. Others are missing leaves or whole volumes. The 48 copies include volumes in Trier and Indiana which seem to be two parts of one copy. There are a substantial number of fragments, including numerous individual leaves. Twelve vellum copies survived, of which four are complete, and one is the New Testament only.

See White, Eric M. "The Gutenberg Bibles that Survive as Binder's Waste," Wagner & Reed (eds) Early Printed Books as Material Objects. Proceedings of the Conference Organized by the IFLA Rare Books and Manuscripts Section Munich, 19-21 August 2009 (2010) 21-35.

♦ When I checked the ISTC in January 2010 there were four different digital facsimiles available online, from the British Library, Keio University, Niedersächische Staats- und Universitäts Bibliothek Göttingen, and the Library of Congress. The British Library site offers the opportunity to compare in a virtual sense their copies printed on paper and on vellum.

♦ In 2008 Stephen Fry made a 60 minute film on Gutenberg's development of printing by movable type for the BBC entitled The Machine that Made Us. For the film Fry's team reconstructed what may have been Gutenberg's original press, cut punches, made matrices, cast type, and even made paper, before printing a page on the press. In March 2010 you could watch the film at this link: http://www.dontpressme.com/video/gutenberg.html. The film did not take into account the discoveries at Princeton in 2002 regarding the method that Gutenberg probably used to cast type for the B42.

In 1460 an edition of the encyclopedic and lexicographical work by the 13th century Dominican of Genoa, Johannes Balbus (Giovanni Balbi), entitled the Summa grammaticalis quae vocatur Catholicon, was issued in Mainz by "the printer of the Catholicon", (ISTC No. ib00020000). The was the first printed book to name its place of printing. It was also called the first work printed that was not entirely religious in content, though in its non-religious aspects it was clearly preceded by the bloodletting calendar of 1456, of which only one copy survived. 

From the standpoint of lexicography Balbi became "the first lexicographer to achieve complete alphabetization (from the first to the last letter of each word)" (Oxford History of English Lexicography [2008] 30). The first four sections of of Balbi's work concerned orthography, prosody, word derivations and syntax and figures of speech. Throughout his work Balbi quoted not only from the Bible and writings of the saints but also from the Latin classics. It remained the most widely-used lexical resource during the 14th and 15th centuries, and had no serious rival until the early 16th century.

The colophon of this book reads in translation:

"This book was produced not with a reed, stylus, or quill, but by the admirable design, proportion, and adjustment of punches and matrices."

The means by which this book was printed continues to be the subject of research:

"As early as 1905 Gottfried Zedler recognized that the Catholicon edition dated Mainz 1460 exists in three impressions printed from a single setting of type but associated with three presses (with different pinhole patterns) and printed on three distinct paper stocks. In 1982 Paul Needham presented evidence that the three issues were printed at three different times, according to the datable use of their paper stocks: copies on Bull's Head paper (with which are classed the vellum copies) in 1460, copies on Galliziani paper ca. 1469, and copies on Crown and Tower papers ca. 1472. Moreover, Needham argued that the three impressions were produced, not from standing type, but from two-line 'slugs' cast from the type and capable of being reassembled for subsequent impressions. According to this theory, the first impression of the Catholicon was produced by Gutenberg himself in 1460; the 'slugs' then passed into the possession of Konrad Humery with Gutenberg's other typographic material after the latter's death in 1468 and were re-used by Humery, probably with the help of Peter Schoeffer, ca. 1469. In this view, which has aroused prolonged controversy among incunabulists, the 1460 Catholicon represents not only Gutenberg's last production but also his final achievement, the invention of an early form of stereotyping" (The Nakles Collection of Incunabula, Christie's New York, 17 April 2000, Lot 2).

"Three issues can be distinguished in spite of identical typesetting: a) printed on vellum or Bull's Head paper; b) on Galliziani paper; c) on Tower & Crown paper. This has given rise to the theory that issue a) was printed in 1460, issue b) in 1469 and issue c) about 1472; see P. Needham, in BSA 76 (1982) pp.395-456 and the articles "zur Catholicon-Forschung" in Wolfenbütteler Notizen zur Buchgeschichte 13 (1988) pp.105-232. For an alternative theory that all three states were printed about 1469, see L. Hellinga in Gb Jb 1989 pp. 47-96 and in The Book Collector (Spring 1992) pp. 28-54" (http://istc.bl.uk/search/search.html?operation=record&rsid=220621&q=0, accessed 12-28-2009).

In 1472 printer Johannes Nicolai de Verona issued from Verona, Italy, the first printed edition of Roberto Valturio's (Valturius's) De re militari, a work which first circulated in manuscript circa 1455-1460. Some of the extant manuscripts appear to have been copied from the printed edition, reflecting the interplay between printed book and manuscript production in the first decades of printing. As Valturio lived until 1475 his De re militari has also been called the first printed book by a living author. It vies for that title with Paolo Bagellardo's De infantium aegritudinibus et remediis issued from Padua in 1472.

Valturio's work was the first book printed in Verona, the second Italian book printed with illustrations, and the first book printed with woodcuts by Italian artists. Depending on how the counts are made, the book contains at least 90 woodcuts, though because some of the images are composite it is possible to arrive at a higher count. The images were printed in blank spaces left on the page, presumably after the text was printed, using a thinner ink. Some pages in the edition remain blank.

". . . the illustrations are the first true Italian book illustrations, probably after designs by Matteo de Pasti, the medallist and pupil of Alberti. They were preceeded in Italy only by a blockbook [cf. Essling 1] and the 1467 Rome edition of Torquemada which contains a series of rather crude woodcuts probably designed under German influence” (Printing and the Mind of Man No. 10).

From the scientific standpoint  Valturio's work was first printed book on technology, with the first scientific or technological illustrations— in this case woodcuts of war machines. In Prints and Visual Communication (1953; 32) William Ivins pointed out that these woodcuts were the first dated set of book illustrations made for "informational" rather than decorative or religious purposes.

The images in Valturio's book . . ."the majority of which are in Book X, consist of representations of weapons, war chariots, siege engines, canons, flags, water floats, bridges and pontoons and much else. . . . They depend on a tradition of military illustration, which extends from the late Roman Empire, the best-known text being the De rebus bellicis of the 4th century, to Byzantine and Western medieval texts. The text of the De rebus bellicis was rediscovered in an illustrated manuscript of 9th- or 10th-century date in the library of the Cathedral of Speyer, and it was copied for the book collector and humanist Bishop of Padua, Pietro Donato, during the Council of Basel in 1436. These illustrations, in one or another of the various copies made of them, are likely to have been among the sources for the illustrations in the Valturio text. Two other relevant texts concerning military equipment, both illustrated, are those by Konrad Kyeser of Eichstätt, written shortly after 1400, and Mariano Taccola of Siena, known in various versions dating from c. 1427 to 1449“ (Alexander [ed.] The Painted Page. Italian Renaissance Book Illumination 1450-1550 [1994] No. 63). Alexander describes an illustrates a manuscript written circa 1475-80, of Valturio (Munich, Bayerisch Staatsbibliothek, CLM 23467) which, "is a direct copy of the printed edition. The illustrations also are clearly copied from the woodcuts."

Valturio's work may frequently be confused with the Epitoma rei militaris (also referred to as De re militari) by the late 4th century-early 5th century Roman writer Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, the first edition of which was published in print in Utrecht, probably one or two years after the first edition of Valturio's work, in 1473 or 1474.

"A secretary to Pope Eugene IV, then adviser to Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, humanist Roberto Valturio is chiefly known for his treatise on warfare, De re militari, of 1455. The work celebrates the military prowess of Malatesta, who sent copies to Mathias Corvinus, Francesco Sforza, Sultan Mohammed II, and perhaps also King Louis XI of France and Lorenzo de Medici. The illustrations are probably the work of Matteo de Pasti, who built the church of San Francesco in Rimini on the model prescribed by Leon Battista Alberti. Matteo also often drew inspiration from the treatises of Guido da Vigevano, Conrad Kyeser, and Taccola" (website of the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence, where you can also watch a brief video about Valturio in Italian, accessed 01-15-2009).

ISTC no. iv00088000.

On February 13, 1483 printer Boninus de Boninis, de Ragusia of Verona issued a second edition of Valturio's De re militari in Latin (ISTC no. iv00089000), followed 4 days later by his Opera dell' arte militare, translated into Italian by Paolo Ramusio on February 17, 1483 (ISTC no. iv00090000).  The Italian translation is the first illustrated book on technology published in a vernacular.

Dibner, Heralds of Science, no. 172 (citing an incomplete copy of the first edition). 

Printer Günther Zainer of Augsburg, Germany, issued Vocabularius, with text in both Latin and German. ISTC no. iv00322000.

Vocabularius rerum was the first technical dictionary, and after the Vocabularius ex quo (1467), the first bi-lingual dictionary, of which one copy, printed in Eltville, Germany, is recorded (ISTC no. v00361700).  The work was "devoted entirely to technical terms, each with its own section, of medicine (four sections), culinary and medicinal herbs and food plants, zoology, mining and mineralogy, navigation, architecture, textiles, tanning and leather work, musical instruments, books and book production, cooking and kitchen utensils, baking, wine and viticulture, gambling, carpentry, horses and carriages, etc.

"Some of the words are highly technical, lexicographical rarities. In the section on scribes and book production we find definitions not only of the traditional scribal tools (calamus, stilus, graphius, pugillaris, etc.), but also of such specialist words as antipira (= the scribe's eye-shade, for protection against the fire or candle-light), corrosorium (= the mill or grinder to reduce chalk to a powder for the preparation of vellum), and epicausterium (= the table-cloth on which the parchment is laid for ease of writing). None of these last words occurs, for example, in Karen Gould's "Terms for Book Production in a Fifteenth-Century Latin-English Nominale", The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 79 (1985), pp. 75-99. There is also an entry on the distinction between the words liber, volumen, and codex; likewise between exemplar and exemplum.' (Nicholas Poole-Wilson). . . ." (W. P. Watson Antiquarian Books, online description, accessed 08-09-2009).

"Possessed of a knowledge of names rather than of things, the mediaeval student had one urgent need - a dictionary. New words began to pour in—in Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, and Greek—whose meanings he sought to know; and, for the medical student, there were new drugs, the composition and uses of which were essential to his practice. It is not surprising then to find books of the dictionary class among the first to be printed. . . . The Vocabularius . . . has four sections devoted to medicine: (1) De homine et de diversis membris, in which the parts of the body are defined in order, with the German equivalents; brief references to authors are given. (2) De nominibus balneatorum etc., containing all the terms relating to bathing, bleeding, and cupping. (3) De medicis et eorum que pertinent ad medicine artes. The definitions here are most interesting... Siringa is described as a metallic instrument with which a surgeon injects resolving medicines into the Virile member in order to dissolve calculi in the bladder. (4) De nominibus quorundam egritudinum, contains seven and a half folios of definitions of diseases." (Osler, Incunabula medica).

While under the patronage of the Medici, Leonardo da Vinci designed a programmable, mechanical automaton.

Leonardo's drawing for this invention was misunderstood until 1975 when Leonardo scholar Carlo Pedretti recognized that Leonardo's so-called automobile in the Codex Atlanticus is an automaton. The automaton  featured front wheel drive and rack and pinion control.

Printer and typographer Nicolas Jenson died in Venice. His detailed will made provisions for the continuation of his printing business, and is therefore significant for the history of printing.

Among Jensen's bequests were his punches and matrices for casting type fonts. His will is the first concrete reference in a document of the existence of matrices for casting type fonts, as there were no manuals on printing published until the seventeenth century. The relevant section reads, in English translation:

"Item: the said testator does declare and certify, that if his company, Zan of Cologne and Nicolas Jenson, will choose to take over all the furniture, the clothing, the bed coverings and the household stuff as well as the tools, the presses, and all else pertaining to the art of book printing, and the material on hand, and likewise all else belonging to the said testator that is mentioned in the bond of partnership of the prior company and which at his decease shall be, and be found, in his dwelling, all of these things shall be appraised and at this worth the said company, Zan of Cologne and Nicolas Jenson, shall take and hold all these properties, with this provided, that they shall be held to pay of this price for these goods and chattels, to the heir of the testator, five hundred ducats out of hand and the remainder shall be set in the account owed to the testator which he does carry with the firm, Nicolas Jenson and Company.

"The said testator has declared and does declare that in all and each of the above premises naught shall be read or understood to include the punches with which the matrices are stamped, from which matrices the letters are in turn wrought and fabricated, for he did and does except completely these punches and did and does will that Messer Peter Ugelleymer, his dearest friend, shall have them, and he does devise and bequeath them to the said Messer Peter. And Messer Peter cannot be held to give or pay aught for these same punches unless it shall so please him of his generosity.

"Yet if this Company does not choose to accept these goods and chattels at the worth aforesaid, then Messer Peter shall be held and bound to receive and take these goods and chattels at one hundred ducats less than the price aforesaid, and Messer Peter shall pay the moneys thus, to wit: four hundred ducats of gold out of hand to the heir of said testator, the remainder to go and be computed in the deduction, or in part thereof, which the testator shall make to the company aforesaid, Nicolas Jenson and Company, with this provision, that if Messer Peter likewise will not choose to take these goods and chattels, as aforesaid, then neither shall he have the testator's punches."

Quotations from the Will of Nicolas Jenson, translated into English by Pierce Butler of the Newberry Library in November, 1928. Ludlow printed the will and sent it out customers as a promotional piece, including the statement "[Set] in a trial font of sixteen point Nicolas Jenson, a new type designed by Ernst Detterer, interpreting as faithfully as possible the original roman type of Jenson, and printed in a limited edition on Rives paper by the Ludlow Typograph Company of Chicago in the month of November, 1928." (http://www.pbtweb.com/eusebius/appendix/njwill.html, accessed 02-08-2208).

♦ Jenson's presses were purchased by Andrea dei Toressani, d'Asola (Andreas Torresanus, de Asula, Andrea Torresani),  father-in-law of Aldus Manutius.

Printer Erhard Ratdolt's edition of Eusebius of Caesarea's (Eusebius Caesariensis) Chronicon issued from Venice on September 13, 1483 recorded an entry for the year 1440 added by the editor, Johannes Lucilius Santritter of Heilbronn, crediting Johann Gutenberg, with the invention of "an ingenious way of printing books." This was one of the earliest acknowledgments in print of Gutenberg's invention.

"This statement apparently influenced the account in the 1499 Cologne Chronicle, where it is stated that the printing process was 'developed' ('Wart undersoicht') in the year 1440 and after, whereas printing was 'begun' ('do began men tzo drucken') in the jubilee year 1450 and after.

"If this statement is correct, it must refer to the period when Gutenberg was living in Strasbourg and when, as now-lost Strasbourg documents show, he was involved in teaching certain investors several mechanical skills, including gem cutting and polishing. A deposition in a lawsuit brought against Gutenberg makes reference to 'four pieces lying in a press' and to Gutenberg's wish that they be taken out and separated so that their purpose would not be known. Many generations of investigators assumed that this statement referred to typographic experiments, and they have elucidated in detail what the four pieces 'must' have been. However, Kurt Köster has showed that Gutenberg's major Strasbourg undertaking of the late 1430s was the mass production of pilgrim mirrors in anticipation of the Aachen pilgrimage, and he has argued convincingly that all the vocabulary of the lawsuit in question could apply plausibly to this enterprise, not to typographic experiments. The argument does not entirely invalidate the possiblity that in 1440 Gutenberg was experimenting with typography. But there is no proof, and all the earliest physical survivals in typography have a Mainz, not a Strasbourg, context" (Paul Needham, "Prints in the Early Printing Shops," IN: Parshall (ed) The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe [2009] 44).

ISTC no. ie00117000. In 2012 a digital facsimile of physician Hartmann Schedel's copy of Ratdolt's edition was available from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München. The value of Eusebius's text to Schedel, author of the Nuremberg Chronicle, is evident.

Sometime between 1500 and 1565 an "enormous" deposit of very pure and solid graphite was discovered near Borrowdale parish, Cumbria, England. The substance appeared to be a form of lead, and consequently it was called plumbago, the Latin word for lead ore. The material could easily be sawn into sticks; the locals found that it was very useful for "marking sheep."

The Cumbria deposit was the only large scale deposit of graphite ever found in this solid form, and until the end of the 18th century this deposit remained the only source of graphite for pencils, allowing England to retain a monopoly on solid graphite used for pencils until about 1860. 

Other aspects of the early history of the pencil remain uncertain. Simonio and Lyndiana Bernacotti are believed to have created the first carpentry pencil. They did this by hollowing out a stick of juniper wood. "Shortly thereafter, a superior technique was discovered: two wooden halves were carved, a graphite stick inserted, and the two halves then glued together—essentially the same method in use to this day. The black core of pencils is still referred to as 'lead,' even though it never contained the element lead."

The Venetian Arsenal developed methods of mass-producing warships. These included the frame-first system to replace the Roman hull-first practice. The new system was much faster and required less wood. At the peak of its efficiency the Arsenal employed about 16,000 people who could produce nearly one ship each day, and could fit out, arm, and provision a newly-built galley with standardized parts on a production-line basis not seen again until the Industrial Revolution.

Italian metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio published De re pirotechnia at Venice. De re pirotechnia was the first comprehensive treatise on the pyrotechnic or "fire-using" arts, including mining, metallurgy, applied chemistry, gunpowder, military arts and fireworks. Significantly for the history of printing, it contained the first description of type-casting.

Italo-Spanish clockmaker, engineer and mathematician of Toledo Juanelo Turriano (Italian: Gianello Torriano; born Giovanni Torriani) may have created an automaton of a monk, made of wood and iron, 15 inches in height. This automaton, which still operates, was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1977. Regarding this automaton Elizabeth King wrote:

"Driven by a key-wound spring, the monk walks in a square, striking his chest with his right arm, raising and lowering a small wooden cross and rosary in his left hand, turning and nodding his head, rolling his eyes, and mouthing silent obsequies. From time to time, he brings the cross to his lips and kisses it. After over 400 years, he remains in good working order. Tradition attributes his manufacture to one Juanelo Turriano, mechanician to Emperor Charles V. The story is told that the emperor's son King Philip II, praying at the bedside of a dying son of his own, promised a miracle for a miracle, if his child be spared. And when the child did indeed recover, Philip kept his bargain by having Turriano construct a miniature penitent homunculus. Looking at this object in the museum today, one wonders: what did a person see and believe who witnessed it in motion in 1560? The uninterrupted repetitive gestures, to us the dead giveaway of a robot, correspond exactly in this case to the movements of disciplined prayer and trance" (http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v1n1/nonfiction/king_e/prayer_print.htm, accessed 01-04-2012).

A video of the automaton monk in motion, narrated by artist/ scholar Elizabeth King, and entitled A Clockwork Prayer, was available on the site of radiolab.org in January 2012.

In 1565 Belgian author Samuel Quiccheberg (von Quicheberg), scientific and artistic adviser to Albrecht V, Duke of Bavaria, published Inscriptiones vel Tituli Theatri Amplissimi in Munich. This work was the first treatise on museums. It provided a rationale and organizational system for an ideal princely collection of art and Wunderkammer. Quiccheberg combined the traditional fields of art and curiosities with naturalia, mirabilia, artefacta, scientifica, antiquities and exotica into his plans for the Munich Kunstkammer.

In several places, Quiccheberg argued that one of the primary purposes of collecting was to promote technological innovation. He recommended collecting "Tiny models of machines, such as those for drawing water, or cutting wood into boards, or grinding grain, driving piles, propelling boats, stopping floods, and the like; on the basis of these models of little machines and constructions, other larger ones can be properly built and, subsequently, better ones invented." The idea was the prince could collect or commission a library of machines, including alternative designs, and then, when the need arised, have full scale versions built.

Swiss artist and book illustrator Jost Amman and poet, playwright, and shoemaker Hans Sachs published Eygentliche Beschreibung aller Stände auff Erden, hoher und nidriger, geistlicher und weltlicher, aller Künsten, Handwercken und Händeln ... Durch d. weitberümpten Hans Sachsen gantz fleissig beschrieben u. in teutsche Reimen gefasset in Frankfurt am Mayn.

This series of illustrated descriptions of trades, accompanied by Sach's text in verse, included one of the earliest accounts, however brief, of the printing art, and one of the earliest images of the press. It also described and illustrated the art of making woodcuts, papermaking and bookbinding. 

A digital facsimile may be downloaded from the University of Koeln website.

Italian goldsmith, sculptor, painter, soldier and musician Benvenuto Cellini published Due Trattati, uno Intorno alle Otto Principali Arte dell'Oreficieria. L'Altro in Materia  dell'Arte della Scultura. . . . in Florence.

Cellini is remembered chiefly for the autobiography that he dictated to an amanuensis between 1558 and 1562, but which remained unpublished until 1728. The only work which Cellini published during his lifetime was the Due Trattati. One of the few original treatises on Renaissance artistic techniques, it describes Cellini's methods in a way analogous to Leonardo da Vinci's Trattato della Pittura (1561), but unlike Leonardo's work, which was compiled posthumously from various manuscripts by Leonardo, Cellini dictated his treatise himself. 

In October 1898 Cellini's book was issued in English translation by English entrepreneur and designer Charles Robert Ashbee from Cellini's original manuscript in the Bibliotheca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, rather than from the 1568 edition, which was abridged, as The Treatises of Benventuo Cellini on Goldsmithing and Sculpture. Ashbee was also the founder of the Guild & School of Handicraft, much of the efforts of which were in jewelry, coppersmithing and ironwork. 600 copies were printed by Ashbee's Essex House Press by printers from William Morris's then defunct Kelmscott Press, using the original Kelmscott presses, type, and handmade paper. However, the edition contained finely engraved photo-realistic illustrations, and its format, style and cloth binding was distinctly Essex House rather than Kelmscott.

In Le diverse et artificose machine, elegantly published from his home in Paris, Agostino Ramelli described and illustrated, among numerous remarkable inventions, a revolving book wheel. Ramelli's book wheel was one of the earliest "information retrieval" devices. He wrote:

"This is a beautiful and ingenious machine, very useful and convenient for anyone who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are indisposed and tormented by gout. For with this machine a man can see and turn through a large number of books without moving from one spot. Moveover, it has another fine convenience in that it occupies very little space in the place where it is set, as anyone of intelligence can clearly see from the drawing.

"This wheel is made in the manner shown, that is, it is contructed so that when the books are laid on its lecturns they never fall or move from the place where they are laid even as the wheel is turned and revolved all the way around. Indeed, they will always remain in the same position and will be displayed to the reader in the same way as they were laid on their small lecturns, without any need to tie or hold them with anything. This wheel may be made as large or small as desired, provided the master craftsman who constructs it observes the proportions of each part of its components. He can do this very easily if he studies carefully all the parts of these small wheels of ours and the other devices in this machine. These parts are made in sizes proportionate to each other. To give fuller understanding and comprehension to anyone who wishes to make and operate this machine, I have shown here separately and uncovered all the devices needed for it, so that anyone may understand them better and make use of them for his needs." (Ramelli, The Various Ingenious Machines of Agostino Ramelli. A classic Sixteenth-Century Illustrated Treatise on Technology. Translated from the Italian and French with a biographical study of the author by Martha Teach Gnudi. Techical annotations and a pictorial glossary by Eugene S. Ferguson [1987] 508-9)

Historian Anthony Grafton, whom many would call a Renaissance man, had one of Ramelli's book wheels constructed, and uses it in his office. In December 2010 you could view an image of Grafton with the book wheel at the Princeton website at this link.

In 1589 William Lee of Calverton near Nottingham, England, invented the stocking frame knitting machine for the production of stockings. Framework knitting, as the use of Lee's machine in stocking production was called, was the first major stage in the mechanization of the textile industry, a process that 200 years later led to the Industrial Revolution. 

"The machine imitated the movements of hand knitters. Lee demonstrated the operation of the device to Queen Elizabeth I, hoping to obtain a patent, but Elizabeth refused, fearing the effects on hand-knitting industries. The original frame had 8 needles to the inch, which produced only coarse fabric. Lee later improved the mechanism with 20 needles to the inch. By 1598 he was able to knit stockings from silk, as well as wool, but was again refused a patent by James I. Lee moved to France with his workers and his machines, but was unable to sustain his business. He died in Paris c.1614. Most of his workers returned to England with their frames, which were sold in London.

"The commercial failure of Lee's design might have led to a dead-end for the knitting machine, but John Ashton, one of Lee's assistants, made a crucial improvement by adding the mechanism known as a "divider".  

"A thriving business built up with the exiled Huguenot silk-spinners who had settled in the village of Spitalfields just outside the city. In 1663, the London Company of Framework Knitters was granted a charter. By about 1785, however, demand was rising for cheaper stockings made of cotton. The frame was adapted but became too expensive for individuals to buy, thus wealthy men bought the machines and hired them out to the knitters, providing the materials and buying the finished product. With increasing competition, they ignored the standards set by the Chartered Company. In 1728 the Nottingham magistrates refused to accept the authority of the London Company and the centre of the trade moved northwards to Nottingham, which also had a lace making industry" (Wikipedia article on stocking frame, accessed 06-10-2012)

Italian Architect Domenico Fontana published Della transportatione dell'obelisco Vaticano. . . . in Rome at the press of Domenico Basa. The folio volume contains 2 engraved titles, both signed by Natal Bonifacio, 35 full-page and 3 double-page engravings. It describes one of the greatest engineering feats of the Renaissance -- the removal of the Vatican obelisk from its old location behind the sacristy of St. Peter's, where it had been since the reign of Caligula, to its present location in the center of the Piazza of St. Peter. The problem of transporting this 327 ton and fragile stone tower had occupied Italian engineers for many years, so that when Pope Sixtus V appointed a council to consider ways and means of moving the obelisk, nearly 500 men came to submit their plans.

The honor went to Domenico Fontana, the pope's official architect, who proved to the council the feasibility of his proposal by making a scale model in lead. Fontana erected a framed tower of timbers surrounding the obelisk and then by means of ropes attached to the tower raised the obelisk from its pedestal, and afterward lowered it so that it should rest on a wooden platform. This platform he had had drawn on rollers to the new site, where the tower was re-erected and the great stone raised from its horizontal position on the platform to the vertical and set on the new base.  The project required 900 men, 75 horses and untold numbers of pulleys and lengths of rope.

The plates also illustrate many of the buildings and designs that Fontana executed for Pope Sixtus V.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 812.

The Japanese adopted the Chinese 1/5 abacus via Korea. In Japanese the abacus is called soroban.

The 1/4 abacus appeared in Japan about 1630.

German astronomer Christoph Scheiner invented the pantograph. This was probably the first copying device. Scheiner did not publish an account of this invention until 25 years later, when he issued Pantographice in Rome, 1631.

In 1599 Galileo Galilei developed his geometric and military compass into a general-purpose mechanical analog calculator, later known in English as the sector. As an instruction manual for purchasers of the compass, and to establish his priority for the invention, in 1606 Galileo published from his own house in Padua,printed by Peitro Marinelli, Le Operazioni del Compasso Geometrico et Militare in an edition of only sixty copies. To avoid having the compass pirated, Galileo had no illustrations of the device included in the pamphlet, which may be considered the first "computer manual."

During the seventeenth century the sector became one of the most widely used mechanical calculators for scientific purposes.

You may view a digital copy of Galileo's Compasso at this link.

Galileo published from Venice at the press of Tomaso Baglioni Difesa di Galileo Galilei ... contro alle calumnie & imposture di Baldessar Capra. This booklet published the transcript of the trial resulting from the lawsuit that Galileo successfully brought against Baldessar Capra for copying the proportional and military compass that Galileo had invented. It was among the first, if not the very first, record of litigation over an invention, and most certainly the first litigation in the history of computing.

German-Dutch lensmaker of Middelberg, Netherlands, Hans Lippershey created and disseminated designs for the first practical telescope.

"Crude telescopes and spyglasses may have been created much earlier, but Lippershey is believed to be the first to apply for a patent for his design (beating Jacob Metius by a few weeks), and making it available for general use in 1608. He failed to receive a patent but was handsomely rewarded by the Dutch government for copies of his design. The 'Dutch perspective glass', the telescope that Lippershey invented, could only magnify thrice.

"The first known mention of Lippershey's application for a patent for his invention appeared at the end of a diplomatic report on an embassy to Holland from the Kingdom of Siam sent by the Siamese king Ekathotsarot: Ambassades du Roy de Siam envoyé à l'Excellence du Prince Maurice, arrive a La Haye, le 10. septembr. 1608 ('Embassy of the King of Siam sent to his Excellence Prince Maurice, September 10, 1608'). The diplomatic report was soon distributed across Europe, leading to the experiments by other scientists such as the Italian Paolo Sarpi, who received the report in November, or the English Thomas Harriot in 1609, and Galileo Galilei who soon improved the device.

"One story behind the creation of the telescope states that two children were playing with lenses in his shop. The children discovered that images were clearer when seen through two lenses, one in front of the other. Lippershey was inspired by this and created a device very similar to today's telescope" (Wikipedia article on Hans Lippershey, accessed 03-27-2009).

While Sarpi and Harriot experimented with Lippershey's telescope prior or contemporaneously with Galileo, neither wrote or published on the subject.

Physician and writer Pietro Caneparius published De atramentis in Venice. This is "the earliest known work which gives details of the formulation of typographic inks" (Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of the Exhibition at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London [1963] no. 122).

In 1656 French physician, chemist, botanist, and savant Pierre Borel published De vero telscope inventore, cum brevi omnium conpiciliorum historia. . . . accessit etiam centuria microscopicarum in The Hague (Den Haag, 's-Gravenhage).

Borel's work was the first documentary history of the invention of the telescope and microscope. It also contained Christiaan Huygens's preliminary announcement in anagram form of his discovery of the rings of Saturn and of the Saturnian moon Titan. Borel's purpose in compiling his history was to publish the evidence obtained by William Boreel, French ambassador to the Dutch States, supporting the claims of Dutch spectacle-maker Zacharias Jansen to the invention of both the telescope and compound microscope. Jansen's first claim is not generally recognized (German-Dutch lensmaker Hans Lippershey is traditionally credited with inventing the first telescope), but Jansen probably did invent the compound microscope, the original of which Boreel saw in 1619.

One of the several documents that Borel collected for his history was a letter from Christiaan Huygens entitled "De Saturni luna observation nona," dated 5 March 1656, recounting his discovery of the Saturnian moon Titan and giving in anagram form his solution to the problem of the mysterious variable "arms" of Saturn. Huygens had concluded that the "arms" were really a single ring surrounding the planet, a solution that, three years later, he announced in Systema Saturnium. By publication of the anagram he was able to establish his priority before full disclosure of the discovery.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 268.

In 1656 Dutch mathematician, astronomer, physicist and horologist Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock in 1656 and patented it in 1657. This technology reduced the loss of time by clocks from about 15 minutes to about 15 seconds per day.

"Huygens contracted the construction of his clock designs to clockmaker Salomon Coster [of The Hague], who actually built the clock. Huygens was inspired by investigations of pendulums by Galileo Galilei beginning around 1602. Galileo discovered the key property that makes pendulums useful timekeepers: isochronism, which means that the period of swing of a pendulum is approximately the same for different sized swings. Galileo had the idea for a pendulum clock in 1637, which was partly constructed by his son in 1649, but neither lived to finish it. The introduction of the pendulum, the first harmonic oscillator used in timekeeping, increased the accuracy of clocks enormously, from about 15 minutes per day to 15 seconds per day leading to their rapid spread as existing 'verge and foliot' clocks were retrofitted with pendulums.

"These early clocks, due to their verge escapements, had wide pendulum swings of up to 100°. In his 1673 analysis of pendulums, Horologium Oscillatorium, Huygens showed that wide swings made the pendulum inaccurate, causing its period, and thus the rate of the clock, to vary with unavoidable variations in the driving force provided by the movement. Clockmakers' realization that only pendulums with small swings of a few degrees are isochronous motivated the invention of the anchor escapement around 1670, which reduced the pendulum's swing to 4°-6°. The anchor became the standard escapement used in pendulum clocks. In addition to increased accuracy, the anchor's narrow pendulum swing allowed the clock's case to accommodate longer, slower pendulums, which needed less power and caused less wear on the movement. The seconds pendulum (also called the Royal pendulum) in which each swing takes one second, which is about one metre (39.37 in) long, became widely used. The long narrow clocks built around these pendulums, first made by William Clement around 1680, became known as grandfather clocks. The increased accuracy resulting from these developments caused the minute hand, previously rare, to be added to clock faces beginning around 1690" (Wikipedia article on Pendulum clock, accessed 12-25-2011).

The first pendulum clock created by Salomon Coster of the Hague, and dated 1657, is preserved in the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Germans in Nuremberg attempted to work around the English monopoly on  solid graphite for pencils by trying to manufacture graphite sticks from powdered graphite, sulphur, and antimony.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz made a drawing of his calculating machine mechanism. Using a stepped drum, the Leibniz Stepped Reckoner, or step reckoner, mechanized multiplication as well as addition by performing repetitive additions. Leibniz had only a wooden model and two brass examples of the machine constructed. These would have been seen by relatively few people. However, because of descriptions published from 1710 onward, the machine was well-enough known to have great influence. The stepped-drum gear was the only workable solution to certain calculating machine problems until about 1875.

Leibniz first published a brief illustrated description of his machine in "Brevis descriptio machinae arithmeticae, cum figura. . . ," Miscellanea Berolensia ad incrementum scientiarum (1710) 317-19, figure 73. The lower portion of the frontispiece of the journal volume also shows a a tiny model of Leibniz's calculator.

"Leibniz got the idea for a calculating machine in 1672 in Paris, from a pedometer. Later he learned about Pascal's machine when he read Pascal's Pensées. He concentrated on expanding Pascal's mechanism so it could multiply and divide. He presented a wooden model to the Royal Society of London on February 1, 1673, and received much encouragement. In a letter of March 26, 1673 to Johann Friedrich, where he mentioned the presentation in London, Leibniz described the purpose of the "arithmetic machine" as making calculations "leicht, geschwind, gewiß" [sic], i.e. easy, fast, and reliable. Leibniz also added that theoretically the numbers calculated might be as large as desired, if the size of the machine was adjusted; quote: "eine zahl von einer ganzen Reihe Ziphern, sie sey so lang sie wolle (nach proportion der größe der Machine)" [sic]. In English: "a number consisting of a series of figures, as long as it may be (in proportion to the size of the machine)". His first preliminary brass machine was built 1674 - 1685. His so-called 'older machine' was built 1686 - 1694. The 'younger machine', the surviving machine, was built from 1690 to 1720.

"In 1775 the 'younger machine' was sent to Göttingen University for repair, and was forgotten. In 1876 a crew of workmen found it in an attic room of a Göttingen University building. It was returned to Hannover in 1880. In 1894-1896 Artur Burkhardt, founder of a major German calculator company restored it, and it has been kept in the Niedersaächsischen Landesbibliothek ever since" (Wikipedia article on Stepped Reckoner, accessed 05-25-2009).

Tomash & Williams, The Erwin Tomash Library on the History of Computing (2009) L69 (p. 772-73).

Dutch mathematician, astronomer, physicist and horologist Christiaan Huygens published Horologium oscillatorium sive de motu pendulorum ad horologia aptato demonstationes geometricae in Paris. Depite the reference to time-measurement in its title, this work is a general treatise on dynamics of bodies in motion, with an emphasis on the motion of the pendulum. It contains the first mathematical analysis of pendulum motion, including the formula for the relation between the period and the time of free fall from rest, the rule for deriving the center of oscillation for both simple and compound pendulums, and proof of the tautochronism of the cycloid (the arc traced by a point on a circle when the circle is rolled along a flat plane), which made possible Huygens's invention of the first reliable pendulum clock in 1656. Also included are Huygens's theories of the evolutes of curves, descriptions of his marine clocks and their trials, the first value for the force of gravity (which he derived using a simple pendulum), and the most important of his studies of centrifugal force; these last were used by Newton in his determination of universal gravitation.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1137.

English hydrographer, printer, punch cutter, globe maker, and instrument maker Joseph Moxon published in London his Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing as part of his survey of the chief trades of his day. This was the first printing manual published in English, and the first comprehensive manual in any language published on printing—a trade that was passed down through apprenticeship, without truly useful printed manuals, since the mid-15th century.  

Moxon's Mechanick Exercises was intended to furnish his readers with basic instruction in all the chief trades of his day. Fourteen numbers, devoted to smithying, joining, carpentry and related arts, were issued between 1677 and 1680, before possible disappointment with sales, and the "breaking out of the [Popish] Plot"— which "took off the minds of my few customers from buying. . . ." (Moxon's "Advertisement," Vol. ii)— forced Moxon temporarily to cease production.  

¶ Volume 1 was the first book in England to be published in parts, or fascicules. Moxon resumed the series in 1683 with Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, issued in twenty-four parts during 1683 and 1684. The general title page was issued with the first number in 1683, and bears that date in its imprint. The numbers were each two printed sheets (16pp., 4to) with one or more copperplate engravings, at 2d. per sheet and 2d. per plate. "Although 500 copies were printed, very few complete sets have been preserved, the work being, perhaps, the most difficult to obtain in the whole range of typographical literature" (Bigmore & Wyman, A Bibliography of Printing II (1880) 54). Bigmore & Wyman describe a second edition of 1693-1701, and a third edition of 1703, a portion of which they say is the "fourth edition." It is not unusual for sets of this very rare work to combine parts from different editions.

Moxon had worked for years as a master printer. He had also cut steel punches for letters, made moulds and matrices, and cast and sold type. In 1676 he published Regulae trium ordinum literarum typographicarum, or the rules of the three orders of print letters... Shewing how they are compounded of geometrick figures, and mostly made by rule and compass. Useful for writing masters, painters, carvers, masons, and others that are lovers of curiosity. (Bigmore & Wyman II, 56).  His type in that work were based on Dutch originals that he knew from experience in Holland.  

In the second volume of Mechanick Exercises  Moxon provided detailed technical accounts of the tools of the compositor and pressman, the art of typefounding, and the work of the compositor, corrector, pressman and other members of the printing trades as they had come down to his day. Most of these skills had not changed materially for nearly two hundred years, and would remain unaltered until the mechanization of printing in the nineteenth century. Moxon's manual "put into writing a knowledge that was wholly traditional" with such success that it was copied by virtually every writer of printing manuals and served as a standard text for over two hundred years.  

Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, edited by Davis and Carter [1962] vii ff.  

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1561.

In 1690 William Rittenhouse founded the first paper mill in the United States, on Paper Mill Run, also known as Monoshone Creek, a small tributary of Wissahickon Creek, outside Philadelphia. The location was then known as Rittenhousetown.

There were about 150 paper mills in England by 1699. At this time they employed about 2500 people, or an average of about 16 people per mill, making paper by hand.

In 1700 Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini issued De morbis artificium diatriba from the press of Antonio Capponi in Modena. Ramazzini's book on the diseases of workers was the first comprehensive and systematic treatise on occupational medicine; it was also the foundation work in ergonomics.

“The Western medical tradition, with its emphasis on humoral imbalance as the cause of illness, for centuries did not really favor the idea that certain diseases might be due to one’s occupation or environment. Egyptians knew that the blacksmith was ‘grilled’ by the furnace, and in Roman times Lucretius mentioned the ‘malignant breath’ of gold miners, and noted ‘how speedily men die and how their vital forces fail when they are driven by dire necessity to endure such work.’ . . . In the sixteenth century the ever insolent Paracelsus wrote a monograph on diseases of metalworkers, and the metallurgist and physician Georgius Agricola connected the injured lungs of Silesian miners to the dust they breathed, But the founder of investigation into occupational and environmental diseases is generally conceded to be the great Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini” (Simmons, Doctors and Discoveries: Lives That Created Today’s Medicine, p. 123).

Ramazzini decided to study occupational diseases after a chance encounter with a cesspool cleaner, from whom he learned of the eye afflictions and other dangers attached to that profession. He compiled information from the available sources on the subject and also performed firsthand research, visiting workers and noting their particular illnesses and infirmities.

“In his first edition, Ramazzini addresses some forty-two groups. Miners are discussed in the first chapter, for their suffering is most pronounced and the cause is obvious. But artisans of all kinds are represented. There are chapters on diseases of apothecaries, bakers, millers, painters, and soap makers. Ramazzini details metal poisoning in metalworkers, and silicosis in stonemasons. The seventeenth chapter is devoted to tobacco workers” (Simmons, p. 125).

Ramazzini also discussed the occupational diseases of women, recommending that midwives practice cleanliness and take precautions against syphilitic infections. Ramazzini recognized that a number of workers’ diseases were caused by the taxing postures and repetitive motions required by professions such as shoemaking, tailoring and writing; he is thus considered a founder of ergonomics. He suggested ways to prevent these ailments:

“Standing, even for a short time, proves so exhausting compared with walking and running . . . It follows that whenever occasion offers, we must advise men employed in the standing trades to interrupt when they can that too prolonged posture by sitting or walking about or exercising the body in some way. . . . Those who sit at their work and are therefore called “chair-workers,” such as cobblers and tailors become bent, hump-backed, and hold their heads down like people looking for something on the ground . . . These workers, then, suffer from general ill-health caused by their sedentary life. . . . The maladies that afflict the clerks arise from three causes: First, constant sitting, secondly the incessant movement of the hand and always in the same direction . . . Incessant driving of the pen over paper causes intense fatigue of the hand and the whole arm because of the continuous and almost tonic strain on the muscles and tendons, which in course of time results in failure of power in the right hand. All sedentary workers suffer from lumbago. They should be advised to take physical exercise, at any rate on holidays. Let them make the best use they can of [exercise] one day, and so to some extent counteract the harm done by many days of sedentary life”( http://ergonomenon.com/ergonomics-articles/bernardino-ramazzini-the-first-ergonomist-and-what-have-we-learned-from-him/, accessed 06-05-2012).

Ramazzini's book was translated into English as A Treatise on the Diseases of Tradesmen (London, 1705). Through various Latin editions and translations into Italian, German, French and Dutch it was also influential in the history of economics. Adam Smith cited it in his Wealth of Nations, and Karl Marx cited it in Das Kapital.

In 1713 Ramazzini expanded his text. This revised edition was reprinted with a parallel English translation by Wilmer Cave Wright and published as De Morbis Artificum Bernardini Ramazzini Diseases of Workers (1940).

Norman, Morton's Medical Bibliography 5th ed (1991) No. 2121. Hunter, The Diseases of Occupations (1955) 30-34. Lilly, Notable Medical Books 99. Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man No. 170. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science & Medicine (1991) No. 1776. Rosen, History of Miners’ Diseases, 108-120.

English clergyman and encyclopedist John Harris published Lexicon technicum: Or, an universal English dictionary of arts and sciences: Explaining not only the terms of art, but the arts themselves.

Harris's' work was the first English dictionary of arts and sciences, and the earliest modern encyclopedia of science. Harris was the first to make the distinction between “word-books” (dictionaries) and “subject-books (encyclopedias), and his Lexicon Technicum was the first English encyclopedia to be arranged in alphabetical order, as opposed to systematic order in the tradtion of the medieval encyclopedist, Isidore of Seville.

A clergyman educated at Oxford, Harris took an early interest in science, and was elected to the Royal Society in 1696. As a result, he had access to many of the greatest scientific minds in England, and the Lexicon technicum may be the first example of an encyclopedist relying directly on the consultation and help of experts or specialists, such as John Ray and Isaac Newton. In particular, Harris relied heavily on the writings of Isaac Newton as a source, quoting lengthy excerpts from them under such headings as “Attraction,” “Colour,” “Fluxions,” “Gravity,” “Light,” and “Motion.” The introduction to Vol. II contains the first printing (in Latin and English) of Newton’s “De natura acidorum,” his only published work on chemistry; and the articles “Quadrature” and “Curves” give the first English translations of the “Two treatises” from Newton’s Opticks.  

Babson, Newton Supplement, 55. Collison,Encyclopedias, 99. Horblit, One Hundred Books Famous in Science no. 25a. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine, no. 992. Printing and the Mind of Man no. 171a.

Johann Gottfried Zeidler published Johann Gottfried Zeidlers Buchbinder-Philosophie oder Einleitung in die Buchbinder Kunst, darinnen die selbe aus dem Buch der natur und eigener Erfahrung Philosophisch abgehandelt wird, mit sonderbahren Anmerckungen Zweyer Wohlerfahrner Buchbinder und jegehöigen Kopffern. This work, issued with 5 plates, and woodcuts in the text, was the earliest technical manual on bookbinding. It included the earliest picture of a type holder for lettering.

Pollard, Early Bookbinding Manuals (1984) no. 16.

In 1710 German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhlem Leibniz published "Brevis descriptio Machinae Arithmeticae, cum Figura" in Miscellanea Berolinensis (1710) 317-19, fig. 73. This was the first description of Leibniz's stepped-drum calculator, or stepped reckoner. Because Leibniz had only two working examples of the machine made, and one was lost, his invention of the stepped reckoner was primarily known through this and other publications.

Around 1710 English ironmonger, Baptist lay preacher, and inventor Thomas Newcomen developed the atmospheric reciprocating engine, which unlike the steam pump ("The Miner's Friend") developed by Thomas Savery in 1698, employed a piston in a cylinder, the vacuum pulling the piston down to the bottom of the cylinder when water was injected into it, cooling the steam. Newcomen's reciprocating engine could pump water far higher than was possible using Savery's steam pump.

In 1712 Newcomen and his partner John Calley produced the first working atmospheric reciprocating engine, or Newcomen steam engine, for pumping water at the Conygree Coalworks near Dudley, England. Newcomen's Dudley Castle beam engine is generally accepted as the first successful Newcomen engine. Newcomen engines were successful partly because they were very safe to operate. Since the steam was under such low pressure, there was no risk of a dangerous boiler explosion.  It is possible that Newcomen's Dudley engine was preceded by an engine Newcomen built a mile and a half east of Wolverhampton. Both of these steam engines were used to pump out water-filled coal mines. 

Because Savery held a general patent covering all imagined uses of steam power, Newcomen and his partner John Calley persuaded Savery to join forces with them to exploit their invention until the expiration of Savery's patent in 1733.

"Although its first use was in coal-mining areas, Newcomen's engine was also used for pumping water out of the metal mines in his native West Country, such as the tin mines of Cornwall. By the time of his death, Newcomen and others had installed over a hundred of his engines, not only in the West Country and the Midlands but also in north Wales, near Newcastle and in Cumbria. Small numbers were built in other European countries, including in France, Belgium, Spain, and Hungary, also at Dannemora, Sweden. Evidence of the use of a Newcomen Steam Engine associated with early coal mines was found in 2010 in Midlothian, VA (site of some of the first coal mines in the U.S." (Wikipedia article on Newcomen steam engine, accessed 10-21-2012).

A full-size working replica of Newcomen's steam engine can be seen in operation at the Black Country Living Museum, which stands on another part of what was Lord Dudley's Conygree Park. 

Rolt, Thomas Newcomen. The Prehistory of the Steam Engine (1963).

On November 12, 1713 the Parliament of Great Britain passed An Act for Providing a Publick Reward for Such Person or Persons as Shall Discover the Longitude at Sea.  This was duly published in 1714.

One of the most famous early examples of government incentive for scientific research, this Act of Parliament established a reward of £20,000 for anyone who could invent a reliable and practicable method of finding longitude at sea to within half a degree, with lesser prizes offered for ways of finding it to within one degree and within forty minutes. The Act also established a permanent body of Commissioners, known as the Board of Longitude, to evaluate the merits of all proposed methods, award the prizes and provide research grants of up to £2,000. Despite the incentive provided by the enormous first prize, the problem, which had baffled navigators for centuries, remained unsolved for nearly fifty years, until John Harrison invented the first accurate marine chronometer in the 1760s.

Baillie, Clocks & Watches: An Historical Bibliography (1951) 140-141, Gould, The Marine Chronometer: Its History and Development (1960) 1-17. Horblit, One Hundred Books Famous in Science (1964) no. 42a. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 2. 

Lombe's Mill, a silk throwing mill built by Thomas Lombe on an island in the river Derwent in Derby, England from 1718-21, was the first successful powered continuous production unit in the world, and the model for the factory concept later developed by Richard Arkwright and others in the Industrial Revolution.

The mill seems to have been the result of early industrial espionage. Silk weaving technology had evolved in Italy since the thirteenth century. The Italians had developed two machines-- a throwing machine and a doubler-- capable of winding the silk onto bobbins while putting a twist in the thread.

"They called the throwing machine, a filatoio, and the doubler, a torcitoio. There is an illustration of a circular handpowered throwing machine drawn in 1487 with 32 spindles. The first evidence of a externally powered filatoio comes from the thirteenth century, and the earliest illustration from around 1500. Filatorios and torcitoios contained parallel circular frames that revolved round each other on a central axis. The speed of the relative rotation determined the twist. Silk would only cooperate in the process if the temperature and humidity were high, in Italy the temperature was elevated by sunlight but in Derby the mill had to be heated, and the heat evenly distributed." (Wikipedia article on Lombe's Mill, accessed 09-30-2012).

About 1715 Thomas Lombe's brother John obtained employment at one of the Italian shops where the secret silk-throwing machinery was used. As the story goes, John stole into the shops at night and carefully diagrammed them by candlelight. He brought the designs back to England in 1716. In 1718 Thomas obtained British patent No. 422 for "A New Invention of Three Sorts of Engines never before made or used in Great Britaine, One to Wind the Finest Raw Silk, Another to Spin, and the Other to Twist the Finest Italian Raw Slik into Organzine in great Perfection, which was never before done in this Kingdom."

"Little of the original mill remain. It is known from written sources that it was five storeys high rectangular in plan. It was built of brick, in flemish bond, being 33.5m long by 12m wide. It was built on a series of stone arches that allowed the waters of the River Derwent to flow through. The mill was 17m high,topped by a shallow pitched roof.The throwing machines were two storeys high, and pierced the first floor. The winding machines were situated on the top three floors. All the machines were powered by Sorocolds external undershot waterwheel- one that was 7m in diameter and 2m in width. Its axle entered the mill through a navel hole at first floor level. It drove a vertical shaft which was 0.45m square. This drove a horizontal shaft or lay shaft that ran the length of the mill. The torcitoios and filatoios took their power from this shaft. The vertical shaft was extended past the second floor by an iron gudgeon to a further vertical shaft that reached the top 3 floors to drive the winding machines. The mill needed to be heated in order to process the silk and this was explained in the 1718 patent. It was reported in 1732 that Lombe used a fire engine (steam engine) to pump hot air round the mill. The stair column was 19.5m high, its layout is not known and there is no information on how bales were hoisted between the floors" (Wikipedia article on Lombe's Mill, accessed 09-30-2012).

Working in London, the painter Jacob Christoph le Blon secured a patent from George I for a process which he called "printing paintings."

To prepare each of his three printing plates, Le Blon used the technique of mezzotint engraving: a copper sheet is uniformly roughened with the finely serrated edge of a burring tool, and local regions are then polished, to varying degrees, in order to control the amount of ink that they are to hold.

To develop his process Le Blon needed to find three colored inks of suitable transparency, and to analyze the color that was to be reproduced into its components. Sometimes he used a fourth plate, carrying black ink. This technique allowed the use of thinner layers of colored ink, reducing cost, and accelerating drying.

The son of an organ maker, Basile Bouchon of Lyon adapted the concept of musical automata controlled by pegged cylinders to the repetitive task of weaving. He invented a loom that was controlled by perforated paper tape.

In order to make the input of instructions to the loom more flexible Jean-Baptiste Falcon substituted a chain of punched paper cards for the perforated paper tape employed by his colleague Basile Bouchon.

Jacques Vaucanson took seven years to design and construct his first automaton, or android— The Flute Player. Vaucanson's Flute Player was most probably the first automaton to perform a series of mechanical procedures long enough and complex enough to provide a credible imitation of life. When finally completed the automaton was "a life-size figure of a shepherd that played the tabor and the pipe and had a repertoire of twelve songs."

In 1738 Vaucanson presented The Flute Player at the Académie Royale des Sciences, and published a pamphlet in Paris entitled Le mécanisme du fluteur automate, presenté a messieurs de L'Académie Royale des Sciences. Avec la description d'un canard artificial, mangeant, beuvant, digerant & se vuidant, épluchantses aîles & ses plumes, imitant en div. maniers un canard vivant. . . .

In 1738 Jacques Vaucanson completed his Canard digérateur or Digesting Duck, an automaton that imitated or simulated the process of eating kernels of grain, of digestion, and of defecation.

This was the first automaton to simulate biological processes.

Scottish goldsmith and printer William Ged published Belli Catilinarii et Jugurthini Historiae by Galius Sallustius Crispus (Sallust).

This small 12mo consisted of only a title leaf and 150 pages of Sallust's text printed in very small type.  The imprint on the title page read:

"Edinburghi, Gulielmus Ged, Aurifaber Edinensis, non Typis mobilis, ut vulgo fieri solet, sed Tabellis seu Laminis fusis, excudebat, MDCCXXXIX." (Edinburgh: Printed by William Ged, Goldsmith of Edinburgh, not from movable type, as is commonly done, but from cast plates."

This book was probably the first book to announce in print that it had been published from metal plates rather than individual movable types. Ged reprinted this edition once, in 1744. A manuscript note in a copy of that printing in my possession reads that copies printed in 1739 were for presentation; only in 1744 were copies offered for sale.

Ged is thought to have begun experimenting with stereotype printing plates asround 1725. About 1727 Ged successfully made plates reproducing pages of type.  The earliest known specimen of stereotype printing from his process is a Form of Prayer for June 11, 1728. With a stationer, William Fenner, he went into partnership with John James and his brother Thomas to exploit the invention, and in 1730 they applied to Cambridge University for the use of their privilege of printing Bibles and prayer books.  They were granted a license and Ged began casting plates, but they ran into many difficulties and no book completely printed by this process is known.

In 1833 Ged returned to Scotland, and in 1836 Ged published proposals for issuing an edition of Sallust to be printed by a new process, the nature of which he did not reveal. Ged left a memoir entitled, Biographical Memoirs of William Ged; Including a Particular Account of his Progress in the Art of Block-Printing, which was first published in London, 1781. This was reprinted in Kubler, Historical Treatises, Abstracts & Papers on Stereotyping (1936).

Clair, A Chronology of Printing (1969) 101, 104. Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of the Exhibitions (1963) nos. 311-313, includes a stereotype plate from his edition of Sallust presented to Faculty of Advocates in the hope that they might grant patronage to his invention in 1740. 

René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur and Henri Louis Duhamel du Monceau issued from Paris Descriptions des arts et métiers faites ou approuvées par Messieurs de l'Académie royale des Sciences, containing 72 works in 114 parts printed in folio format, with over 2100 engraved plates and plans.

This was the most important and the largest work on the mechanical and industrial arts of eighteenth century France, and one of the earliest projects of its kind undertaken in any country. Although encyclopedic in scope, the work was not conceived in parallel to Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, but in response to the perceived function of the Académie royale des Sciences. A statement was published in 1699 in Histoire, an organ of the Académie, that outlined the motives and aims behind a proposed Description des arts et métiers:

“When this work is completed, it will be easy for each craft to compare the practices in vogue in France with those pursued in other countries; and from this comparison, the French and the inhabitants of these foreign lands will profit equally” (quoted in Cole and Watts, p. 7).

Each article had sections on materials, tools and apparatus, processes and methods, and illustrations of the métier. The wide range of crafts and industries covered nearly every aspect of French industrial and artisan life: coal-mining, fishing, textile manufacture, carpentry and cabinet-making, masonry, glass-blowing, ceramics, candle- and soap-making, barbering and wig-making, papermaking and bookbinding, iron- and tinsmithing, among other fields. Although the work was very much a separate enterprise, the Arts et métiers inspired many articles in the Encyclopédie, and can be said to complement the latter work. Both were essential to any well-balanced library in France and abroad.

The two principal figures involved in the Arts et métiers were René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur  and Henri Louis Duhamel du Monceau. The former was elected to the Académie at age 25, and had a prodigious output, submitting memoir after memoir on a variety of subjects, mostly relating to pure mathematics and pure science, but including his celebrated description of English steel production. Duhamel de Monceau, who succeeded Réaumur, was interested in applied sciences, in particular chemistry, botany and mechanics. Réaumur died before the first cahier of the Arts et métiers appeared, and Duhamel du Monceau assumed control of the project some time after Réaumur’s death in 1757. Other contributors included François Bedos de Celles, Fredrik Chapman, Charles Romme, Michel Ferdinand d’Albert d’Ailly, duc de Chaulnes, the Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet, Jean-Jacques Perret, Charles-René Fourcroy de Ramecourt, August-Denis Fougeroux de Bondaroy, François-Alexandre Pierre de Garcault, Jérome le Français de Lalande, Jean Jacques Paulet, Jeanne-Marie Roland de la Platière, Nicolas Christien de Thy, comte de Milly (1728-84) and others. The Académie and the authors of the Arts et métiers sought help from men with practical experience whenever possible.

Though it was written by the elite rather than the artisan class, the combination of the best scientific minds and the best practical minds of the era produced an invaluable reference work and an unparalleled social record of the artisan classes, and recorded for posterity manufacturing methods that would soon disappear with the coming of the Industrial Revolution. Like Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the Arts et métiers is one of the greatest productions of the French Enlightenment, and a benchmark in social and scientific history.

Arthur H. Cole and George B. Watts, The Handicrafts of France as Recorded in the Description des Arts et Métiers (1952).

Between 1751 and 1780 French philosopher, art critic, and writer Denis Diderot and French mathematician, mechanician, physicist and philosopher Jean le Rond d'Alembert edited and wrote portions of the Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société‚ de gens de lettres in 17 folio volumes of text plus 11 folio volumes (i.e., 10 volumes in 11) of plates. The first 7 volumes were published in Paris, but volumes 8 to 17 had to be published under a false Neuchâtel imprint. The main work appeared between 1751 and 1772. A supplement of 4 volumes plus one plate volume was published in Paris and Amsterdam from 1776 to 1777. The Table analytique et raisonnée for the set was published in 2 folio volumes in Paris and Amsterdam in 1780. Altogether there were 35 volumes, with 71,818 articles, and 3,129 plates.

The central enterprise of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie embodied that movement's liberal, anti-clerical and scientific spirit, its preoccupation with man as a creature of nature, and its conception of culture and society as mutable products of the evolutionary processes of history. As such, the work challenged the twin authorities of the French monarchy and the Catholic Church, both of which derived their power from the traditional belief in a divinely ordained, unchanging order. Well aware of the dangers of affronting such powerful authorities, the philosophes who contributed to the Encyclopédie relied heavily on irony and subterfuge in their attacks on the established order, but the epistemological basis of these attacks was clearly stated in the Encyclopédie's "Discourse préliminaire," written by d'Alembert, who, "although he formally acknowledged the authority of the church, . . . made it clear that knowledge came from the senses and not from Rome or Revelation" (Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775-1800 [1979] 7).

"The Encyclopédie was an innovative encyclopedia in several respects. Among other things, it was the first encyclopedia to include contributions from many named contributors, and it was the first general encyclopedia to lavish attention on the mechanical arts. Still, the Encyclopédie is famous above all for representing the thought of the Enlightenment. According to Denis Diderot in the article 'Encyclopédie,' the Encyclopédie's aim was 'to change the way people think.' "(Wikipedia article on Encyclopédie, accessed 01-26-2010).

The first seven volumes of the Encyclopédie were produced in relative safety, due in part to the support of powerful protectors, notably Madame de Pompadour, but official tolerance came to an end in 1759, when the Encyclopédie was condemned by the Parlement of Paris and placed on the Index librorum prohibitorum by Pope Clement XIII. Diderot was forced to complete the remaining ten volumes in secret and to publish them under a false Neuchâtel imprint.  "In truth, secular authorities did not want to disrupt the commercial enterprise, which employed hundreds of people. To appease the church and other enemies of the project, the authorities had officially banned the enterprise, but they turned a blind eye to its continued existence" (Wikipedia).

A high percentage of the Encyclopédie's 71,818 articles were written by Diderot and d'Alembert themselves, with another large portion, about 400 articles, written by the Baron d'Holbach. Other famous contributors included Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire. The most prolific contributor was the French scholar Louis de Jaucourt who wrote 17,266 articles, or about 8 per day between 1759 and 1765.   

The Encyclopédie was a considerable commercial success, resulting in a print run of 4250 copies (Wikipedia), much larger than the typical print run of most publications at the time.

The account of printing in the Encyclopédie is among the most significant of the 18th century. Of this Giles Barber wrote in French Letterpress Printing (1969)9-10:

"The Encyclopédie provides one of the best general explanations of printing of the century, being both detailed and accurate. The main article is well supported by a host of minor ones including numerous definitions of terms and processes and by an excellent and evocative series of plates showing general workshop scenes as well as details of presses and other equipment. The authorship of all these articles is not, as yet ascertained. In their Preface the editors say: 'On juge bien que sur ce qui concerne l'Imprimerie et la Librairie, les memes tous les secours qui'il nos était possible de désirer'. In addition two of the publishers are credited with particular articles, David l'ainé with 'catalogue" (based on a manuscript by the abbé Girard bequeathed to Le Breton) and Le Breton himself with 'encre noire'. The technical part of the long and important article on 'imprimerie' is ascribed to the prote in Le Breton's shop, who we learn from the article 'prote', also ascribed to him, was one Brullé. J.B.M. Paillon, the famous engraver, wrote a number of minor articles on engraving ('dentelle, dorure sur parchemen, fleuron') and provided notes for others. Pierre Simon Fournier, the type founder, is similarly thanked in the Préface for providing background notes on his trade. "Papeterie' is by L. J. Goussier, one of the regular contributors, assisted by 'M. Prevost de Langlée près de Montargis'.

"Of the chief editors we know that d'Alembert wrote 'bibliomanie' and that Diderot's editorial asterisk, indicating his responsibility for either part or all of the article, occurs before 'bibliothécaire', caractère de'imprimerie (doubtless basically written by Fournier), chassis, corps, correcteur' and a few other minor subjects. But the chief editor as far as printing was concerned was undoubtedly the Protestant chevalier Louis de Jaucourt. Among his more important contributions were parts of 'imprimerie' covering 'histoire des inventions modernes' and 'imprimerie de Contantinople', the historical part of 'papier' and the articles on 'privilege d'impression' and 'relieur' as well as a large number of short ones.  It has also bee suggested the printer Claude François Simon wrote many of the printing articles but no internal confirmation of this has been found."

♦ Charles C. Gillespie reproduced 485 of the most notable plates in the Encyclopédie with informative and entertaining commentary in A Diderot Pictorial Encylopedia of Trades and Industry (2 vols. 1959).  These included all or most of the plates concerning book production (papermaking, printing, copperplate engraving, bookbinding, leather production).

♦ Lough, Essays on the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert (1968) provided an authoritative bibliographical study and identified the authors of a significant percentage of the unsigned articles. 

Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 200.  Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 637.

♦ There are numerous versions of the Encyclopédie online. The ARTFL Encyclopédie Database from the University of Chicago contains "20.8 million words, 400,000 unique forms, 18,000 pages of text, 17 volumes of articles, and 11 volumes of plate legends." There is also the Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project at the University of Michigan. The entire searchable French text and all the illustrations are available at http://diderot.alembert.free.fr/ (accessed 04-21-2010).

There is also http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Diderot_-_Encyclopedie_1ere_edition_tome_11.djvu/842. When I searched this in March 2011 for Prevost de Langlée près de Montargis the French text was robotically translated into English by Google Chrome.

The first book, part of which was printed on wove paper (velin) invented by English papermaker James Whatman, was the edition of Virgil's Bucolica, Georgica et Aeneis printed in Birmingham, England by writing master, typographer and printer John Baskerville. The edition was advertised for sale in the London Press on May 5, 1757. Because Whatman could supply only enough wove paper for part of the edition,

"the first 28 sheets (A-2E) were printed on an unwatermarked wove paper, the remainder (2F-3H, Π-b) on an unwatermarked laid paper. At some time after the change from wove to laid paper a number of sheets and individual leaves were cancelled, those in the wove sections being identifiable through the cancellantia being printed on laid paper. Some of these cancels are found in nearly all copies of the book, some in only a few" (Gaskell, John Baskerville: A Bibliography [1959] no. 1).

The wove paper Whatman produced for this edition was a preliminary form:

"Apropos of the claim . . . that Baskerville's quarto Virgil of 1757 is printed on the first known specimen of western wove paper, it can be said without hesitation that the characteristics of this paper are unique. It is quite unlike the more successful wove papers that followed in having unmistakable wiremarks and flaws" (Balston, The Whatmans and Wove (Velin) Paper [1998] xxxv). 

Baskerville's Virgil of 1757 was his first publication, a project which he began in 1754, after he had made a fortune manufacturing japanned goods. Some authorities consider it Baskervile's finest work. The edition became famous for its typography, and overall design. 

"In this Virgil, his first book, the 'amateur' Baskerville shows an assurance one would have expected from a highly experienced master . . . His use of his own, freshly created type, with its balance between the subtlety of the earlier printers' designs and the harsh new French types, is exemplary. . . The skill seen here is especially remarkable, for such simplicity, even minimalism, was revolutionary. It was a defining moment in bookmaking, ridding it of the irrelevant, flowery decoration . . . The repercussions were to be felt not only in Britain, but in continental Europe, and even in America." (Bartram, Five Hundred Years of Book Design, 70-71).

Though book historians draw attention to the first use of wove paper in the first Baskerville edition of Virgil, there is no evidence that Baskerville was especially interested in this innovation in paper. Most of his later book were printed on the traditional laid paper.  Besides the innovative typography and book design involved, Baskerville's first edition of Virgil was also known for the "glazed" surface of the paper. The exact method by which Baskerville glazed or hot-pressed his book-paper was a trade secret that Baskerville never revealed. As a result, extensive research by historians of printing and paper has been devoted to possible techniques involved; see Balston, op. cit (1998) 27-28, 217-224.

Eventually after the first edition of his 1757 4to Virgil was sold out, Baskerville published a second edition, produced in facsimile to the first. The precise date of this second edition, called by some a "forgery," is unknown, but it has been estimated to be around 1770. Among the ways it can be distinguished from the first edition is that is printed entirely on laid rather than wove paper. Determining the original printing from the early facsimile edition also requires attention to subtle bibliographical details cited in Gaskell's bibliography referenced above.

Pardoe, John Baskerville of Birmingham, Letter-Founder & Printer (1975).

Astronomer and writer Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande publishedl'Art de faire le papier in volume 4 of the series Descriptions des arts et métiers published by the Académie royale des Sciences.  

Papermaking, a craft which had arrived in Europe earlier than printing, and had been passed down as trade secrets through apprenticeship for even longer, was later than printing in having a comprehensive manual published. The first comprehensive printing and typesetting manual had been published by printer Joseph Moxon roughly eighty years before de Lalande's, in 1683-84. By the mid-eighteenth century several other printing manuals— most notably that of Fertel— had been published. However, since literacy was not required for tasks in papermaking it is probable that many papermakers were illiterate, in contrast to printers, who had to be literate. Thus it may be appropriate that this first detailed treatise was written not by a professional papermaker but by a scientist and astronomer. Its publication in a handsomely and expensively printed scientific series would suggest that it was intended not necessarily for papermakers themselves, but for students of technology, or entrepeneurs who might enter the papermaking industry.

De Lalande's work comprised 150 folio pages illustrated with 14 large engravings, describing the process of papermaking. Fundamental elements of the process were (1) Selection of raw material, i.e. rags. High quality white paper depended on using high quality white rags. (2) Conversion of rags into pulp (or "stuff"). When de Lalande published this process was done by a washer/beater "engine" propelled by water power. (3) Sheet-making and consolidation. (4) Sizing. (5) Sorting, Finishing and Packing.

When de Lalande published, other than the conversion of rags into pulp, papermaking remained a manual process. It would begin to be mechanized roughly fifty years later, in the early nineteenth century.  A very careful and accurate observer, de Lalande consulted with numerous professional papermakers in different regions of France in order to write his treatise. The work covers all aspects of the trade, including the design and construction of buildings, the design of machinery and equipment, and the economics of the business, plus a glossary of terms of the trade.

De LaLande's work was translated into German along with the rest of the Descriptions des arts et métiers series, from 1762-75. A Dutch translation of de Lalande's treatise appeared separately in 1792. The work was first translated into English by Richard MacIntrye Atkinson more than 200 years after its original publication, in a splendid full-size edition limited to 405 leatherbound copies in 1976.  By this time the text was chiefly of interest to paper historians or hand-made papermakers. The English translation, published by The Ashling Press, Mountcashel Castle, Kilmurry, Sixmilebridge, Co. Clare, Ireland, included all the plates printed on blue hand-made paper made by Ashling Papermakers.

Hunter, The Literature of Papermaking 1390-1800 (1925) 33.

Illiterate English weaver and carpenter James Hargreaves of Blackburn, Lancashire invented the spinning jenny, which spun eight threads simultaneously.

This was a major step toward the Industrial Revolution, and as a result of Hargreaves's invention Blackburn became a boomtown of the Industrial Revolution, and among the first industrialized towns in the world.

German pastor, botanist, mycologist, entomologist, ornithologist and inventor Jacob Christian Schäffer published Versuche und Muster ohne alle Lumpen oder doch mit enem geringen Zusatze derselben Papier zu machen in six volumes, Regensburg, 1765-71, in which he documented his experiments with new papermaking materials, and included actual specimens of paper made with each.  Because his experiments were conducted prior to the discovery of bleach by Scheele, Berthollet and others, all of Schäffer's samples show the tint of the original material from which they were made. Schäffer's book also probably includes the first documented sample of paper produced from wood pulp—not surprising because Schäffer, an entomologist, studied the production of wood pulp paper by wasps: 

"In most of the examples about one-fifth part cotton rags were added to the pulp to help bind the fibres together. A number of the specimens are sized and nearly all have been printed upon.

"It is curious to note one of the first specimens shown in Schaeffer's books was made from wasps' nests–for it was not the wasp, himself, the first papermaker, or was it the frog who was the original fabricator of paper? The wasp made his nest of wood fibre cleverly felted together exactly as paper is constructed, while the frog made a peculiar kind of spittle on the surface of ponds which became well-felted paper after drying naturally in the sun" (Hunter, The Literature of Papermaking 1390-1800 [1925] 34-36.)

Writing in 1925, Dard Hunter described Schäffer's set of books as "the most interesting and rarest work on the subject of paper ever published," and stated that complete copies with all of the 82 original paper specimens were extremely difficult to find.

In 1769 English inventor and entrepreneur Richard Arkwright of Nottingham received British patent No. 931 for "A new Piece of Machinery never before found out, practised, or used, for the Making of Weft or Yarn from Cotton, Flax, and Wool, which would be of great Utility to a great many Manufactuers in this His Kingdom of England, we well as to His Subjects in general, by Employing a Number of Poor People in Working the said Machinery, and Making the said Weft or Yarn much Superior in Quality to any ever hertofore Manufactured or Made."

Arkwright's description of his invention in his patent specification, referring to the associated diagrams, was brief, and unillustrated:

"A, the cogg wheel and shaft, which receive their motion from a horse; B, the drum or wheel which turns C, a belt of leather, and give motion to the whole machine; D, a lead weight which keeps F., the small drum, steady to E, the forcing wheel; G, the shaft of wood which gives motion to the wheel H, and continues it to I, four pair of rollers (the form of which are drawn in the margin), which act by tooth and pinion, made of brass and steel nutts, fixt in two iron plates K. That part of the roller which the cotton runs through is covered with wood, the top roller with leather, and the bottom one fluted, which lets the cotton &c. through it, and by one pair of rollers moving quicker than the other, draws it finer for twisting, which is performed by the spindles T. K, the two iron plates described abpve; L, four large bobbins with cotton rovings on, conducted between rollers at the back; M, the four threads carried to the bobbins and spindles, by four small wires fixt across the frame in the slip of wood V; N, iron leavers with small lead weights, hanging to the rollers by pulleys, which keep the rollers close to each other; O, a cross piece of wood to which the leavers are fixed; P, the bobbins and spindles; Q, flyes made of wood, with small wires on the side which lead the thread to the bobbins; R, small worsted bands, put about the whirl of the bobbins, the screwing of which tight or easy causes the bobbins to wind up the thread faster or slower; S, the four whirls of the spindles; T, the four spindles which run in iron plates V, explained in letter M; W, a wooden frame of the whole machine."

In 1775 Arkwright received a second patent No. 1111 for "Certain Instruments or Machines which would be of publick Utlity in Preparing Silk, Cotton, Flax, and Wool, for Spinning, and constructed on easy and simple Principles very different from any that had ever been contrived." This patent, an expansion of Arkwright's first patent of 1775, was illustrated with diagrams of the machine.

As stated, the machine, known as a spinning frame, was originally intended to be operated by "horse" power. When Arkwright applied water power to the machinery it became known as the water frame. This invention was a key component of the Industrial Revolution.

 Joseph Priestley described a vegetable gum which has the ability to rub out pencil marks: "I have seen a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the mark of black lead pencil." He called the substance "rubber."

Also in 1770 Edward Nairne, an English engineer, is credited with developing the first widely-marketed rubber eraser for an inventions competition. He reportedly sold natural rubber erasers for the high price of 3 shillings per half-inch cube.  This was the first practical application of rubber in Europe.

Wilhelm Haas of Basel built a new type of printing press in which all parts subject to stress during the printing process were made of iron, including both the bed and the platen.

Building key parts of the handpress out of iron greatly improved the efficiency of the press.

German scientist, satirist and Anglophile Georg Christoph Lichtenberg discovered Lichtenberg figures, and described them in his memoir "Super nova methodo motum ac naturam fluidi electrici" investigandi," Göttinger Novi Commentarii, Göttingen, 1777.

"In 1777, Lichtenberg built a large electrophorus to generate high voltage static electricity through induction. After discharging a high voltage point to the surface of an insulator, he recorded the resulting radial patterns in fixed dust. By then pressing blank sheets of paper onto these patterns, Lichtenberg was able to transfer and record these images, thereby discovering the basic principle of modern Xerography. This discovery was also the forerunner of modern day plasma physics. Although Lichtenberg only studied 2-dimensional (2D) figures, modern high voltage researchers study 2D and 3D figures (electrical trees) on, and within, insulating materials. Lichtenberg figures are now known to be examples of fractals" (Wikipedia article on Lichtenberg figures, accessed 06-11-2010).

In 1779 Richard Arkwright built a factory in Cromford, Derbyshire, England for his hydraulic spinning machine.

This was one of the first developments of mass production, which eventually caused disruptive economic and social changes characteristic of the Industrial Revolution. In Cromford there were not enough local people to supply Arkwright with the workers he needed. After building a large number of cottages close to the factory, he imported workers from all over Derbyshire. Arkwright preferred weavers with large families ao that while the women and children worked in his spinning-factory the weavers (adult males) worked at home turning the yarn into cloth.

"The Derby Mercury reported on 22nd October 1779 that Arkwright feared that people made unemployed by his new methods might destroy his factory: 'There is some fear of the mob coming to destroy the works at Cromford, but they are well prepared to receive them should they come here. All the gentlemen in this neighbourhood being determined to defend the works, which have been of such utility to this country. 5,000 or 6,000 men can be at any time assembled in less than an hour by signals agreed upon, who are determined to defend to the very last extremity, the works, by which many hundreds of their wives and children get a decent and comfortable livelihood' " (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/IRarkwright.htm, accessed 01-30-2012).

For a portrait of Arkwright by Joseph Wright of Derby follow this link.

French geologist and traveller Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond published Description des expériences de la machine aerostatique de MM. Montgolfier, et de celles auxquelles cette découverte a donné lieu and Première suite de la description des expériences aérostatiques de MM. Montgolfier, et de celles auxquelles cette découverte a donné lieu.

This was the first full-length account of the historic experiments with balloon flight conducted by paper manufacturers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier in 1783. After some unsatisfactory experiments with hydrogen gas (which dissipated too quickly from their trial models), the Montgolfiers discovered that air heated to 100 degrees Celsius became sufficiently rarified to lift a balloon and did not diffuse. On June 5, 1783 the brothers released their first full-sized balloon, a paper and linen globe thirty-five feet in diameter, which rose 6,000 feet and travelled a horizontal distance of 7,668 feet from the starting point. On September 19, before Louis XVI and the French court at Versailles, they launched the first flight with living beings aboard (a sheep, a cock and a duck); and on November 20 the first manned flight took place.  

The invention of the hot-air “Montgolfière,” as well as its obvious limitations, stimulated renewed research into the possibility of using hydrogen as a lifting agent. Development of the hydrogen balloon proceeded simultaneously with that of the hot-air model, and on December 1 the first passenger-carrying hydrogen balloon, designed and manned by the physicist Jacques Charles, with Nicholas-Louis Robert as co-pilot, ascended for a two-hour voyage.  

Charles’s work was financed through the efforts of Faujas de Saint-Fond, whose account of it appears in the second volume of his work. A few copies of volume 1 were issued separately. When volume 2 was published the following year volume 1 was reissued with a 4-page supplement, describing the voyage of November 20.

Chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, a commissioner appointed by the Académie des Sciences to study the Montgolfier balloon, was among the authors of a report dated December 23, 1783 which was published on pages 200-231 of volume 2.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 769. Davy, Interpretive History of Flight 37-41. Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 229. En français dans le texte 75. 

In 1739 Scottish Goldsmith William Ged printed a 12mo edition of Sallust, which was probably the first book to announce on its title page that it had been printed from stereotype plates rather than moveable type.  Ged did not, however, attempt to patent the process. In 1784 Andrew Foulis, Printer to the University of Glasgow, and Alexander Tilloch, a printer in Glasgow, were awarded British patent No. 1431 for "A Method of Making Plates for the Purpose of Printing by or with Plates instead of the Moveable Types commonly used, and for Vending and Disposing of the said Printing Plates and the Books or other Publications therewith Printed, whereby a much greater degree of Accuracy, Correctness, and Elegance will be introduced in the publication of the Works both of the Ancient and Modern Authors than had hiterto been attained." Their process Tilloch claimed to have invented in 1781 without knowledge of Ged's prior work.

In their brief specification Foulis and Tilloch stated that their "method of making plates for the purpose of printing by or with such plates, instead of the moveable types commonly used, which is performed by making a plate or plates for their page or pages of any book or other publication, and in printing off such book or other publication at the press; the plates of the pages to be arranged in their proper order, and the number of copies wanted thrown off, instead of throwing the impressions wanted from moveable types locked together in the common method; and such plates are made either by forming moulds or matrices for the page or pages of the books or other publications to be printed by or with plates, and filling such moulds or matrices with metal or with clay, or with a mixture of clay and earth, or by stamping or striking with these moulds or matrices the metal, clay, earth or mixture of clay and earth."

About 1785 American inventor Oliver Evans built the first automated flour mill on Red-Clay Creek near Newport, Delaware. Driven by water power, the mill operated continuously through the use of five bulk material handling devices including a hopper-boy, bucket elevators, conveyor belts, Archimedean screws, and descenders, reducing the number of men needed to operate the equipment from four to one.

Evans described this invention in The Young Mill-Wright and Millers' Guide which he published in Philadelphia in 1795. This work became very popular, undergoing numerous editions and revisions over the next fifty or more years. Evans patented this invention in a few states and, when the US patent system was established, in the federal patent system (Third U.S. Patent).

Evans described his automatic flour mill as follows:

"These five machines . . . perform every necessary movement of the grain, and meal, from one part of the mill to another, and from one machine to another, through all the various operations, from the time the grain is emptied from the wagoner's bag . . . until completely manufactured into flour. . . without the aid of manual labor, excepting to set the different machines in motion."

Scottish inventory and mechanical engineer James Watt of Glasgow invented the centrifugal governor to regulate the speed of his steam engine.

This created interest in other feedback devices.

In 1790 London chemist,  chemist, translator, journalist, publisher, scientist, and inventor William Nicholson received British patent No. 1748 for "A Machine or Instrument on a New Construction for the Purpose of Printing on Paper, Linen, Cotton Woolen and other Articles in a more Neat, Cheap, and Accurate Manner than is effected by the Machines now in use." In this patent Nicholson made sketchy but prophetic proposals for printing with cylinders which it is believed he never carried out.

"Nicolson's patent consisted of three parts. The first was for casting types in a multi-letter mould, so that 'two, three or more letters' could be cast at one pouring of the metal, but the resulting types were to be scraped into a shape so that they could be inserted around a cylinder. The second part called for cylinders covered with leather or cloth to distribute the ink. The third demanded that all printing was to be performed by passing paper or material to be printed between two cylinders, one of which 'has the block form, plate assemblance of types, or original, attached to or forming part of its surface' " (Moran, Printing Presses, History and Development from the Fifteenth century to Modern Times [1973] 102).

Nicholson's specification contains several drawings.

"In the first drawing, which as the outline of a hand-press A is the impression cylinder in gear with and driving the carriage HI to and fro. B is the inking cylinder,w ith distributing rollers; these take their ink supply from the 'ink block' (duct) at O as this advances with the carriage.

"In the second drawing, which shows three cylinders vertically arranged, B is an inking cylinder with distributors andan ink duct; A is a cylinder 'having the letter imposed upon it surface'; E is the impression cylinder" (Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue fo the Exhibitions at The British Museum and at Earls Court, London 16-27 July 1963 [1963] No. 402).

Mechanization of printing through a steam-powered cylinder press was accomplished by Friedrich Koenig between 1810 and 1816. The Oxford Dictionary of National Bibliography states that "Nicholson was subsequently consulted by Friedrich König, the inventor of a machine for the same purpose constructed on different principles, but never asserted a prior claim."

On April 10, 1790 President George Washington signed the Patent Act of 1790 into law, founding the United States patent system. 

Three months later, on July 31, 1790 Samuel Hopkins of Philadelphia, received the first U.S. patent for an improvement in "the making of Pot ash and Pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Process." President George Washington signed the patent, as did Attorney General Edmund Randolph and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. The original document is preserved in the Chicago History Museum.

Austro-Hungarian author and inventor, Wolfgang von Kempelen, published in Vienna Mechanismus der mensclichen Sprache nebst Beschreibung seiner sprechenden Maschine, in which he discussed the origins and development of languages, and described the first successful speech synthesizer.

Unlike von Kempelen’s fraudulent chess-playing Turk automaton , Kempelin's speech synthesizer actually worked.  Kempelen's synthesizer was the first that produced not only some speech sounds, but also whole words and short sentences. He believed that it was possible to acquire skill in using the machine within three weeks, especially if one chose to synthesize sentences in Latin, French, or Italian. German von Kempelen considered much more difficult to synthesize because of its many closed syllables and consonant clusters.

"The machine consisted of a bellows that simulated the lungs and was to be operated with the right forearm (uppermost drawing). A counterweight provided for inhalation. The middle and lower drawings show the 'wind box' that was provided with some levers to be actuated with the fingers of the right hand, the 'mouth', made of rubber, and the 'nose' of the machine. The two nostrils had to be covered with two fingers unless a nasal was to be produced. The whole speech production mechanism was enclosed in a box with holes for the hands and additional holes in its cover.

"The air flow was conducted into the mouth not only by way of an oscillating reed, but also through a narrow shunting tube. This allowed the air pressure in the mouth cavity to increase when its opening was covered tightly in order to produce unvoiced speech sounds. Driven by a spring, a small auxiliary bellows would then deliver an extra puff of air at the release.

"With the left hand, it was also possible to control the resonance properties of the mouth by varied covering of its opening. In this way, some vowels and consonants could be simulated in sufficient approximation. This was not really a simulation of natural articulation, since the shape of the mouth of the machine in itself remained constant. Some vowels and, especially, the consonants [d t g k] could not be simulated in this way, but only feigned, at best. An [l] could be produced by putting the thumb into the mouth.

"The function of the vocal cords was simulated by a slamming reed made of ivory (leftmost drawing). Although the effective length of the reed could be varied, this could not be done during speech production, so that the machine spoke on a monotone.

"Two of the levers to be actuated with the right hand served the production of the fricatives [s] and . . . as well as [z] and . . . by means of separate, hissing whistles (right drawing). A third one effectuated the production of a rattling [R] by dropping a wire on the vibrating reed (middle drawing)." (http://www.ling.su.se/staff/hartmut/kemplne.htm, accessed 12-14-2008).

Kempelin's final version of the machine, which differs slightly from the version shown in the book, is preserved in the Deutsches Museum, Munich, in the department of musical instruments.

Because Kempelin's speech synthesizer required a human for its operation it was not literally an automation but may be thought of as a forerunner of robotic or computer speech synthesizers.

In 1792 American inventor Jacob Perkins invented steel engraving for the process of banknote printing. In America Perkins was unable to commercialize the process successfully.  Motivated by a £20,000 prize offered by the British government for development of unforgable banknotes, in 1818 Perkins moved to England. He and associates "set up shop in England, and spent months on example currency, still on display today. Unfortunately for them, Sir Joseph Banks thought that 'unforgable' also implied that the inventor should be English by birth. Sir Joseph Banks's successors awarded future contracts to the English printing company started with Charles Heath" (Wikipedia article on Jacob Perkins, accessed 10-21-2012).  

In 1819 Perkins received British patent No. 4400 for: "Certain Machinery and Implements Applicable to Ornamental Turning and Engraving, and to the Transferring of Engraved or Other Work from the Surface of One Piece of Metal to another Piece of Metal, and to the Forming of Metallic Dies and Matrices; and also Improvements in the Construction and Method of Using Plates and Presses for Printing Bank Notes and other Papers, whereby the Producing and Combining various Species of Work is effected upon the same Plates and Surfaces, the Difficulty of Imitation increased, and the Process of Printing facilitated; and also an Improved Method of Making and Using Dies and Presses for Coining Money, Stamping Medals, and other Useful Purposes."  The patent included six large folding engineering drawings.  

In England Perkins entered into business arrangements with English engraver, currency and stamp printer, book publisher and illustrator Charles Heath. To produce steel engravings engravers such as Heath had to use special plates supplied by Perkins.  These plates had to be printed on presses designed and provided by Perkins; both the plates and the presses were described in Perkins's patent.  The publisher who first recognized the aesthetic and economic advantages of steel engraving was Longman, who issued twenty books containing, all together, around seventy steel engravings beginning in 1821. Longman's first production using steel engravings was the edition of Thomas Campbell's The Pleasures of Hope issued by Longman on January 10, 1821. Heath's four engraved illustrations for this work, including its engraved title page, were dated 1820. According to Longman's ledgers, 3000 copies of this edition were printed, and in November 1824 a further 3000 copies were printed from the same plates, reflecting the extreme durability of steel engravings compared to engravings from copperplates. There was also a printing dated 1822, as I have a copy in my collection bearing that date. 

Roughly twenty years later in 1840 Perkins's methods reached true mass production when they were used to print the world's first adhesive postage stamp. The process, which proved the extreme durability of steel plates compared to any other available graphic reproduction medium of the time, remained in use until 1879:

"Henry Courbould made a drawing of Queen Victoria from the Medal struck on her accession to the throne for which Perkins, Bacon and Petch paid him £12.00. A piece of steel 3" square x 9/16" thick was annealed several times to remove the carbon and when completely soft the background was engraved with the aid of the geometric lathe, followed by the engraving of Queen's head and the inscription "Postage - One Penny". After hardening, the die became harder than it had been originally and 240 impressions were transferred to the printing plate using the Roll Transfer Press. This Master Die 1 was in use from 1840 to 1855 with master Die 2 being used until 1879 - a tribute to the excellence of Jacob Perkins' plate hardening system. It was proved that fully 400,000 imprints could be taken from a single plate without signs of wear. Altogether, over twenty-two thousand million stamps for Great Britain and the Colonies were printed by the Perkins' process during these years" (http://www.bphs.net/GroupFacilities/J/JacobPerkinsPrinting.htm, accessed 06-24-2012).

Hunnisett, Engraved on Steel. The History of Picture Production using Steel Plates (1998) 112.

During the Napoleonic wars, France, under naval blockade imposed by Great Britain, was unable to import pure graphite sticks from England. Nor could France import English pencils or the inferior German pencils. To solve this problem, Nicholas Jacques Conté, an officer in Napoleon's army, discovered a method of mixing powdered graphite with clay and forming the mixture into rods that were fired in a kiln. By varying the ratio of graphite to clay, the hardness of the graphite rod could also be varied.

"This method of [pencil lead] manufacture which had been earlier discovered by the Austrian Joseph Hardtmuth of Koh-I-Noor in 1790 remains in use."

Meteorologist and instrument manufacturer Gottfried Erich Rosenthal published Litterature der Technologie das ist: Verzeichniss der Bücher, Schriften und Abhandlungen, welche von den Künsten, den Manufackturen und Fabriken, der Handlung, der Handwerkern und sonstigen Nahrungszweigen, als auch von denen zum wissenschaflichen Betriebe derselben erforderlichen Kenntnissen aus dem Naturreich, der Mathematik, Physik und Chemie handeln.

Rosenthals' work was the first comprehensive bibliography of technology, containing about 20,000 references in European languages and Latin, but seemingly nothing in English. It shows the build-up of techical literature by the early stages of the Industrial Revolution.  It is particularly useful for the numerous references to early journal articles on specialized subjects.

This work was also issued as the final part of Jacobssons technologisches Wörterbuch oder alphabetische Erklärung aller nützlichen mechanischen Künste, Manufacturen, Fabriken und Handwerker (1781-95).

Petzhold p. 727.

In 1796 German actor and playwright Alois Senefelder invented lithography (from Greek λίθος - lithos, 'stone' + γράφω - graphο, 'to write') as a cheaper way of publishing his plays. He experimented with a new etching technique using a greasy, acid resistant ink as a resist on a smooth fine-grained stone of Solnhofen limestone from Bavaria (Bayern), halfway between Nuremberg (Nürnberg) and Munich (München).  Senefelder discovered that this could be extended to allow printing from the flat surface of the stone alone. Gradually he brought his technique into a workable form, perfecting both the chemical processes and the special form of printing press required for using the stones. He called it "stone printing" or "chemical printing", but the French name "lithographie" (lithography) became more widely adopted. With the composer Franz Gleißner, in 1796 Senefelder started a publishing firm using lithography

In 1799 Senefelder met with German composer and music publisher Johann Anton André in Munich. Senefelder agreed to collaborate with André, and granted André's firm the right to use the new printing method for the first time. This occurred in 1800 when the vocal score of André's own opera Die Weiber von Weinsberg came off the press. 

Lithography was the first planographic printing process, and the first radically new method of printing since Gutenberg’s invention of printing by movable type.

In 1797 Italian physicist Giovanni Battista Venturi published Essais sur les ouvrages physico-mathématiques de Léonard de Vinci, avec des fragmens tirés de ses manuscrits. . . . This brief work, with one folding engraved plate, is considered the beginning of the modern Leonardo studies. Venturi, who lived in Paris for much of his life, had access to the Leonardo da Vinci manuscripts which had been moved by order of Napoleon, after his conquests in the Italian peninsula, from the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan to the Institut National in Paris.  Venturi organized the codices and gave them the letters by which they are known today. His studies inspired him to claim that “il faut donc placer Léonard à la tête de ceux qui se sont occupés des sciences Physico-Mathématiques et de la vraie méthode d’étudier parmi les Modernes.” In his 56 page book, Venturi presented excerpts, translated into French, of some of the manuscripts’ most important sections on physics, mathematics and geology together with essays and notes of his own on the texts. Venturi intended this work to be the prelude to a more ambitious three-volume edition of Leonardo’s complete writings on mechanics, hydraulics and optics; however, this was never published.

Venturi is best known for his researches on the Venturi effect described in his treatise on hydraulics, Recherches expérimentales sur le principe de la communication latérale du mouvement dans les fluides appliqué a l'explication de differens phenomenes hydrauliques, also first published in 1797. Verga, Bibliografia Vinciana, No. 273. 

In 1798 French soldier and mechanical engineer Louis-Nicolas Robert invented the first papermaking machine.

After completing his military career, in 1790 Robert became an indentured clerk at one of the Didot family's Paris publishing houses. First working under Saint-Léger Didot as a clerk, he later switched to a position as "inspector of personnel" at Pierre-François Didot's hand paper-making factory in Corbeil-Essonnes in the suberbs of Paris. This establishment had a history dating back to 1355, and supplied paper to the Ministry of Finance for currency manufacture. Both Robert and Didot grew impatient with the quarrelling workers, vatmen, couchers, and laymen, so Robert was motivated to find a way to mechanize the labor-intensive process of making paper by hand. 

Prior to 1798, paper was made one sheet at a time, by dipping a rectangular frame or mould with a screen bottom into a vat of pulp. The frame was removed from the vat, and the water was pressed out of the pulp. The remaining pulp was allowed to dry; the frame could not be re-used until the previous sheet of paper was removed from it. Robert's construction had a moving screen belt that would receive a continuous flow of stock and deliver an unbroken sheet of wet paper to a pair of squeeze rolls. As the continuous strip of wet paper came off the machine it was manually hung over a series of cables or bars to dry. This continuous, unbroken sheet of paper later had to be cut. An advantage of making continous sheets was that it the large sheets could be printed for wallpaper.

Robert applied for a French patent for his machine on September 9, 1798; it was granted in 1799.  However, because of disagreements between Robert and his partners, St. Leger and François Didot, and also because of financial disruptions caused by the French Revolution, François Didot attempted to have it developed in England, sending his English brother-in-law, John Gamble, to London to develop the technology.

In 1801 John Gamble, of Leicester Square, Middlesex County (now London), received British patent No. 2487 for an "Invention of Making Paper in single Sheets, without Seam or Joining, from One to Twelve Feet and upwards Wide, and from One to Forty-five Feet and upwards in Length." Gamble's specification was essentially a translation of Robert's patent. The title of the specification, with its emphasis on the production of very large sheets, indicates that the original market for the product was expected to be wallpaper.  Earlier that year Gamble returned to France to obtain drawings of the machine for the patent specification.  He also arranged to have Robert's working model of the machine sent to England so that improvements could be made.

In 1976 Janet Fourdinier sold Robert's original drawings of his papermaking machine at auction. These were acquired by collector and papermaking historian Leonard Schlosser.  After Schlosser's death the drawings were reproduced in color in their original size and published by Henry Morris of the Bird & Bull Press with an explanatory introduction in Nicolas Louis Robert and his Endless Wire Pamaking Machine with Facsimiles of the Inventor's Original Drawings of the first Paper Machine, Including a chapter on the papermaking historian Leonard B. Schosser (2000).

Clapperton, The Paper-making Machine. Its Invention, Evolution and Development (1967) 15-33.

In 1798 the first official public national industrial exposition, Exposition publique des produits de l'industrie, occured in Paris. It was organized by the Marquis de Avèze and François de Neufchâteau, Minister of the Interior for the French Republic. For this two catalogues were issued. The first issue, printed in Paris by the Imprimérie de la République, consisted of 24 pages.  A second issue, expanded to 30 pages, was issued at Grenoble by J. Allier. Its title page read as follows:

EXPOSITION PUBLIQUE DES PRODUITS DE L’INDUSTRIE. Première exposition publique des produits de l’industrie française. Catalogue des produits industriels qui ont été exposés au Champs-de-Mars pendant les trois derniers jours complémentaires de l’An VI; avec les noms, départments et demeures des artistes et manufacturiers qui ont concouru à l’exposition; suivi du Proces-Verbal du Jury nommé pour l’examen de ces produits. A Grenoble: Chez J. Allier, imp. cour de Chaulnes, [1798].

"It appears from a statement made by the Marquis d'Avèze, that in the year V of the Republic, 1797, that gentleman was requested by the Minister of the Interior to undertake the office of Commissioner to the Manufactures of the Gobelins (tapestries), of Sèvres (china) and of Savonnerie (carpets). On visiting these establishments, the marquis found the workshops deserted; for the artisans had been in a starving condition for two years, while the warehouses were full of the results of their labours, and no commercial enterprise came to relieve the general embarassment. It then occurred to the marquis that if these and other objects of industry of the national manufactures could be collected together in one large exhibition, a stimulous might be given to the native industry, and thus relief be afforded to the suffering workmen. The plan was approved by M. François de Neufchateau, the Minister of the Interior, and the chateau of St. Cloud was appropriated for the purpose.'In a few days the walls of every apartment in the castle were hung with the finest Gobelin tapestry; the floors covered with the superb carpets of the Savonnerie, which long rivalled the carpets of Turkey, and latterly have far surpassed them; the large and beautiful vases, the magnificent groups, and the exquisition pictures of Sèvres china, enriched these saloons, already glowing the chefs d'oeuvre of Gobelins and the Savonnerie. The Chamber of Mars was converted into a receptacle for porcelain, where might be seen the most beautiful services of every kind, vases for flowers,—in short, all the tasteful varieties which are originated by this incomparable manufacture.' The 18th Fructidor was the day fixed for public admission, but previous to that time a number of distinguished persons in Paris and many foreingers visited the Exposition, and made purchases sufficient to afford a distribution to the workmen, whereby some temporary relief was afforded to their necessities. But on the very morning of the 18th, the walls of the city were placarded with the decree of the Directory for the expulsion of the nobility. The chateau of St. Cloud was given into the custody of a comapny of dragoons, the Marquis d'Avèze was in the proscribed list, and thus ended the scheme which had promised so well.

"Early in the following year, however (1798,) on his return from proscription to Paris, the marquis resumed his labours. The palace selected for the Exposition was the Maison d'Orsay, Rue de Varennes, No. 667. The objects collected consisted of rich furniture and marqueterie by Boule, Riessner, and Jacob; clocks and watches by L'Epine and Leroy; porcelain and china from the manufactories of Sèvres, of Angoulême and of Nast; richly bound books; silks of Lyons; historical pictures by Vincent, David, and Suvé; landscapes by Hue and Valenienne, flowers by Vandael, and Van Pankouck; and many other objects of an equally luxurious and aristocratic character; all tending to prove that in banishing the aristocracy from Paris, the Government had banished the chief patrons of French manufacture. The Exposition was exceedingly attractive and successful, and the Government accordingly determined to adopt the idea and carry it out on a grand scale. An admirable opportunity was afforded on the return of Napoleon from the successful termination of the Italian wars. On the same spot in the Champ de Mars on which the army had celebrated the inauguration of the collection of Italian spoils, and only six weeks after that fête, the nation erected the 'Temple of Industry,' around which were arranged sixty porticoes filled with objects of use or of beauty. The Exhibition remained open only during the last three complimentary days of the year VI, of the Republic; but it excited the greatest enthusiasm throughout the country. The merits of the several exhibitors were entrusted to the decison of a jury composed of nine men, distinguished in science and in art; and this plan was found to work so well, that it was continued  in subsequent Expositions, the only change being to increase the number of jurors. The names of some of the manufacturers in the prize list are of European reputation; as for example, that of Breguet, connected with the progress of watch and clock making in France, Lenoir, the inventor and maker of mathematical instruments; Didot and Herhan, who so greatly improved the art of printing; Dilh and Guerhard, whose manufacture of painted china rivalled that of Sèvres, Conté, celebrated as a mechanist and engineer, who first applied machine-ruling to engraving; Clouet and Payen, so well known for their chemicals; and Denys du Luat, among whose cotton yarns were some of the extraordinary finess of No. 110" (Tomlinson, Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts I, ii-iii)

Charles B. Wood III, Fairs & Expositions. Catalogue 144 (2010) No. 6, with illustration of the title page of the second issue.

In 1798 French chemist C. Pajot-des Charmes, formerly Inspector of Manufactures, published l'Art du Blanchiment des toiles fils et cotons de tout genre in Paris, illustrated with 9 plates. The following year English chemist translator, journalist, publisher, scientist, and inventor William Nicholson translated the volume into English as The Art of Beaching Piece-Goods, Cottons, and Threads, of Every Description, Rendered more easy and general by Means of he Oxygenated Muraiatic Acid; with the method of rendering painted or printe dGoods perfectly white or colourless. To which are added, the most certain Methods of bleaching Silk and Wool; and the Discoveries made by the Author in the Art of bleaching Paer. Illustrated with Nine Large Plates, in quarto, representing all the utensils and different manipulations of the bleaching process. An elementary work composed for the use of manufactuers, bleachers, dyers, callico printers, and paper-makers. The translation was published in London in 1799, with an appendix by Nicholson concerning English equivalents to French measuring units, and updates on the bleaching process.

Of primary concern to this database was Pajot des Charmes' discussion of the use of bleach in the production of paper, particularly in the production of recycled paper. This was significant as prior to the introduction of bleaching any recycled paper was typically dark grey from the residual ink.

At this stage in the Industrial Revolution, around 1800, all phases of cloth production were performed by machines. 

"Mechanized cotton spinning powered by steam or water increased the output of a worker by a factor of about 1000. The power loom increased the output of a worker by a factor of over 40 Large gains in productivity also occurred in spinning and weaving of wool and linen, but they were not as great as in cotton."

Around the year 1800 British statesman and scientist Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope aka Charles Mahon, 3rd Earl Stanhope, built the first printing press entirely out of iron. The greatly increased rigidity provided enabled by the iron, rather than wood, construction, further improved the efficiency of the press. However, output increased only modestly, from an average of 200 sheets per hour on a wooden hand press to around 250 sheets per hour on a Stanhope press.

Stanhope did not patent his press, and the date of its origin is unknown. The earliest surviving example is dated 1804. Early models had straight side frames which were prone to breaking due to the immense pressure that could be exerted. These castings were changed in about 1806 to the heavier 'rounded' style. In this form the press continued to be manufactured into the late 19th century.

Moran, Printing Presses, History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times (1973) Chapter 3, "The Stanhope Press," 49-57.

In 1801 Pomeranian-English papermaker Matthias Koops published in London Historical Account of the Substances which Have Been Used to Describe Events, and to Convey Ideas from the Earliest Date to the Invention of Paper. Second edition. Printed on Paper Re-Made from Old Printed and Written Paper. 

In 1800 Koops, whose scholarly and inventive attributes seem to have excelled his business acumen, published the first edition of this serious account of the history of materials used for recording information. To promote his venture to produce paper from materials other than linen rags— The Straw Paper Manufactory— Koops had the first edition printed entirely on yellow paper made from straw. The following year he had part of the second edition, essentially identical to the first, printed on straw, but he also had a portion of the second edition printed on recycled paper, with the exception of the frontispiece image of the papyrus plant, which was printed on straw in both versions of the second edition. The copies printed on recycled paper were the first books ever printed on recycled paper, and may have remained the only books printed on recycled paper for a century or more; I have been unable to find any study of this topic.

The appendix of all copies of Koops's second edition (pp. 259-73) was printed on paper made from wood pulp. This may be the earliest extensive printing on paper made from wood pulp.  Printing on paper made from wood fibers may have been first shown in Jacob Christian Schaäffer's Versuche und Muster ohne all Lumpen oder doch mit eniem geringen Zusatze derselben Papier zu machen (1765-71), and it is probable that Koops got the idea for producing this paper from Schäffer's work.

My copy of the 1801 edition shows that Koops's recycled paper was of excellent quality; his wood pulp paper somewhat less so, since that final gathering of my copy has browned but remains sound.

From the name of Koops's enterprise it is evident that he considered the production of paper from materials other than linen rags to be more commercial than the paper recycling process he invented:

". . . By 1800 Koops had experience of manufacturing from waste paper at Neckinger mill in Bermondsey, and in 1800–01 three patents were granted to him: one for extracting inks from printed and written paper before pulping, and the other two for making paper fit for printing from straw, hay, thistles, waste, and refuse of hemp and flax. In 1800 his Historical Account of the Substances which have been Used to Describe Events was printed on straw paper.

"Having proved the possibility of making good paper from such materials, Koops set up a company, the Straw Paper Manufactory, raised over £70,000 by issue of shares, and in 1801 erected a paper-making mill at Millbank in Westminster. Contractors for the machinery included John Rennie, the engineer, and the firm of Boulton and Watt. This paper mill was easily the largest in the country. The enterprise, however, was over-ambitious and under-capitalized. Koops himself was the principal shareholder in the venture and on the strength of this offered to satisfy his creditors. His failure to discharge his bankruptcy by 1802 compelled Koops's creditors to issue a writ, inter alia, for seizure of the Straw Paper Manufactory's assets, and in the end its proprietors could not keep the enterprise solvent. The Millbank paper mill and its equipment were eventually offered for sale by auction in October 1804, thereby ending the possibility of England challenging the European paper industry by using more easily available materials for making paper" (Oxford DNB).

On June 20, 1801 German actor, playwright, and inventor Alois Senefelder received British patent no. 2518 for "A New Method and Process of performing the Various Branches of the Art of Printing on Paper, Linen, Cotton, Woollen and other Articles." This patent, with 18 pages of text and 9 figures on a large folding plate, represented Senefelder's earliest technical description of the process of lithography. 

It may be worthy of note that Senefelder foresaw the wide range of applications of his process beyond strictly printing on paper.

Senefelder's patent was first printed in 1856. Prior to this time English patents were recorded only on the Patent Rolls and were not published in print until the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1852 proposed that an Office of the Commissioners of Patents be set up. Under its first Superintendent of Specifications, Bennet Woodcroft, the Office published newly deposited specifications, and also all earlier patents beginning in 1617.

Twyman, Lithography 1800-1850 (1970) 26-27, 257.

In 1803 Joseph-Marie Jacquard of Lyon received a patent for the automatic loom, which he invented in 1801. Jacquard's loom used punched cards to store patterns, and reduced strenuous manual labor.

In 1806 Jacquard's loom was declared public property, and Jacquard received a pension. However, he was forced to flee from Lyon because of the anger of the weavers, who feared they would lose their jobs to the new technology. Jacquard persevered, and by the time of his death there were thirty thousand Jacquard looms installed in Lyon alone.

The Jacquard loom did no computation, and was not a digital device. However, it is considered an important conceptual step in the history of computing because the Jacquard method of storing information in punched cards, and weaving a pattern by following the series of instructions recorded in a train of punched cards, was used by Charles Babbage in his plans for data and program input, and data output and storage in his general purpose programmable computer, the Analytical Engine. Trains of Jacquard cards were programs in the modern sense of computer programs, though the word "program" did not have that meaning until after the development of electronic computers after World War II.

In 1804 English inventors Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier bought the patents for the papermaking machine invented five years earlier in France by Louis-Nicolas Robert.

The Fourdriniers hired English engineer and manufacturer, Bryan Donkin, to make modifications to the Robert design.  On August 14, 1807 Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier and John Gamble were granted a new British patent  for "Prolonging the Term of Certain Letters Patent assigned to Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier for the Invention of making Paper by means of Machines." 

". . .of the early pioneers who invented, developed, and financed the machine through the difficult years of its evolution, Louis Robert, Henry Fourdrinier, Didot St. Leger and Gamble, all died in comparative poverty. Robert died at 66 while managing a small school at Vernouillet, on the 28th August, 1828, leaving a wife and six children. Didot, who had returned to France, died in 1829 near the same village; and Henry Fourdrinier died on the 9th September, 1854, at the age of 88, . . . near Rugeley. John Gamble was still living in 1857, and there does not appear to be any authentic date of his death. These four men, who where so intimately connected with, and who gave so much of their lives and fortunes to, the development of the Fourdrinier machine, lived to see many successful paper-mills in which hundreds of paper-making machines were operating, from which they they themselves werre able to get nothing at all. The Bryan Donkin Company alone had built 197 paper-making machines before Henry Fourdrinier died, and by that time many other engineering firms were also building this type of machine. The Fourdrinier firm, of which Henry Fourdrinier was the head, lost at least £60,000 in the first ten years of the development of the machine, and became bankrupt in the process. Leger Didot lost his paper-mill and his business. Gamble lost his paper-mill at St. Neots to Matthew Towgood; and Robert was left completely out of it by everybody, and eventually got nothing but a statue and memorial many years after he died" (Clapperton, The Paper-making Machine. Its Invention, Evolution and Development  [1967] quote 12-3, see also 34-44).

In 1806 English inventor, Ralph Wedgwood of Etruria in Staffordshire, cousin and business partner of potter and industrialist Josiah Wedgwood, received a patent for the earliest form of carbon paper. This invention appears to have been a great success in that it may have earned £10,000 in profit within the first seven years of the patent.

In 1807 English papermaker Thomas Cobb produced a machine for mechanizing the papermaking process.

"This machine consisted of the usual vat, or chest, and breast-box with a delivery-slice, and a conveyer band on which the moulds were placed. This conveyer band was worked by hand, and the mould stayed under the delivery-slice long enough to get a supply of stuff, and was then passed on. In the orignal model the mould was then taken off by hand and couched onto a pile, as in ordinary hand-made paper-making. Subsequently, however, Cobb added another conveyer, onto which the moulds passed, and when they reached the end of the second conveyer they came under a couch-roll, round which was travelling an endless felt. As the moulds passed this roll, the sheet was couched off on the felt and taken up and through two press-rolls, which squeezed the paper sufficiently dry for it to be handled. Thomas Cobb persisted for a good many years with this machine, patented several improvements to it in 1812, by when had got it very much more mechanized, and it was quite an elaborate machine" (Clapperton, The Paper-making machine. Its Invention, Evolution, and Development [1967] 59-60).

Cobb's British patent No. 3580 for "Certain Further Improvements in the Art of Making Paper in Separate Sheets" was distinctive in that it described a papermaking machine which used mechanical moulds on which one sheet was made at a time. The machine was completely automatic; no handling of the sheet was necessary until it was pressed and ready to be air-dried. 

English engineer Sir George Cayley published a three-part paper, "On Aerial Navigation," In the Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts, 24 (1809) 164-174; 25 (1810) 81-87, 161-173, with single engraved plates in Vol. 24 and in Vol. 25 relating to the paper. The papers were published in issue numbers 108, 112, and 113.

Cayley founded the science of aerodynamics and is generally credited with the invention of the airplane. He has also been called the world's first aeronautical engineer.  Cayley discovered and identified the four aerodynamic forces of flight—weight, lift, drag and thrust— and in 1799 took the crucial step of separating the system of thrust from the system of lift. This enabled him to break away from the centuries-old preoccupation with flapping-wing machines (ornithopters), and to conceive and design a fixed-wing machine with cruciform tail-unit, propelled by paddles— the first modern-configuration airplane. In 1804 he flew the first of his successful model fixed-wing gliders and became the first to explore the aerodynamical possibilities of a whirling arm.

Cayley's researches first appeared in print in "On Aerial Navigation," which includes his classic pronouncement that "the whole problem [of aerodynamics] is confined within these limits, viz. to make a surface support a given weight by the application of power to the resistance of air."

Gibbs-Smith, Invention of the Aeroplane 1799-1909 (1966) 5-9. Hodgson, The History of Aeronautics in Great Britain. . . (1924) 345-349. Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 263. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 423.

In July 1809 English inventor John Dickinson of Aspley, Hertfordshire, patented the cylinder-mould papermaking machine, receiving British patent No. 3191 for "Certain Improvements on my former Patent Machinery for Cutting and Placing Ppaer, and also certain Machinery for the Manufacture of Paper by a new Method." Dickinson's concept was the first to allow for commercially viable machine production of paper, and of the early inventors in papermaking, Dickinson was the only man in England to a develop a business that remained financially successful for generations.

Dickinson's "process consisted of a perforated cylinder of metal, with a closely fitting cover of finely woven wire, which revolved in a vat of wood pulp. The water from the vat was carried off through the axis of the cylinder, leaving the fibres of the wood pulp clinging to the surface of the wire. An endless web of felt passed through what was known as a 'couching roller' lying upon the cylinder drew off the layer of pulp which when dried became paper" (Wikipedia article on John Dickinson, accessed 05-19-2012).

Clapperton, The Paper-making Machine. Its Invention, Evolution and Development (1967) 54-77.

In 1810 confectioner Nicholas Appert published in Paris L'art de conserver, pendant plsieurs années, toutes les substances animales et végétales. . . . In this small book Appert described the first workable process for canning foods, laying the foundation of the food-processing industry. Appert's method, which he began working on in 1795, involved heating food and sealing it hermetically in specially made glass jars. By providing the first reliable way to preserve many types of prepared foods for extended periods of time, Appert also developed a new way of furnishing potable, nourishing and unspoiled food to armies in the field. 

In 1800 Napoleon, who is widely quoted, accurately or not, as saying, "An army marches on its stomach," offered an award of 12,000 francs to anyone who could devise a practical method for food preservation for armies on the march. The award went to Appert, but since the method was considered to be of strategic importance for Napoleon's military campaigns, Appert was not allowed to publish it until 1810.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) No. 59.

Printer, bookseller and inventor Friedrich Koenig conducted the first test of his steam-driven platen press, printing 3000 copies of sheet H (pp. 113-128) of The New Annual Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Literature for the Year 1810 at Richard Taylor & Co. Printers in Shoe Lane, London. This was the first printing done by the first printing press not powered by hand, and, at the rate of 800 sheets per hour, it achieved more than double the speed possible with an iron hand press, such as the Stanhope press.

However, comparing the press work on sheet H with the sheets in the rest of the complete volume of the Register for 1810 it is evident that the printing of this experimental sheet is inferior.

Koenig, a native of Suhl, Germany, had designed a power-driven device known as the Suhl press around the year 1803; however, whether an actual machine was built is unknown. Finding no interest in his invention, Koenig travelled to London where he was introduced to Thomas Bensley, a printer interested in innovative technology. Bensley brought in two further printers, George Woodfall and Richard Taylor, to help finance the development of Koenig's powered press.

Koenig received British patent 3321 on March 29, 1810 for "A Method of Printing by Means of Machinery," describing his powered platen press. 

"The inking apparatus consisted of several cylinders vertically arranged, above which was  an ink-box, through a slight in which the ink was forced by a piston to fall on the cylinders, by which it was distributed. These cylinders were perforated brass tubes, through the axles of which, also perforated, steam or water was introduced to moisten the felt or leather covering. Koenig and Bauer, unlike Nicholson, gave detailed detailed specifications of the 'mill work' which carried the carriage backward and forward and depressed the platen. This operation was accomplished by a compound lever causing a screw to make a quarter of a revolution. The tympan was raised and thrown back, as the carriage left the platen, by a chain attached to the end, while a bar depressed it into position again as the carriage returned. The frisket, instead of being hinged to the free end of the tympan—as in the hand press—sprang up by the action of counterweights the moment the tympan was thrown back, thus released the sheet of paper, which was changed by hand. The press is said to have worked at the rate of 800 impressions an hour—a great advance on the hand press—but it was really a dead-end; it could advance no further technically, and the inking apparatus was considered unsatisfactory" (Moran, Printing Presses, History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times [1973] 105).

On October 30, 1811 printer and inventor Friedrich Koenig received British patent No. 3496 for "Further Improvements on my Method of Printing by Means of Machinery," describing the first cylinder flat-bed press.

"This steam-driven machine, revolutionary though it was, still incorporated vestiges of the hand press, as certain developments necessary to transform the printing press completely had not yet taken place. The forme no longer made a simple movement under a platen, rather the bed on which it was fastened received a continual motion by means of a double rack—for every sheet it moved to and fro.

"The platen was discarded in favour of a 'pressing cylinder,', which was completely novel. Koenig, writing later in The Times of 8 December 1814, explained the difference between the earlier cylinders and his invention: 'Impressions produced by means of cylinders, which had likewise been already attempted by others, without the desired effect, were again tried by me upon a new plan, namely, to place the sheet round the cylinder, thereby making it, as it were, part of the periphery.' Koenig's machine was, therefore not a mangle, in which a sheet is rolled and pressed, which was the essence of earlier ideas, and of some yet to come, but an ingenious device for bringing the sheet of paper rapidly to the point of impression.

"In the absence of grippers, a continuous motion to Koenig's cylinder would not have allowed the feeding of sheets, so there hd to be an intermitten or stop motion. The cyhlinder was therefore divided into three parts, which were covered with cloth and provided with points in the manner of tympan on a hand press' and iron frames, which continued to bear the name of 'friskets', were attached to hold the sheets of paper. The surface of the cylinder between the 'tympans' was cut away to allow the forme to pass freely under it on its return. The cylinder made one-third of a revolution for each impression and then stopped. The sequence was as follows: the uppermost frisket seized a sheet of paper and moved into the next position; the sheet formerly in that position came into contact with the forme and was printed; the third segment moved to the upper position.

"Composition rollers were in their infancy, and at this point Koenig utilized once again leather-covered rollers, which were not very efficient, and it was also difficult to supply them with an even flow of ink. The ink-box consisted of a vertical cylinder with a hole at the base, about half an inch in diameter, and was fitted with an air-tight piston, which was depressed by a screw which forced the ink out on the rollers. Whatever the drawbacks of this machine, it was set to work at the rate of 800 impressions an hour" ((Moran, Printing Presses, History and Development. . . [1973] 106).

♦ The first ever sheets printed by Koenig's cylinder flat-bed press that were actually issued were sheets G (pp. 81-96) and X (pp. 305-20) of Thomas Clarkson's Memoirs of the Private and Public Life of William Penn, Vol. 1 [1813] printed by Koenig's sponsor, printer Richard Taylor, at his press in Shoe-Lane, London. 

Workers and craftsmen concerned about the loss of jobs due to mechanization in the workplace as a result of the Industrial Revolution founded the Luddite movement. 

"Towards the close of the year 1811, a spirit of riot and insubordination manifested itself in the country of Nottingham, which, in the course of that year, extended to the counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lancashire, Cheshire, and Yorkshire, and in some degree, pervaded all the manufacturing districts of England. The insurgents, who assumed the name of 'LUDDITES,' probably with a view of inspiring their adherents with confidence, the malcontents gave out that they were under the command of one leader, whom they designated by the factitious name of Ned Ludd, or General Ludd, calling themselves Ludds, Ludders, or Luddites. There is no reason, however to believe that there was in truth any one leader. In each district where the disaffection prevailed, the most aspiring man assumed the local superiority, and became the General Ludd of his own district.

"The avowed and immediate object of the Luddites was the destruction of certain articles of machinery, the use of which had superseded or diminished manual labour, in the manufacture of the articles to which they were applied. These disturbances, which had now attracted the attention of parliament, and excited apprehensions of the most alarming nature, first manifested themselves by the destruction of a great number of newly-erected stocking-frames, by small parties of men, principally stocking-weavers, who assembled in various places round the town of Nottingham. The men engaged in the disturbances were at first principally those thrown out of employment by the use of the new machinery, or by their refusal to work at the rate of wages offered by the manufacturers, and they particularly sought the destruction of frames owned those hosiers, or worked by those men who were willing to work at the lower rates. In consequence of the resistance opposed to the outrages of the rioters, in the course of which one of their number was shot, on the 11th of November, at Bullwell, magistrates found it necessary to call in the assistance of a considerable armed force, which was promptly assembled, consisting, at first, principally of local militia and volunteer yeomanry, to whom were added about four hundred special constables. The terror of this force seemed for a time to allay the spirit of insurbordination; but before the end of the month of November, the outrages were renewed, and assumed a more serious systematic character. In several villages, the rioters not only destroyed the frames, but they levied contributions for subsistence, which rapidly increased their number, and enlarged their sphere of action.

"A considerable regular military force was now went to Nottingham, and in January 1812, two of the most experienced police magistrates were dispatatched from London to that place for the purpose of assisting the local authorities in their endeavours to restore tranquillity in the disturbed districts. The systematic combination with which the outrages were conducted, the terror which they inspired, and the disposition of many of the lower orders to favour, rather than to oppose them, made it very difficult  to discover the offenders, or to obtain evidence to convict those who were apprehended. Some, however, were afterwards proceeded against at the spring assizes of 1812, at Nottingham, and seven persons, convicted of different offences connected with the riots, were sentenced to transportation. In the meantime, acts were passed by the legistature for establishing a police in the disturbed districts, upon the ancient system of watch and war, and for making the destruction of stocking-frames a capital crime, punishable by death.

"Early in the year, the spirit of riot and distrubance spread itself into Cheshire and Lancashire; at Tentwistle, in the former county, the cotton machinery in Mr. Rhodes's mill was totally destroyed; and at Stockport, the house of Mr. Goodwin was set on fire on the 14th of April, and his steam-looms destroyed. On the 20th of the same month, the manufactory of Messrs. Daniel Burton and Sons, situated at Middleton, six miles from Manchester, was attached by a mob, consisting of several thousand persons, and although the rioters were repulsed, and four of their number killed by the military force assembled to protect the works, a second attack was made on the following day, when Mr. Emanuel Burton's dewelling-house was set on fire, and destroyed. About the same time riots took place in Manchester, of which the alleged cause was the high price of provisions. At West Houghton, near Bulton-le-moors, the rioters taking advantage of the absence of the military, assailed the large manufactur of Messrs. Wroe and Duncuft, and after having forced the doors, and set fire to the mill and machinery, dispersed before the soldiers could be assembled

"Symptoms of the same lawless disposition appeared at Newcastle-under-line, Wigan, Warrington, and Eccles; and the contagion had spread to Carlisle, and into Yorkshire. In Nottinghamshire, the machinery obnoxious to the rioters was wide weaving frames; in Lancashire, looms wrought by steam; and in Yorkshire, gig-mills, or machinery used in the shearing of woollen cloth—all inventions of modern date, and each of them calculated to supersede or diminish the demand for manual labour. . . .

"The causes alleged for these alarming proceedings were generally the want of employment for the working manufacturers—a want, however, which was the least felt in some of the places where the disorders were the most prevalent; another of the alleged causes was the application of machinery to supply the place of labour; and a third, the high price of provisions. An opinion also prevailed at the time, that the views of some of the persons engaged in these excesses extended to revolutionary measures, and contemplated the overthrow of the government; but his opinion seems to have been supported by no satisfactory evidence; and it is admited on all hands, that the leaders of the riots, although possessed of considerable influence, were all of the labouring classes.

"That societies existed for forwarding the objects of the disaffected was clearly manifest, all which societies were directed by a secret committee, which might be considered as the great mover of the whole machine; and it was established by the various information received from different parts of the country, that these societies were governened by their respective secret committees; that delegates and messengers were continually dispatched from place to place for the purpose of concerting plans and conveying information; * [*"A small weekly contribution paid by every member of these combinations formed a fund, by which the delegates and messengers were wholly or in part supported, according to the nature and extent of their services. This fund there is reason to suppose was also applied to the support of the imprisoned Luddites; and its application in this way, combined with the nature of the oath, may in some degree account for the paucity of information collected from them while in prison, and even in the prospect of death. In fact, the made no disclosures. All their secrets, whether they related to the organization of their societies, the names of their leaders, or their depots of arms, died with them."] that an illegal oath of the most atrocious kind was extensively administered;* [*"Several copies of the oath were discovered, but the following appears to be the correct version: OATH. 'I. A. B., of my own voluntary will, do declare, and solemnly swear, that I never will reveal to any person or persons under the canopy of heaven, the names of the persons, who compose this secret committee, their proceedings, meetings, places of abode, dress, features, complexion, or anything else that might lead to a discovery of the same, either by word, deed, or sign, under the penalty of being sent out of the world by the first brother who shall meet me, and my name and character blotted out of existence, and never to be remembered but with contempt and abhorrence; and I further now do swear, that I will use my best endeavours to punish by death any traitor or traitors, should any rise up among us, wherever I can find him or them, and though he should fly to the verge of nature, I will pursue him with unceasing vengeance. So help me God, and bless me to keep this my oath inviolable."] that secret signs were arranged, by which the persons engaged these conspiracies were known to each other. The military organization, carried on by persons enaged in these societies, had also prceeded to an alarming length; in some parts of the country they assembled in large numbers, chiefly by night; upon heaths or commons, taking the usual precaution of paroles and counter-signs. The muster-rolls were called over by numbers, not names; they were directed by leaders, sometimes in disguise; they placed sentries to give alarm at the approach of any person, whom they might suspect of an intention to interrupt or give information opf their proceedings; and they dispersed instantly at the firing of a gun or other signal agreed upon, and so dispersed to avoid detection . . . . (An Historical Account of the Luddites of 1811, 1812, and 1813, with Report of their Trials at York Castle, from the 2nd to the 12th of January, 1813, before Sir Alexander Thompson and Sir Simon le Blanc, Knights, Judges of the Special Commission [1862] 7-12).

In January 1813 64 persons were tried for crimes tied to the Luddite movement; 14 were executed.  The proceedings of the trial were published as Report of Proceedings under Commissions of Oyer & Terminer and Gaol Delivery for County of York, Held at the Castle of York, before Sir Alexander Thomson, Knight and Sir Simon Le Blanc, Knight, from the 2nd to the 12th January 1813.  From the shorthand notes of Mr. Gurney. To which are subjoined Two Proclamations, Issued in consequence of the Result of those Proceedings. Though this edition is undated, because of the sensational nature of the trial, the presumption is that it would have been published during 1813.

In 1812 French inventor Saint-Leger Didot (Leger Didot) then living in England, was granted British patent No. 3568 for "Certain other Improvements upon the Said Machines for the Making of both Woven and Laid Paper." In 1806 Henry Fourdrinier had obtained patent No. 2951 for a method of making a machine for manufacturing paper of an indefinite length, laid and wove, with separate moulds.  However, Fourdrinier's patent for the endless chain-mould machine  did not accompany his specification with drawings and did not describe the machine in much detail. Thus Didot and his associates, including Fourdrinier, thought it appropriate to patent a more detailed specification at this time.

Clapperton, The Paper-making Machine. Its Invention, Evolution and Development (1967) 54-58. 

In 1813 George E. Clymer, mechanic and inventor of Philadelphia, invented the Columbian Press.  Inspired to some extent by the Stanhope Press, the Columbian Press was designed to allow a whole newspaper page to be printed in a single pull. The press worked by a lever system, similar to that of the Stanhope press. Because Clymer found a limited market for his press in America, in 1817 he moved to England to compete with the Stanhope Press. In 1817 Clymer received British patent No. 4174 for "Certain Improvements in Printing Presses." His specification described and illustrated the Columbian Press.

Reflecting the slow transition from handpress to mechanized printing in many aspects of the printing trades, Clymer's Columbian Press was manufactured and sold for over a century.  Some historians consider it the first great American contribution to printing technology.

In 1813 engineer Bryan Donkin of Bermondsey, Surrey, and printer (later: Whig journalist, musician, and miscellaneous writer) Richard Mackenzie Bacon of Norwich received British patent No. 3757 for "Certain Improvements in the Implements or Apparatus Emplying in Printing, whether from Types, from Blocks, or from Plates." 

"The first [rotary press] to be built, that of Richard Bacon and Bryan Donkin, patented in 1813, was fed by sheets of paper and avoided the problem of fitting type to cylindrical surfaces. The type was still held in flat formes, which were fixed on four sides of a prism, which was square in section. Its axis revolved by the action of a winch, and the type was printed on to the paper by means of a second roller, called by the old name of the platen, its surface being made up of four segments of cylinders, and its circumference when turned round always applying to a type surface. Ink was applied by a large composition cylinder above the prism, which received  ink from a distribution roller supplied from a third metal roller. Bacon and Donkin were thus pioneers in the use of the composition roller and the ink duct. The whole mechanism was quite small, capable standing upon an ordinary writing-table, but it was very complicated and required great accuracy of operation. An exhibition was held in Donkin's factory, and claims were made that the machine would perform the work of eight hand presses. Hansard states that he showed the inventor that work on six of his presses would have required four of the new machines to execute it. The only one of Bacon and Donkin's machines known to Hansard was installed at the University Press, Cambridge, where (in 1825) it 'rests in peace, as not being found in any degree useful" (Moran, Printing Presses. History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times [1973] 175-76).

On November 29, 1814 The Times of London newspaper published its first issue printed on a double steam-driven Koenig cylinder press.

The output of the new machine was initially 1,100 sheets an hour—more than four times higher than the manually operated press previously used by the newspaper.

Koenig's third British patent, no. 3725, for "Certain Additional Improvements in my Method of Printing by Means of Machinery," issued on July 23, 1813

"contained improvements on that of 1811 and served as the basis of the double machine. For this a second cylinder was added by which the return movment of the bed was made productive. While the printer cylinders were divided into three parts as before, each being covered with cloth with points attached, the 'friskets' were abolished in favour of endless tapes conducted over rolls. The ink system underwent modifcation to the demands of double printing. The inking rollers were set transversely across the forme with their axles meeting on one side. In the patent the inking rollers were still described as covered in skin, but Koenig learned of the superiority of composition rollers during the year, otherwise The Times machine could not have worked as effectively as it did" (Moran, Printing Presses, History and Development [1973] 107).

Frederick Koenig's last English patent, No. 3868, "Certain further improvements on my method of printing by means of machinery," was the basis of an improved cylinder machine and of a perfecting machine— one which would print on both sides of a sheet of paper.

"The perfecting machine was a combination of two in one, in which the forme, printing cylinder and inking device were duplicated but which had a single feeding apparatus in the shape of an endless web on which the sheet of paper was fed. A registering apparatus was fixed between the two printing cylinders, which were covered only partially to the size of a sheet so that the forme could return freely under the uncovered portion. The paper was carried between two rows of tapes round the first cylinder, to be printed on one side, and was then taken off the cylinder, laid on the register device, which sustained it until it arrived in a vertical position over the second cylinder, to be moved around it and printed on the second side. The sheet was turned by the use of an S-shaped course, and after being printed on both sides was conducted to a board in the middle of the machine. The first machine of this sort was finished in Febuary 1816, and was installed in Bensley's office, where, steam-driven, it was used for book printing. It produced 900 to 1,000 perfected sheets an hour. The second edition of Dr. J. Elliotson's translation of Blumenbach's Institutions of Physiology was, in consequence, the first complete book to be printed by a machine" (Moran, Printing Presses, History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times [1973] 109-110).

In 1816 printing engineer Friedrich Koenig added a perfector to The Times of London steam power press, allowing the press to print almost as many copies on both sides of the sheet on one pass through the press as had been previously printed on one side only. By 1818 Koenig's steam power press achieved an output of 2400 impressions per hour.

In 1816 printing engineer Edward Cowper of London received British patent No. 3974 for "A Method of Printing Paper for Paper Hanging, and other Purposes."  

"Cowper . . .  recognized, like Nicholson, the advantages of a curved printing surface mounted on a  continously revolving cylinder. The difficulty was to provide this surface. Cowper, who would have been aware of the Bacon and Donkin project, must have realized that single types, however shaped or arranged, had very serious disadvantages, and that the solid stereotype plate offered much better prospects of success if they could be curved.

"The only method of casting stereotypes known at that time was the plaster process, which produced a flat plate. Cowper's patent described how these plates were to be heated and then passed between two rollers to curve them. There was, of course, the risk of breaking the plates during the operation, but the method worked; it was used for printing £1 notes at the Bank of England, where these machines were installed for the purpose" (Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of the Exhibitions and the British Museum and Earl's Court  16-27 July 1963 [1963] No. 408). 

Two years later, in 1818 Cowper received British patent No. 4194 for "Certain Improvements in Printing Presses or Machines Used for Printing."  This described a method of printing on both sides of sheet simultaneously, also called a perfecting press.

"In January 1818 Cowper patented his ink-distributing table, which was attached to the forme, and indentations at its sides gave an endwise motion to two distributing rollers in a movable carriage held on four bearings, and with two small friction pulleys attached. The ink was conveyed by a vibrating roller which was alternately in contact with the table and with a 'ductor or doctor' roller turning in an ink trough. The table and forme both passed under the inking rollers, which received ink from the table and inked the forme as it passed under them. In Cowper's specification the rollers are described as 'covered with leather, felt, composition (treacle and glue) &c.', an indication that he was still gradually working his way towards composition rollers at the time.

"Another Cowper improvement [included in the patent] concerned the method of conveying the sheet of paper from one cylinder to another in a perfecting machine by the construction of two subsidiary 'carrying drums' between the impression cylinders, on which the sheet was carried by means of two sets of endless strings, 'each composed of two or more strings kept tight by weights or springs', the printing cylinders and carrying drums being connected by means of toothed wheels" (Moran, Printing Presses. History & Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times [1973] 127).

German inventor Karl Drais invented the Laufmaschine ("running machine"), later called the velocipede, draisine (English) or "draisienne" (French), or nick-named, dandy horse. This incorporated the two-wheeler principle that is basic to the bicycle and motorcycle and represented the beginning of mechanized personal transportation.  Drais took his first recorded ride on the Laufmachine from Mannheim to Rheinau, now a suburb of Mannheim on June 12, 1817.

"The dandy-horse was a two-wheeled vehicle, with both wheels in-line, propelled by the rider pushing along the ground with the feet as in regular walking or running. The front wheel and handlebar assembly was pivoted to allow steering.

"Several manufacturers in France and England made their own dandy-horses during its brief popularity in the summer of 1819 -- most notably, Denis Johnson of London, who used an elegantly curved wooden frame which allowed the use of larger wheels. Riders preferred to operate their vehicles on the smooth pavements instead of the rough roads, but their interactions with pedestrians caused many municipalities to enact laws prohibiting their use. A further drawback of this device was that it had to be made to measure, manufactured to conform with the height and the stride of its rider, as none of its manufacturers are known to have built an adjustable version. After its brief moment in the limelight, the dandy-horse quickly faded into oblivion.

"However, in the 1860s in France, the vélocipède bicycle was created by attaching rotary cranks and pedals to the front-wheel hub of a dandy-horse" (Wikipedia article on Dandy horse, accessed 04-25-2009).

In 1818 printer and publisher Cornelius S. Van Winkle of New York published The Printer's Guide; or, an Introduction to the Art of Printing: Including an Essay on Punctuation and Remarks on Orthography. This work, published in small 8vo format, was the first printer's manual written by an American printer and published in the United States.  Van Winkle characterized himself on the title page as "Printer to the University of New-York."

This work was the first printing manual that described American presses, specimens of American typefounders, price lists for printing, and information on supplies.  "While some parts of the manual, as Wroth has demonstrated, derive from Stower, it was prepared by an American printer for the use of American printers. In one sense, American printing may be said to have come of age with the publication of Van Winkle" (Silver, The American Printer, 1797-1825 [1967] 96).

In 1970 The Lakeside Press, R.R. Donnelley & Sons issued an excellent facsimile edition of this manual, even reproducing the foxing and color of the original paper.  From these we learn that the first edition was issued with two separate catalogues of type specimens bound at the end:  A Specimen of Printing Types from the Foundry of E. White, and A Specimen of Printing Types Cast at D. & G. Bruce's Foundry.

Thanks to John Hightower for pointing out in January 2012 that a digital version of the first edition of van Winkle's book is available at openlibrary.org. Google books has a digital version of the 1836 printing by White & Hagar of New York, characterized as "with additions and alterations."

The workshop of inventor James Watt, containing all the furniture, the floorboards and door, window and skylight, and 8,4320 objects, essentially as they were left upon Watt's death in 1819, are preserved in the Science Museum, London.

"The workshop was in the attic of Watt's home, Heathfield, outside Birmingham. Watt spent a lot of time in the workshop after his retirement in 1800, partly to escape his second wife. His main project in the workshop was copying sculpture, for which he developed the two large copy-mills which dominate the workshop space. Upon Watt's death the room was sealed and, bar a few VIP visits by intrigued VIP visitors in the 1860s, left untouched until 1924. In that year, Heathfield faced demolition, and the room was dismantled and carefully shipped to the Science Museum" (Science Museum website, accessed 06-03-2011).

"It [Watt's workshop] remained on display for visitors for many years, but was walled-off when the gallery it was housed in closed. The workshop remained intact, and preserved, and in March 2011 was again put on public display as part of a new permanent Science Museum exhibition, 'James Watt and our world' "(Wikipedia article on James Watt, accessed 06-03-2011).

In 1820 Charles Xavier Thomas of Alsace, an entrepreneur in the insurance industry, invented the arithmometer, the first commercially produced adding machine, presumably to speed up and make more accurate, the enormous amount of daily computation insurance companies required. Remarkably, according to the Wikipedia, Thomas received almost immediate acknowledgement for this invention, as he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor only one year later, in 1821.  At this time he changed his name to Charles Xavier Thomas, de Colmar, later abbreviated to Thomas de Colmar.

"Initially Thomas spent all of his time and energy on his insurance business, therefore there is a hiatus of more than thirty years in between the first model of the Arithmometer introduced in 1820 and its true commercialization in 1852. By the time of his death in 1870, his manufacturing facility had built around 1,000 Arithmometers, making it the first mass produced mechanical calculator in the world, and at the time, the only mechanical calculator reliable and dependable enough to be used in places like government agencies, banks, insurance companies and observatories just to name a few. The manufacturing of the Arithmometer went on for another 40 years until around 1914" (Wikipedia article on Charles Xavier Thomas, accessed 10-10-2011).

The success of the Arithmometer, which to a certain extent paralleled Thomas's success in the insurance industry, was, of course, in complete contrast to the problems that Charles Babbage faced with producing and gaining any acceptance for his vastly more sophisticated, complex, ambitious and expensive calculating engines during roughly the same time frame. Thomas, of course, produced an affordable product that succeeded in speeding up basic arithmetical operations essential to the insurance industry while Babbage's scientific and engineering goals initially of making mathematical tables more accurate, and later, of automating mathematical operations in general, did not attempt to meet a recognized industrial demand. 

"The [Arithmometer] mechanism has three parts, concerned with setting, counting, and recording respectively. Any number up to 999,999 may be set by moving the pointers to the numbers 0 to 9 engraved next to the six slots on the fixed cover plate. The movement of any of these pointers slides a small pinion with ten teeth along a square axle, underneath and to the left of which is a Leibniz stepped wheel.  

"The Leibniz wheel, a cylinder having nine teeth of increasing length, is driven from the main shaft by means of a bevel wheel, and the small pinion is thus rotated by as many teeth as the cylinder bears in the plane corresponding to the digit set. This amount of rotation is transferred through one of a pair of bevel wheels, carried on a sleeve on the same axis, to the ‘results’ figure wheel on the back row on the hinged plate. This plate also carried the figure wheel recording the number of turns of the driving crank for each position of the hinged plate. The pair of bevel wheels is placed in proper gear by setting a lever at the top left-hand cover to either "Addition and Multiplication" or "Subtraction and Division." The ‘results’ figure wheel is thereby rotated anti-clockwise or clockwise respectively.  

"Use. Multiplying 2432 by 598 may be performed as follows: Lift the hinged plate, turn and release the two milled knobs to bring all the figure wheels to show zero; lower the hinged plate in its position to the extreme left; set the number 2432 on the four slots on the fixed plate; set the lever on the left to "multiplication" and turn the handle eight times; lift the hinged plate, slide it one step to the right, and lower it into position; turn the handle nine times; step the plate one point to the right again and the turn the handle five times. The product 1,454,336 will then appear on the top row, and the multiplier 598 on the next row of figures" (From Gordon Bell's website, accessed 10-12-2011).

About this time the quantity of paper made by machine exceeded the quantity of paper made by hand. This was roughly twenty years after papermaking machinery was developed in England.

In 1822 American inventor William Church received British patent no. 4664 for "An Improved Apparatus for Printing." This patent which was illustrated with 8 large folding engineering drawings consisted of three parts: "first, a machine for casting the printing types, and also of arrangem them in boxes of letters, so that the types of the same denomination are placed side by side ranges, ready to be transferred to the composing machinery. The second part of the apparatus consists of a machine, by which the individual types are selected and composed into words and sentences. The third part of the aparatus is a press for printing and delivering the sheets into a pile" (Church's patent p. 2).

Church's composing machine was the first patented machine for type composition.

"While there is no evidence that a composing machine was built, the design included features which were embodied in later inventions. The type was stored in inclined channels, from which it was relased by the operation of a keyboard. The released type fell into a horizontal race where it was assembled by rocking arms into a continous line. Like other early composing machines, Church's did not provide for justification of the lines, leaving that to be done by hand. Power was provided by a clock-work mechanism" (Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of an Exhibition at Earl's Court, London, 16-27 July 1963 [1963] No. 462.

Huss, Dr. Church's "Hoax": An Assessment of Dr. William Church's Typographical Inventions in which is enunciated Church's Law (1976).

Though earlier examples of mechanical pencils have survived, in 1822 English engineer and inventor John Isaac Hawkins and English silversmith and inventor Sampson Mordan were the first to patent a metal pencil with an internal mechanism for propelling the graphite (pencil lead) shaft forward during use, as an improvement on the less complex leadholders that merely clutched the pencil lead to hold it into a single position. The two received British Patent No. 4742, "Pencil holders or port crayons; pens for facilitating writing and drawing," published: 20 December 1822. 

"After buying out Hawkins' patent rights, Mordan entered into a business partnership with Gabriel Riddle from 1823 to 1837. The earliest Mordan pencils are thus hallmarked SMGR. After 1837, Sampson Mordan ended the partnership with Riddle and continued to manufacture pencils as "S.MORDAN & CO". His company continued to manufacture pencils and a wide range of silver objects until World War II, when the factory was bombed" (Wikipedia article on Mechanical pencil, accessed 01-03-2013).

"Mordan often made his pencils in whimsical "figural" shapes that resembled animals, Egyptian mummies, or other objects; like his other silverware and goldware, these pencils are now highly collectible" (Wikipedia article on Sampson Mordan, accessed 01-03-2013).

In 1825 stationers and inventors John Phipps and Christopher Phipps of London received British patent No. 5075 for "An Improvement or Improvements in Machinery for Making Paper."  In their specification they described "the employment of a roller the cylinder part of which is formed of 'laid' wire. . . the effect produced by said roller is that of making impressions upon the sheet of paper upon which said roller passes and thus the paper so made has the appearance of 'laid' paper."  Thus, only a few years after machine-made paper was available, paper manufacturers desired to make machine-made paper resemble hand-made or laid paper.

On September 27, 1825 British engineer George Stephenson's Locomotion No. 1 (originally named Active), the first steam engine to carry passengers and freight on a regular basis, hawled its first train on the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR). The S&DR was the first publically subscribed passenger railroad.

"It was 26 miles (40 km) long and was built in north-eastern England between Witton Park and Stockton-on-Tees via Darlington and connected to several collieries near Shildon. Planned to carry both goods and passengers, the line was initially built to connect inland coal mines to Stockton, where coal was to be loaded onto sea-going boats. Much of its route is now served by the Tees Valley Line, operated by Northern Rail. It was also the longest railway at the time" (Wikipedia article on Stockton and Darlington Railway, accessed 02-01-2012).

About the same time as the S&DR opened for business British engineer Thomas Tredgold issued  A Practical Treatise on Rail-Roads and Carriages, Shewing the Principles of Estimating their Strength, Proportions, Expense, and Annual Produce . . . (1825), and British colliery and steam locomotive engineer Nicholas Wood issued A Practical Treatise on Rail-Roads and Interior Communication in General, with Original Experiments, and Tables of the Comparative Value of Canals and Rail-Roads (1825).  These books, both of which were published in London, were the first comprehensive works on railway engineering.

Dibner, Heralds of Science (1980) No. 182.

Mathematician and engineer Charles Babbage published "On a Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery," Philosophical Transactions 111 (1826) 250-65, 4 plates. This was the first publication of Babbage's system of mechanical notation that enabled him to describe the logic and operation of his machines on paper as they would be fabricated in metal. Babbage later stated that "Without the aid of this language I could not have invented the Analytical Engine; nor do I believe that any machinery of equal complexity can ever be contrived without the assistance of that or of some other equivalent language. The Difference Engine No. 2 . . . is entirely described by its aid" (Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher [1864], 104).  

Babbage considered his mechanical notation system to be one of his finest inventions, and thought it should be widely implemented. It was a source of frustration to him that no other machine designer adopted it (probably because no other engineer during Babbage's time attempted to build machines as logically and mechanically complex as Babbage's). More than one hundred years later, in the 1930s, when developments in logic were applied to switching systems in the earliest efforts to develop electromechanical calculators, Claude Shannon demonstrated that Boolean algebra could be applied to the same types of problems for which Babbage had designed his mechanical notation system.  

"While making designs for the Difference Engine, Babbage found great difficulty in ascertaining from ordinary drawings-plans and elevations-the state of rest or motion of individual parts as computation proceeded: that is to say in following in detail succeeding stages of a machine's action. This led him to develop a mechanical notation which provided a systematic method for labeling parts of a machine, classifying each part as fixed or moveable; a formal method for indicating the relative motions of the several parts which was easy to follow; and means for relating notations and drawings so that they might illustrate and explain each other. As the calculating engines developed the notation became a powerful but complex formal tool. Although its scope was much wider than logical systems, the mechanical notation was the most powerful formal method for describing switching systems until Boolean algebra was applied to the problem in the middle of the twentieth century. In its mature form the mechanical notation was to comprise three main components: a systematic method for preparing and labeling complex mechanical drawings; timing diagrams; and logic diagrams, which show the general flow of control" (Hyman, Charles Babbage [1982], 58).

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2001) no. 37.

Printers and inventors Edward Cowper & Augustus Applegath (often misspelled as Applegarth) in London completed the design of a four cylinder steam-powered printing press with capacity of 4,000-5,000 impressions per hour.

In 1829 British engineer George Stephenson's Rocket won the Liverpool and Manchester Railway competition, reaching the yet unheard of speed of 24 mph during the 20 laps of the course. This was due to several new design features. The Rocket was the first locomotive to have a multi-tube boiler - with 25 copper tubes rather than a single flue or twin flue.

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway (L&MR) was founded on May 24, 1823, but faced numerous technical hurdles, including the development of

"Wapping Tunnel beneath Liverpool from the south end of Liverpool Docks to Edge Hill. This was the world's first tunnel to be bored under a metropolis. Following this was a 2-mile (3.2 km)-long-cutting up to 70 feet (21.3 m) deep through rock at Olive Mount, and a nine arch viaduct (each arch of 50 feet (15.2 m) span), over the Sankey Brook valley, around 70 feet (21.3 m) high. Not least was the famous 4.75 miles (7.6 km) crossing of Chat Moss" (Wikipedia article on Liverpool and Manchester Railway, accessed 02-01-2012).

Besides this 64 bridges and viaducts needed to be constructed.  The L&MR was the world's first inter-city passenger railway in which all the trains were timetabled and were hauled for most of the distance solely by steam locomotives. The line opened on September 15, 1830 and ran between the cities of Liverpool and Manchester in North West England. The L&MR was primarily built to provide faster transport of raw materials and finished goods between the Port of Liverpool and mills in Manchester and surrounding towns.

The first steam locomotive ran in the United States.

William Austin Burt of Detroit, Michigan invented an early typewriter, called the Typographer.

The machine that Burt invented was cumbersome and difficult to use. Writing a letter with Burt's "Typographer" took longer than writing by hand.

Working at the Royal Institution in London, Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, the basis for electricity generation.

in 1832 Charles Babbage published On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, the first work on operations research, partially based on data he accumulated in order to build his Difference Engine No. 1. Primary themes of the book were the division of labor and the division of mental labor, to which Babbage devoted chapters 19 and 20. His chapter on the division of mental labor was an analysis of the methods used by de Prony in the production of his celebrated mathematical tables. Babbage had seen de Prony’s manuscript tables in 1819, and around 1820 began planning the Difference Engine No. 1 based on the principles of the division of labor. With this goal, Babbage visited factories throughout England, inspecting every machine and every industrial process. Rather than a study limited to engineering and manufacturing techniques, his book turned out to be an analysis of manufacturing processes within their economic context. Written when manufacturing was undergoing rapid development and radical change, the book represents an original contribution to British economics.  "Adam Smith had never really abandoned the belief, reasonable enough in his day, that agriculture was the principal source of Britain’s wealth; Ricardo’s ideas were focused on corn; Babbage for the first time authoritatively placed the factory in the centre of the stage. The book is at once a hymn to the machine, and analysis of the development of machine-based production in the factory, and a discussion of social relations in industry. . . .

"The Economy of Manufactures established Babbage’s position as a political economist and its influence is well attested, particularly on John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. Babbage’s pioneering discussion of the effect of technical development on the size of industrial organizations was followed by Mill and the prediction of the continuing increase in the size of factories, often cited as one of Marx’s successful economic predictions, in fact derives from Babbage’s analysis. . . . Babbage wrote with many talents: a natural philosopher and mechanical engineer, his knowledge of factory and workshop practice was encyclopaedic; he was well-versed in relevant business practice; and he was without rival as a mathematician among contemporary British political economists (Hyman 1982, 103–4).

On the Economy of Machines and Manufactures was also the first book on operations research, discussing topics like the regulation of power, control of raw materials, division of labor, time studies, the advantage of size in manufacturing, inventory control, and duration and replacement of machinery. On pages 166 and 167 Babbage analyzed the production of his book as an example of the cost of each step in a particular production process, thus also contributing to book history. The work was Babbage’s most complete and professional piece of writing, and the only one of his books that went through four editions during his lifetime. The first edition of On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures was issued in two versions: a large-paper version (222 x 142 mm.), of which a small number were printed for presentation only; and the regular version,  of which three thousand copies were issued. The work was also translated into several languages. Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) No. 42.

In 1839 weaver Michel-Marie Carquillat, working for the firm of Didier, Petit et Cie, in Lyon, France wove in fine silk a Portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard, The image, including caption and Carquillat’s name, taking credit for the weaving, measures 55 x 34 cm.; the full piece of silk including blank margins measures 85 x 66 cm.

This image, of which only about 10 examples are known, was woven on a Jacquard loom using 24,000 Jacquard cards, each of which had over 1000 hole positions. The process of mis en carte, or converting the image details to punched cards for the Jacquard mechanism, for this exceptionally large and detailed image, would have taken several workers many months, as the woven image convincingly portrays superfine elements such as a translucent curtain over glass window panes.

Once all the “programming” was completed, the process of weaving the image with its 24,000 punched cards would have taken more than eight hours, assuming that the weaver was working at the usual Jacquard loom speed of about forty-eight picks per minute, or about 2800 per hour. More than once this woven image was mistaken for an engraved image. The image was produced only to order, most likely in an exceptionally small number of examples. In 2012 the only recorded examples were those in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Science Museum, London, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. The image was the subject of the book by James Essinger entitled, Jacquard's Web. How a Hand Loom led to the Birth of the Information Age (2004).

To Charles Babbage the incredible sophistication of the information processing involved in the mis en carte — what we call programming— of this exceptionally elaborate and beautiful image confirmed the potential of using punched cards for the input, programming, output and storage of information in his design and conception of the first general-purpose programmable computer—the Analytical Engine. The highly aesthetic result also confirmed to Babbage that machines were capable of amazingly complex and subtle processes—processes which might eventually emulate the subtlety of the human mind.

“In June 1836 Babbage opted for punched cards to control the machine [the Analytical Engine]. The principle was openly borrowed from the Jacquard loom, which used a string of punched cards to automatically control the pattern of a weave. In the loom, rods were linked to wire hooks, each of which could lift one of the longitudinal threads strung between the frame. The rods were gathered in a rectangular bundle, and the cards were pressed one at a time against the rod ends. If a hole coincided with a rod, the rod passed through the card and no action was taken. If no hole was present then the card pressed back the rod to activate a hook which lifted the associated thread, allowing the shuttle which carried the cross-thread to pass underneath. The cards were strung together with wire, ribbon or tape hinges, and fan-folded into large stacks to form long sequences. The looms were often massive and the loom operator sat inside the frame, sequencing through the cards one at a time by means of a foot pedal or hand lever. The arrangement of holes on the cards determined the pattern of the weave.

“As well as patterned textiles for ordinary use, the technique was used to produce elaborate and complex images as exhibition pieces. One well-known piece was a shaded portrait of Jacquard seated at table with a small model of his loom. The portrait was woven in fine silk by a firm in Lyon using a Jacquard punched-card loom. . . . Babbage was much taken with the portrait, which is so fine that it is difficult to tell with the naked eye that it is woven rather than engraved. He hung his own copy of the prized portrait in his drawing room and used it to explain his use of the punched cards in his Engine. The delicate shading, crafted shadows and fine resolution of the Jacquard portrait challenged existing notions that machines were incapable of subtlety. Gradations of shading were surely a matter of artistic taste rather than the province of machinery, and the portrait blurred the clear lines between industrial production and the arts. Just as the completed section of the Difference Engine played its role in reconciling science and religion through Babbage’s theory of miracles, the portrait played its part in inviting acceptance for the products of industry in a culture in which aesthetics was regarded as the rightful domain of manual craft and art” (Swade, The Cogwheel Brain. Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer [2000] 107-8).

Upon learning about the exhibition of Daguerréotypes at the Académie des Sciences on January 7, 1839, English inventor William Henry Fox Talbot hastily read a paper on January 31 to the Royal Society entitled Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Process by which Natural Objects may be made to Delineate Themselves with the Aid of the Artist's Pencil.

This paper, which Talbot had printed and distributed to friends as a pamphlet in February, 1839, was the first separate publication on photography.  In it Talbot suggested that fixed negatives might be used to produce multiple positive images.

In 1835 Talbot had developed a method of fixing negative images on paper previously made light-sensitive by successive coats of sodium chloride and silver nitrate, thus becoming the first to produce permanent paper negatives. 

Gernsheim, The History of Photography (1969) Ch. 7, Gernsheim, Incunabula of British Photographic Literature (1984) no. 646. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 2049.

The graphic reproduction process which came to be called anastatic printing first began to be known in October 1841 when the proprietors of the London journal, the Athenaeum received from a correspondent in Berlin a reprint of 4 pages of their issue of September 25, containing some woodcut illustrations. This was so perfect a facsimile that they immediately inquired as to how it had been done, and they learned that it had been made by a secret new process.  In their issue No. 736 of December 4, 1841 the Athenaeum published a notice on p. 932 entitled "Printing and Piracy-New Discovery" concerning the dangers to the publishing industry that such a high quality facsimile method could pose, particularly with regard to expensive illustrated works, production of facsimiles of which had previously been assumed to be difficult and expensive. The new process, it was learned, had been invented by a C. F. Baldamus of Germany, and promoted by the German engineer and entrepreneur Carl Wilhelm Siemens, later known in England as William Siemens. Siemens went into partnership with the English engineer Joseph Woods, who developed the process and received British Patent No. 10,219 in 1844 for "Improvements in Producing Designs and Copies, and in Multiplying Impressions either of Printed or Written Surfaces." In the patent, which included 3 large folding engineering plans of machinery used, Woods proposed to call the process "anastatic printing." The process was rapidly adopted and used under other names such as "photozincography." 

On April 12, 1845 American writer, poet, editor, literary critic, and magazinist Edgar Allan Poe published in the Broadway Journal I, 229-231 an article entitled "Anastatic Printing."  With this new process of facsimile reproduction Poe foresaw huge advantages over the stereotype process, as anastatic printing plates could be produced quickly and cheaply, obviating the need to store bulky stereotype plates or flong.  He foresaw an increase in the production of pirated editions since anyone with anastatic equipment could reproduce any book they wanted.  Poe also believed that anastatic technology would enable authors to write out and publish their own books as facsimiles of manuscripts, including drawings, avoiding the costly and time-consuming typesetting process. 

Here is what Poe wrote:

"It is admitted by every one that of late there has been a rather singular invention, called Anastatic Printing, and that this invention may possibly lead, in the course of time, to some rather remarkable results — among which the one chiefly insisted upon, is the abolition of the ordinary stereotyping process: — but this seems to be the amount, in America at least, of distinct understanding on this subject.

" 'There is no exquisite beauty,' says Bacon, 'without some strangeness in the proportions.' The philosopher had reference, here, to beauty in its common acceptation; but the remark is equally applicable to all the forms of beauty — that is to say, to everything which arouses profound interest in the heart or intellect of man. In every such thing, strangeness — in other words novelty — will be found a principal element; and so universal is this law that it has no exception even in the case of this principal element itself. Nothing, unless it be novel — not even novelty itself — will be the source of very intense excitement among men. Thus the ennyue who travels in the hope of dissipating his ennui by the perpetual succession of novelties, will invariably be disappointed in the end. He receives the impression of novelty so continuously that it is at length no novelty to receive it. And the man, in general, of the nineteenth century — more especially of our own particular epoch of it — is very much in the predicament of the traveller in question. We are so habituated to new inventions, that we no longer get from newness the vivid interest which should appertain to the new — and no example could be adduced more distinctly showing that the mere importance of a novelty will not suffice to gain for it universal attention, than we find in the invention of Anastatic Printing. It excites not one fiftieth part of the comment which was excited by the comparatively frivolous invention of Sennefelder [sic]; — but he lived in the good old days when a novelty was novel. Nevertheless, while Lithography opened the way for a very agreeable pastime, it is the province of Anastatic Printing to revolutionize the world.

"By means of this discovery anything written, drawn, or printed, can be made to stereotype itself, with absolute accuracy, in five minutes.

"Let us take, for example, a page of this Journal; supposing only one side of the leaf to have printing on it. We dampen the leaf with a certain acid diluted, and then place it between two leaves of blotting-paper to absorb superfluous moisture. We then place the printed side in contact with a zinc plate that lies on the table. The acid in the interspaces between the letters, immediately corrodes the zinc, but the acid on the letters themselves, has no such effect, having been neutralized by the ink. Removing the leaf at the end of five minutes, we find a reversed copy, in slight relief, of the printing on the page; — in other words, we have a stereotype-plate, from which we can print a vast number of absolute facsimiles of the original printed page — which latter has not been at all injured in the process — that is to say, we can still produce from it (or from any impression of the stereotype plate) new stereotype plates ad libitum. Any engraving, or any pen-and-ink drawing, or any MS. can be stereotyped in precisely the same manner.

The facts of the invention are established. The process is in successful operation both in London and Paris. We have seen several specimens of printing done from the plates described, and have now lying before us a leaf (from the London Art-Union) covered with drawing, MS., letter-press, and impressions from wood-cuts, -the whole printed from the Anastatic stereotypes, and warranted by the Art-Union to be absolute fac-similes of the originals. The process can scarcely be regarded as a new invention, — and appears to be rather the modification and successful application of two or three previously ascertained principles -those of etching, electrography, lithography, etc. It follows from this that there will be much difficulty in establishing or maintaining a right of patent, and the probability is that the benefits of the process will soon be thrown open to the world. As to the secret — it can only be a secret in name. 

"That the discovery (if we may so call it) has been made can excite no surprise in any thinking person — the only matter for surprise is, that it has not been made many years ago. The obviousness of the process, however, in no degree lessens its importance. Indeed its inevitable results enkindle the imagination, and embarrass the understanding. Every one will perceive, at once, that the ordinary process of stereotyping will be abolished. Through this ordinary process, a publisher, to be sure, is enabled to keep on hand the means of producing edition after edition of any work the certainty of whose sale will justify the cost of stereotyping — which is trifling in comparison with that of re-setting the matter. But still, positively, this cost (of stereotyping) is great. Moreover, there cannot always be certainty about sales. Publishers frequently are forced to reset works which they have neglected to stereotype, thinking them unworthy the expense ; and many excellent works are not published at all, because small editions do not pay, and the anticipated sales will not warrant the cost of stereotype. Some of these difficulties will be at once remedied by the Anastatic Printing, and all will be remedied in a brief time. A publisher has only to print as many copies as are immediately demanded. He need print no more than a dozen, indeed, unless he feels perfectly confident of success. Preserving one copy, he can from this, at no other cost than that of the zinc, produce with any desirable rapidity, as many impressions as he may think proper. Some idea of the advantages thus accruing may be gleaned from the fact that in several of the London publishing warehouses there is deposited in stereotype plates alone, property to the amount of a million sterling.

"The next view of the case, in point of obviousness, is, that, if necessary, a hundred thousand impressions per hour, or even infinitely more, can be taken of any newspaper, or similar publication. As many presses can be put in operation as the occasion may require : — indeed there can be no limit to the number of copies producible, provided we have no limit to the number of presses. The tendency of all this to cheapen information, to diffuse knowledge and amusement, and to bring before the public the very class of works which are most valuable, but least in circulation on account of unsaleability — is what need scarcely be suggested to any one. But benefits such as these are merely the immediate and most obvious — by no means the most important.

"For some years, perhaps, the strong spirit of conventionality — of conservatism — will induce authors in general to have recourse, as usual, to the setting of type. A printed book, now, is more sightly, and more legible, than any MS. and for some years the idea will not be overthrown that this state of things is one of necessity. But by degrees it will be remembered that, while MS. was a necessity, men wrote after such fashion that no books printed in modern times have surpassed their MSS. either in accuracy or in beauty. This consideration will lead to the cultivation of a neat and distinct style of handwriting — for authors will perceive the immense advantage of giving their own manuscripts directly to the public without the expensive interference of the type-setter, and the often ruinous intervention of the publisher. All that a man of letters need do, will be to pay some attention to legibility of MS., arrange his pages to suit himself, and stereotype them instantaneously, as arranged. He may intersperse them with his own drawings, or with anything to please his own fancy, in the certainty of being fairly brought before his readers, with all the freshness of his original conception about him.

"And at this point we are arrested by a consideration of infinite moment, although of a seemingly shadowy character. The cultivation of accuracy in MS., thus enforced, will tend with an inevitable impetus to every species of improvement in style — more especially in the points of concision and distinctness- and this again, in a degree even more noticeable, to precision of thought, and luminous arrangement of matter. There is a very peculiar and easily intelligible reciprocal influence between the thing written and the manner of writing — but the latter has the predominant influence of the two. The more remote effect on philosophy at large, which will inevitably result from improvement of style and thought in the points of concision, distinctness, and accuracy, need only be suggested to be conceived.

"As a consequence of attention being directed to neatness and beauty of MS., the antique profession of the scribe will be revived, affording abundant employment to women — their delicacy of organization fitting them peculiarly for such tasks. The female amanuensis, indeed, will occupy very nearly the position of the present male type-setter, whose industry will be diverted perforce into other channels.

"These considerations are of vital importance — but there is yet one beyond them all. The value of every book is a compound of its literary value and its physical or mechanical value as the product of physical labor applied to the physical material. But at present the latter value immensely predominates, even in the works of the most esteemed authors. It will be seen, however, that the new condition of things will at once give the ascendency to the literary value, and thus by their literary values will books come to be estimated among men. The wealthy gentleman of elegant leisure will lose the vantage-ground now afforded him, and will be forced to tilt on terms of equality with the poor devil author. At present the literary world is a species of anomalous Congress, in which the majority of the members are constrained to listen in silence while all the eloquence proceeds from a privileged few. In the new regime, the humblest will speak as often and as freely as the most exalted, and will be sure of receiving just that amount of attention which the intrinsic merit of their speeches may deserve.

"From what we have said it will be evident that the discovery of Anastatic Printing will not only not obviate the necessity of copy-right laws, and of international law in especial, but will render this necessity more imperative and more apparent. It has been shown that in depressing the value of the physique of a, book, the invention will proportionately elevate the value of its morale, and since it is the latter value alone which the copy-right laws are needed to protect, the necessity of the protection will be only the more urgent and more obvious than ever."

The American patent No. 4, 239  for"Improvement in Anastatic Printing" was granted to C. F. Baldamus and F. W. Siemens of Berlin, Prussia on October 25, 1845. 

Physician Edward Binns published The Anatomy of Sleep; or, the Art of Procruring Sound and Refreshing Slumber at Will. This work, printed in an edition of 500 copies, was one of the first scientific studies of sleep.

The verso of the title page indicated that the book was "Printed by J. Z. Young By the New Patent Composing Machine, 110 Chancery Lane." This was the first book to be typeset by the Young & Delcambre Composing Machine, the first composing machine known to have been used in a printing office. The Young & Delcambre machine set a single continuous line of type; line breaking and justification were later done by hand. The design of the machine led to its being called "Pianotype."

"The use of the Young and Delcambre machine was opposed by the London Union of Compositors, particularly because female labour was employed to operate it" (Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of the Exhibitions [1963]  no. 463).

In his preface Binns aluded to the innovative methods employed in typesetting his book:

"It would be unjust to the ingenious inventors of the Machine by which this work has been composed, not say, that we believe it must and will, at no very distant period, supersede in many departments of typography composition in the usual mode. But the use of compositors can never be entirely dispensed with, even supposing the machine to be ten times more perfect that it is. The opposition with which its inventors have had to contend, is what might have been anticipated, but was certainly unexpected by the author. But that in time it will come generally into use, he thinks there cannot be a shadow of doubt. He consequently looks upon the publication of the "Anatomy of Sleep" as an epoch in the history of typography, from which it is possible to conceive a new era in the history of literature may be dated" (pp. ix-x).

Austrian mathematician and physicist at Czech Technical University in Prague Christian Andreas Doppler published Über das farbige Licht der Doppelsterne und einige andere Gestirne des Himmels. (On the Colored Light of the Binary Stars and Some Other Stars of the Heavens). 

This was the first statement of the Doppler principle (Doppler shift, Doppler effect), which states that the observed frequency changes if either the observer or the source is moving. Doppler mentions the application of this principle to both acoustics and optics, particularly to the colored appearance of double stars and the fluctuations of variable stars and novae; however, his reasoning in the optical arguments was flawed by his erroneous belief that all stars were basically white and emitted light only or mostly in the visible spectrum. Five years later, the astronomer Hippolyte Fizeau will publish a paper announcing his independent discovery of the effect, noting the usefulness of observing spectral line shifts in its application to astronomy. This point was of such fundamental importance to Doppler's principle that it is sometimes called the Doppler-Fizeau principle. The acoustical Doppler effect was verified experimentally in 1845, and the optical effect in 1901. Modified by relativity theory, it became one of the major tools of astronomy. It also has numerous commerical applications beyond astronomy, such as in Doppler radar and in Doppler ultrasound imaging to evaluate blood flow.

Per and Georg Scheutz, inspired by Dionysius Lardner’s account of Babbage’s Difference Engine, constructed the first working difference engine based on Babbage's design in Stockholm. One of the reasons the Scheutzs were able to build the engine, while Babbage could not, is that they were willing to machine the parts to lower tolerances than Babbage tolerated. Therefore the Scheutz machine was prone to errors.

British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot published The Pencil of Nature in six fascicules in London through the firm of Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans. This work was illustrated with 24 calotypes or talbotypes, a photographic process invented by Fox Talbot in 1841, in which salted paper prints were made from paper negatives. It was the "first photographically illustrated book to be commercially published," or "the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs."  

Because the work was a complete novelty to the book-buying public Fox Tablot published a brief "Notice to the Reader" explaining the nature of the images:

"The plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone without any aid whatever from the artist's pencil. They are the sun-pictures themselves, and not, as some persons have imagined, engravings in imitation."

Fox Talbot originally intended to publish additional fascicules but discontinued publication after six because the work was a commercial failure.

Approximately 40 copies of original edition of The Pencil of Nature have survived.

Two facsimiles were published in print in the 20th century, one in the 21st. The text and images are also available online. 

Thomas W. Starr of Philadelphia received U.S. Patent no. 4130 for Improvement in Preparing Matrices for Type by the Electrotyping Process.

"Electrotyping, that is the growing of a copper shell from an impression of typeset matter, which could be backed up with metal and used to print from as a substitute for cast stereotype plates, was invented in about 1840 and spread rapidly in the printing trade. The use of electrotyping to make matrices from cast type was the subject of US Patent 4130 of 1845, granted to Thomas Starr. By the 1850s, the electrotyping of matrices had entered the normal practice of typefounders. Increasingly, later in the century, punchcutters turned from cutting their designs in steel – especially the more elaborate ones – towards making them in typemetal, from which electrotyped matrices could be grown" (http://typefoundry.blogspot.com/2009/01/recasting-caslon-old-face.html, accessed 10-10-2011).

Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of the Exhibitions at The British Museum and at Earls Court London (1963) no. 17. 

American physicist Joseph Henry, first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and a pioneer in telegraphic research, realized that storms in the United States generally move from west to east.

Henry wrote in the Smithsonian's 1847 annual report that "the extended lines of telegraph will furnish a ready means of warning the more northern and eastern observers to be on the watch for the first appearance of an advancing storm."

By 1849, Henry worked out an arrangement with a number of telegraph companies to allow free transmission of local weather data to the Smithsonian. He proposed to supply "the most important stations" with barometers and thermometers. By the end of the 1849 150 volunteers throughout the United States reported weather observations to the Smithsonian regularly by telegraph. This became the basis for the first national weather service where weather observations from distant points could be "rapidly" collected, plotted and analyzed at one location -- the beginnings of "surface weather analysis".

In 1849 inventor William Martin of St. Pierre-les-Calais, France, who characterized himself as a "mechanist," received British patent No. 12,421 for "Certain Improvements in Machinery for Figuring Fabrics, Parts of which Improvements are applicable to Playing certain Musical Instruments, and also to Printing and other like Purposes."

Besides describing improvements to Jacquard punched card or punched paper apparatus for weaving and for playing musical instruments such as a player piano, Martin described in his patent specification how his invention was applied to typesetting. Martin believed that the method would both speed up the typesetting process, and also allow typesetting information to be stored for future use in later editions. In his patent specification he wrote:

"A somewhat similarly constructed apparatus to that just described as applicable for playing musical instruments may also be applied to machinery or apparatus for composing or setting up type for letter-press printing. It is well known that types have been composed or set up by machinery, and that the mechanism of the apparatus generally employed for this purpose consists of a series of levers in connection with the keys of a finger board, arranged in somewhat the same manner as the keys of a pianoforte, organ, or other similar keyed instrument. The types are arranged in vertical columns behind these levers, and by depressing one of the keys with the finger the corresponding lever will be brought into action and a type or letter thereby pushed out from its column into a channel, along which it is carried to the composing stick. My improvements are applicable to any of the machines now in use, and which are worked by means of a key-board or other similar arrangement of levers that are acted on by the fingers of the compositor. In the Drawing, however, I have only shewn the Invention as applied to a machine constructed on the principle of Messrs. Clay and Rosenborg's Invention, in which the types are arranged in columns in front of an endless travelling belt or band on which they are published by small levers whenever the corresponding key is depressed.

"Figure 17 represents a section of a cylinder with moveable pins or pegs, and precisely similar in construction and operation to the cylinder shewn at Figures 12, 13, and 14. In order to avoid complexity in the Drawings, I have not thought it necessary to shew more than two or three pins or pegs; but it will of course be understood that the cylinder must be furnished with the property quantity of moveable pins arranged all round, as shewn in the other Figures. The perforated paper h passes over a slotted plate i, as in the former instance, and the perforation may be made in the paper either by means of a series of finger levers corresponding with the letters or characters , or by means of the reading machine already described. The operation of the apparatus is as follows:— The perforated paper h is made to pass slowly over the slotted plate i, the pin cylinder B being caused to rotate in the same direction, and at the same speed. By this means the pins or pegs c will be brought into contract with the perforated paper, and if they meet with holes in the paper they will enter, and thus causing their outer collars 2 to pass outside the supporting ring or guide g, as shewn at 3; the pin thus kept out will continue its progress until it reaches the under side of the bell-crank lever x, the outer end of which will therby be lifted up, and by means of a pusher w, at the opposite of the other arm of the lever, will push a single type or character out from the bottom of the column v into a channel in which (in Clay and Rosenborg's machine) there is a travelling endless band, which carries the type or character (thus thrust out) into the composing stick. Immediately that the pin or peg c escapes from the end of the lever x, the latter is brought back again into its original position by means of the spring y, and the pin or peg c continues its progress until it again comes in contact with another portion of the perforated paper; and if it meets with an unperforated part, it will be thrust inwards as seen at 4 (Fig. 12). It will of course be understood, that instead of pushing out the type or character on to the endless band, and therby carrying forward to the composing stick it may be pushed into an inclined channel, down which it will slide by its weight, as in the type-composing machines of Messrs. Young and Delcambre. The advantages resulting from the application of the perforated sheet of paper to this purpose are, that when once the paper is placed in the machine it will only be necessary to communicate motion to the several parts of the machine; as, as the peg or pin barrel b and the perforated paper rotate, the type will be set up or composed without further trouble; whereas, in the machines already existing, it requires a great deal of practice to be accustomed to the key or finger board and to work or set up the type with speed. Another advantage is, that when once a perforated paper has been made, it may, after being used, be kept until a second or third edition of the book to be printed is required, when it will only be necessary to place the paper in the machine and actuate the mechanism, and the type will be quickly composed or set up without the aid of a skilled workman."

Thompson, History of Composing Machines  (1904) p. 12  states that Martin's advanced ideas were not actually applied in the typesetting industry until 1867 when Alexander Mackie introduced it in his typesetting machine called the "Pickpocket." In 1887 Tobert Lanston invented the Monotype which was driven by punched paper rolls.

In 1851 Dar al-Funun (Persian: دارالفنون‎), the first modern institution of higher learning in Persia, was established in Tehran. Conceived as a polytechnic to train upper-class Persian youth in Medicine, Engineering, Military Science, and Geology, Dar-al-Funun was founded by Amir Kabir, then the royal vizier to Nasereddin Shah, the Shah of Iran.  "It was similar in scope and purpose to American land grant colleges like Purdue and Texas A&M. Like them, it developed and expanded its mission over the next hundred years, eventually becoming the University of Tehran" (Wikipedia article on Dar al-Funun, accessed 05-24-2012).

French inventor and engineer Paul Gustave Froment, builder of the original Foucault pendulum, invented the micropantograph. It operated by coupling two pantographs, not unlike the kind Thomas Jefferson used at Monticello to write in duplicate, so that their action was multiplied, allowing reductions of up to 6,250 times.

Perfected by N. Peters, a London banker and microscopist, the device was described in detail and illustrated in Knight's American Mechanical Dictionary II (1876) 1432, including:

"It was stated in 1862 by Mr. Farrants, that the Lord's Prayer, containing 223 letters (amen being omitted), had been written on glass with this instrument within the space of  1/356,000 square inch; at which rate the whole Bible might be inscribed within the 1/22 part of a square inch."

In London David Edward Hughes invented the first perfected mechanism for printing telegraph messages, using a keyboard in which each key caused the corresponding letter to be printed at a distant receiver. Hughes's printing mechanism worked something like a "golfball" typewriter, but it was produced before the typewriter was invented.

American industrialists George R. Bissell and Jonathan Greenleaf Eveleth, founders of the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company (later Seneca Oil Company), and American driller (Colonel) Edwin Laurentine Drake, drilled the first successful oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania. This was the beginning of the American petroleum industry. 

"In the 1850s the market for light-producing liquid fuels was dominated by coal oil and by an increasingly inadequate supply of whale oil. However, George Bissell, a lawyer from New York, and his partner Jonathan Greenleaf Eveleth had a revolutionary idea. They thought there was a possibility of the crude “rock oil” (now petroleum) that had been cropping up in western Pennsylvania being used as an illuminatory substance. At the time, rock oil was nothing but a smelly hindrance to the well-diggers of the region, with some limited medicinal properties. Yet Bissell and Eveleth, after realizing how flammable the liquid was, believed there was great money to be made in producing rock oil commercially, marketed as lamp fuel and such. But they needed someone- an important, well-respected scientist whose name they could attach to their financial venture, to research the material to find out whether or not it could be used in such a manner. Enter Benjamin Silliman Jr., professor of chemistry at Yale University.

"Benjamin Silliman Jr.’s primary contribution to the chemical world, and certainly the world as a whole, involved the fractional distillation of petroleum, analyzed mainly for the purpose of its qualities of illumination. He was asked to do this as one of the most prominent chemists of his time, and his report [1855] on the subject afterwards had extremely far-reaching influences. The immensely important main idea of his report was that distilled petroleum burned far brighter than any fuel on the market, except those that were far more expensive and less efficient. His conclusion was that petroleum is 'a raw material from which...they may manufacture a very valuable product.' Silliman also noted that this material was able to survive through large ranges of temperature, and the possibility of it being used as a lubricant. 

"The impact of the discovery of petroleum as a high-quality illuminator is obvious. At the time, however, Bissell and Eveleth simply brought some people together to form the 'Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company'- shortly after to be renamed the 'Seneca Oil Company,' after another common, regional name for petroleum. Edwin Drake was in charge of drilling the well, and after many setbacks, generally revolving around the lack of money, he struck oil in quiet, rural, Titusville, Pennsylvania on August 27, 1859. The scenery of Titusville changed almost overnight. Oil derricks and towns filled with get-rich-quick speculators filled the newly-named Oil Creek. The holes were generally unremarkable, especially by the standards of today; the first probably only gathered less than 20 barrels of oil a day. However, the influence of these oil wells, and Benjamin Silliman Jr.’s report confirming the use of petroleum as an illuminant, was massive. Almost equally important in Bissell’s idea and Silliman’s discovery was the use of rock oil for lubrication of the many moving parts in the mechanical age soon to come" (Wikipedia article on Benjamin Silliman, Jr., accessed 09-16-2010).

The Parisian typesetter and tinkerer, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville produced the earliest known recording of the human voice and the earliest known recording of music on his phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually but not to play them back.

"In 2008, the New York Times reported the discovery of a phonautogram from 9 April 1860. The announcement of the discovery was accompanied by an announcement that the visual recording was made playable — 'converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.' The phonautogram was one of Leon Scott's forgotten images in Paris; they were scanned then processed by a sophisticated computer program developed a few years earlier by the Library of Congress.

"The recording was a ten-second snippet of a singer, probably a daughter of the inventor performing the French folk song 'Au Clair de la Lune'. This phonautograph recording is now the earliest known recording of a human voice and the earliest known recording of music in existence, predating, by twenty-eight years, the longest surviving Edison phonographic recording of a Handel chorus, made in 1888" (Wikipedia article on Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, accessed 04-18-2009).

You can listen to the earliest known music recording at the Wikipedia article on Scott.

In 1861 C. F. Wittig of Leipzig published Die Schnellpresse, ihre Mechanik und Vorrichtung zum Druck aller typographischen Arbeiten.  This work of 105 pages appears to be the first book published in German on machine printing and it may also be the earliest manual on machine printing published in any language. Wittig's work predated the first work on the subject in French by Monet (1872) and the first book in English by Gaskill (1877). Revised editions of Wittig's book appeared in 1866 and 1878.

Bigmore & Wyman, A Bibliography of Printing (1880-86; 2001 edition) III, 91.

On January 11, 1863 the USS Hatteras, an iron-hulled steamship converted into a gunboat by the U.S. Navy, was taken by surprise and sunk in an engagement  with the disguised Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama, approximately 20 miles off the coast of Galveston, Texas.

The hull of Hatteras rests in approximately 60 ft (18 m) of water  and is buried under about 3 ft (0.91 m) of sand. Her steam engine and two iron paddle wheels remain on the ocean bottom. The wreck is monitored to ensure that it is not damaged by oil and gas development in the area.

On January 11, 2013, 150 years after the battle, a 3-D sonar map was released by NOAA's (the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration) Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, together with ExploreOcean, Teledyne Blueview, and Northwest Hydro showed never-before seen details of the USS Hatteras, the only Union warship sunk in combat in the Gulf of Mexico during the Civil War.

On June 13, 1863 English author Samuel Butler published "Darwin among the Machines" in The Press newspaper published in Christchurch, New Zealand. This article, published by Butler under the pseudonym of Cellarius, suggested that machines might be kind of "mechanistic life," undergoing, the spirit of Darwinian natural selection, a kind of constant evolution, and that machines might eventually supplant humans as the dominant species.

"We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. ...

"Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question " (Wikipedia article on Darwin among the Machines, accessed 01-02-2013).

English mathematician, engineer and computer designer Charles Babbage published his autobiography, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, in which he presented the most detailed descriptions of his Difference and Analytical Engines published during his lifetime, and wrote about his struggles to have his highly futuristic inventions appreciated by society.

In the wording of his title Babbage used the word philosopher in its now obsolete sense of what we call a "scientist." The word scientist, coined by William Whewell, was not widely used until the end of the 19th or early 20th century. (See Reading 6.2.)

American soldier and inventor Benjamin Chew Tilghman developed the sulfite pulping process for the manufacture of paper from wood pulp, receiving the US patent on the use of calcium bisulfite, Ca(HSO3)2, to pulp wood in 1867. The first mill using this process was built in Bergvik, Sweden in 1874. It used magnesium as the counter ion and was based on work by Swedish chemical engineer Carl Daniel Ekman.

Throughout the 19th century it was increasingly necessary to find workable substitutes for scarce linen rags, the supply of which could not possibly keep up with the growing demands for paper. While the production of paper from wood pulp enabled greatly increased production, the bleaching agents used in this new process reduced the longevity of paper. The pulping, bleaching, and sizing processes generated hydrochloric and sulfuric acids, which over time resulted in brittleness and deterioration of paper, and the possible loss of information.

Edward A. Calahan of the American Telegraph Company invented the first stock telegraph printing instrument.

The distinct sound of this telegraph printing instrument eventually earned it the name of “stock ticker.”

In 1868 The Times of London newspaper installed a Walter Press, developed by the owner of the newspaper, John Walter III, that printed on continuous paper, further increasing the speed of production. This rotary machine initiated modern newspaper printing and served The Times until 1895. The average speed claimed for the Walter Press was 12,000 perfect copies per hour. 

Moran, Printing Presses. History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times (1973) 191-92.

Scottish physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell published “On Governors,” a classic paper on feedback mechanisms.

American inventor, newspaper editor and politician Christopher Latham Sholes and Samuel Soule and Carlos Glidden invented the first practical typewriter in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This was the first device to allow the operator to write faster than a person writing by hand.

"Following a strike by compositors at his printing press, he tried building a machine for typesetting, but this was a failure and he quickly abandoned the idea. He arrived at the typewriter through a different route. His initial goal was to create a machine to number pages of a book, tickets, and so on. He began work on this at Kleinsteubers machine shop in Milwaukee, together with a fellow printer Samuel W. Soule, and they patented a numbering machine on November 13, 1866.

"Sholes and Soule showed their machine to Carlos Glidden, a lawyer and amateur inventor at the machine shop working on a mechanical plow, who wondered if the machine could not be made to produce letters and words as well. Further inspiration came in July 1867, when Sholes came across a short note in Scientific American describing the "Pterotype", a prototype typewriter that had been invented by John Pratt in England. Sholes decided that the pterotype was too complex and set out to make his own machine, whose name he got from the article: the typewriting machine, or typewriter.

"For this project, Soule was again enlisted, and Glidden joined them as a third partner who provided the funds. The Scientific American article had described a "literary piano"; the first model that the trio built had a keyboard literally resembling a piano. It had black keys and white keys, laid out in two rows. It did not contain keys for the numerals 0 or 1 because the letters O and I were deemed sufficient:

3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

2 4 6 8 . A B C D E F G H I J K L M

"with the first row made of ivory and the second of ebony, the rest of the framework being wooden. It was in this form that Sholes, Glidden and Soule were granted patents for their invention on on June 23, 1868 and July 14. The first document to be produced on a typewriter was a contract that Sholes had written, in his capacity as the Comptroller for the city of Milwaukee. Machines similar to Sholes's had been previously used by the blind for embossing, but by Sholes's time the inked ribbon had been invented, which made typewriting in its current form possible" (Wikipedia article on Christopher Sholes, accessed 05-22-2009).

In 1872 A.-L. Monet, who characterized himself as "Prote des Machines" at the press of J. Claye in Paris, published Le conducteur de machines typographiques. Guide pratique. Études sur les différents systèmes de machines mise en train - Découpage. This 401-page book, which was issued by Monet's employer, J. Claye, appears to be the first book published in French on machine printing. It predated Gaskill's first book in English on the subject by 5 years.  However, Wittig's work of 1861 published in German predated Monnet's work by 11 years.

Monet continued to develop his text, publishing an extensively revised and expanded treatise on the subject in 1878:  Les machines et appareils typographiques en France et à l'etranger.  This 437-page work contained 176 illustrations as compared to only 42 in the first edition. This edition was vastly more comprehensive than Gaskill's handbook.  A further revised and expanded edition with 484 pages appeared in 1898.

Bigmore & Wyman, A Bibliography of Printing (1880-86; 2001 edition) II, 48-49.

In 1872 Erewhon: or, Over the Range, a satirical utopia novel by the English writer Samuel Butler, was published anonymously in London. A notable aspect of this satire on aspects of Victorian society, expanded from letters that Butler originally published in the New Zealand newspaper, The Press, was that Erewhonians believed that machines are potentially dangerous and that Erewhonian society had undergone a revolution that destroyed most mechanical inventions. In the section of Butler's satire called "The Book of the Machines" Butler appears to have imagined the possiblity of machine consciousness, or artificial consciousness, and that machines could replicate themselves. 

English electrical engineer Willoughby Smith discovered that the electrical resistance of selenium varies dramatically with the amount of light falling on it. The photoconductivity of selenium eventually provided a method for converting images into electrical signals-- the basis for photoelectric cells and a theoretical basis for television. 

In 1872 the patent on the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer (U.S. 79,265) was sold for $12,000 to Densmore and Yost, who made an agreement with E. Remington & Sons, then famous as manufacturers of rifles and sewing machines.  Remington started production of their first typewriter on March 1, 1873 in Ilion, New York. The machines, as first produced, were problematic in their operation.

The action of the type bars in the early typewriters were very sluggish and tended to jam frequently. To fix this problem, Christopher Sholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin obtained a list of the most common letters used in English, and rearranged his keyboard from an alphabetic arrangement to one in which the most common pairs of letters were spread fairly far apart on the keyboard. Because typists at that time used the "hunt and peck" method, Sholes' arrangement increased the time it took for the typists to hit the keys for common two letter combinations enough to ensure that each type bar had enough time to fall back into place before the next one came up. This new arrangement, which Sholes invented in 1873, was named the Sholes QWERTY keyboard, and is still used today. Though Sholes had never imagined that typing would ever be faster than handwriting, which is usually 20 words per minute (WPM) or less, his invention with the QWERTY keyboard was the first machine to allow the operator to write faster than a person writing by hand.

When produced  by Remington & Sons in 1874 Scholes improved machine was called the “Sholes & Glidden Type Writer.” It had a keyboard with letters and numbers arranged in a four-line pattern (known as QWERTY from the first six letters in the top row), a wooden spacer bar, and a vulcanized india-rubber platen or roller. It only printed capital letters.

About 5000 of the Sholes & Glidden Type Writers were sold between 1874 and 1878, when Remington & Sons introduced the Remington 2,  the first typewriter to include both upper and lower case letters via a shift key.

About 1875 engineer Frank S. Baldwin of Philadelphia and Willgot Theophil Odhner, a Swedish engineer and entrepreneur working in St. Petersburg, Russia, independently invented calculators using a true variable-toothed gear. This was the first real advance in mechanical calculating technology since Gottfried Leibniz's stepped drum (1673). These calculators were called "pinwheel calculators."

The greater ease of use of this technology, its general reliability, and the compact size of the equipment incorporating it caused an explosion of sales in the calculator industry.

Thomas Edison of Menlo Park, now Edison, New Jersey, invented the Electric Pen, the forerunner of the mimeograph.

Thomas Edison received US patent 180,857 for "Autographic Printing" on August 8, 1876. The patent covered the electric pen, used for making the stencil, and the flatbed duplicating press. In 1880 Edison obtained a further patent, US 224,665: "Method of Preparing Autographic Stencils for Printing", which covered the making of stencils using a file plate, a grooved metal plate on which the stencil was placed which perforated the stencil when written on with a blunt metal stylus.

The earliest international exposition exclusively of scientific instruments was held at the South Kensington Museum, London.  As a record of the exhibition the South Kensington Museum published a Handbook to the Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus 1876 (London 1876).  

The section on calculating machines on pages 23-34 was written by H. J. S. Smith and included those of Babbage, Scheutz, Thomas de Colmar, and Grohmann. None were illustrated. James Clerk Maxwell contributed two chapters in this guide, Peter Guthrie Tait wrote one, and Thomas Henry Huxley wrote one.  A French translation of this work was published in Paris also in 1876.

The South Kensington Museum was later merged into the Science Museum in London.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace 369.

Alexander Graham Bell in Boston invented the telephone, and applied for the patent, which was issued to Bell as no. 174,465, on March 7, 1876, by the U.S. Patent Office. Bell's patent covered "the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically . . . by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound." In his invention of the telephone Bell was preceded by Philip Reis, who perfected his device in 1861, and numerous other inventors played lesser or greater roles. However, Bell was the first to create a telephone that could reproduce intelligible speech at the receiving end, and was also the first to patent the telephone. Because of the numerous other inventors involved there was unusually extensive and historic litigation over the telephone patents, culminating in Bell's victory. Among the controversies was the question of the priority of Elisha Gray in the invention.

As the well-known story goes, on March 10, 1876 Bell spoke the first words through the instrument to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, in the next room. Bell said, "Mr. Watson— come here— I want to see you." 

Bell presented his first report on the telephone to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston on May 10, 1876. His report, "Researches in telephony," was published in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, new series 4 (whole series 12) (1877) 1-10.  Bell's telephone did not become commercially viable until 1878.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science & Medicine (1991) no. 164.

In 1877 Jackson Gaskill, characterizing himself as "Thirty Years Machine Manager," published The Printing-Machine Manager's Complete Practical Handbook; or, The Art of Machine Managing Fully Explained in London. This was the first manual published in English exclusively on machine printing rather than on printing on a handpress.  Remarkably it was published 66 years after Friedrich Koenig developed the first steam-powered printing press, achieving an output of 800 sheets per hour, roughly double the fastest handpress operation. That there may have been little demand for Gaskill's book until the 1870s was probably a reflection of the slow-changing elements of the printing trades and the longevity of handpresses themselves.  It should not be forgotten that  a few handpress printers continue to use 19th century Stanhope, Columbian, and Albion presses in the second decade of the 21st century.

"Although there has been a tendency to equate th emergence of the cylinder printing machine with the application of steam-power, the two developments were not necessarily interrelated. Power, other than that supplied by a human being, could be and was applied to ther presses besdes those constructed on the cylinder principle, and some cylinder machines were worked by hand. Efficient steam-enginers were not universally available for another thirty years after Koenig's invention. In 1820 there were only eight steam-presses in the whole of London, nearly all being used by newspapers,e xcept for those of Strahan, the King's Printer. As late as 1851, the Printing Machine Managers Trade Society had a membership of only 130, indicating that in London, the main centre of printing, there could not have been many machines at work" (Moran, Printing Presses. History & Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times [1973] 123).

Gaskill's book contains numerous text illustrations showing available machine presses plus an 11-plate color insert showing the 11 press passes required in printing a six-color plate. The work is also notable for its 23-pages of advertisements at the back for a wide variety of presses and related equipment and supplies.

Gaskill's manual on machine printing was predated by that of Wittig in German published in 1861 and that of Monet in French published in 1872.

Bigmore  & Wyman, A Bibliography of Printing (1880-86; 2001 edition) I, 255.

On March 4, 1877 German-American inventor Emile Berliner, working in New York City, invented the microphone. It was first  used as a telephone speech transmitter.

In the summer of 1877, four hundred years after printer William Caxton published The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres, the first book printed in England, the Caxton Celebration opened in the western International Exhibition Galleries on the Queen's road side of the Horticultural Society's Gardens at South Kensington in London. The exhibition was organized by its Chairman, typefounder and politician Sir Charles Reed, by printer William Clowes, by mathematician and physicist from a family of major printers, William Spottiswoode, by printer, biographer and bibliographer of Caxton and rare book collector, William Blades, and various committees. Two hundred or more people participated in some way as patrons or members of committees, representing a "who's who" of the printing industry in England and Europe at the time, along with leading scientists, scholars, librarians and collectors. A few Americans such as Richard M. Hoe were also involved in committees. The exhibition was open for two months, from June 30 to September 1, 1877.

In their issue of July 1, 1877 The Illustrated London News published a collection of images related to the exhibition called "Caxtoniana."   The same newspaper in their issue of July 7 (p. 18) published an article on the opening of exhibition and on p. 17 a large image captioned, "Mr. Gladstone at the Caxton Memorial Exhibition, South Kensington, on Saturday Last." The image showed Prime Minister Gladstone watching printing done on a "Gutenberg-style" hand-press. The Illustrated London News described the opening ceremony of the exhibition as follows:

"The opening ceremony was brief and simple. The leading part was borne by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone. He was met by Sir Charles Reed, chairman of the committee; Mr. W. Blades, the biographer of Caxton; and the other gentlemen we have named, with the Archbishop of York. A large assembly of ladies and gentlemen filled the rooms assigned for this ceremony, as well as the adjacent galleries. After a special dedicatory prayer offered by the Archbishop, Sir Charles Reed read a short statement of the occasion and the objects of the Exhibition. Mr. Hodson, secetary to the Printers' Pension Corporation, handed to Mr. Gladstone a copy of the Exhibition Catalogue. The right hon. gentleman then declared the Exhibition to be opened. This formal declaration was immediately hailed by a flourish of trumpets from the band of the Royal Horse Guards Blue. Mr. Gladstone was conducted through the exhibition, which he examined with attentive interest. Our Illustration shows him looking at the working of an old press. There was a luncheon provided by the Conservatory of the Horticultural Society's Gardens. The chair was occupied by Mr. Gladstone, at whose right hand sat his Majesty the Emperor of Brazil, but the Emperor left the table before the toasts were proposed. His Majesty's health was, of course, duly honoured next to that of our Queen and Royal family. In his principal speech, giving the memory of William Caxton for the chief toast, Mr. Gladstone commented upon the invention of printing, with his usual copiousness of thought and knowledge, and expressed his admiration of the results now attained. The other speakers were the Bishop of Bath and Wells; Dr. Joseph Parker; Mr. Hall, of the Oxford University Press; M. Chaix, of Paris; Herr Fröbel, of Stuttgart; Sir C. Reed, and Mr. G. Spottiswoode. Subscriptions and donations to the Printers' Pension Corporation fund were announced, amounting to £2000, besides which there will be the receipts from the Exhibition." 

As a record of the exhibition, a catalogue was edited by George Bullen (1816-94) Keeper of the Printed Books at the British Museum, entitled Caxton Celebration, 1877. Catalogue of the Loan Collection of Antiquities, Curiosities, and Appliances Connected with the Art of Printing. In its final form this 472 page book listed, sometimes with descriptive bibliographical notes, a total of 4734 items exhibited, making this probably the largest exhibition of rare books, prints, and printing equipment ever held. It encompassed works from the Gutenberg Bible and the Mainz Psalter up to 1877, including about 190 Caxtons, classics illustrating the spread of printing, landmarks of book illustration, examples of music printing, books on papermaking, notable achievements in color printing, examples of historic, unusual or new technologies in printing, as well as printing presses and typesetting and typefounding equipment. 

Notably, the catalogue contained no images. Presumably it was a sufficient challenge just to publish a non-illustrated bibliographical record of such an enormous exhibition, crediting the numerous lenders to the show. Collecting about and around this exhibition over 100 years later, in 2011 and 2012, allowed me to reconstruct some of the unusually complicated history of the publication of this exhibition catalogue. By June 2012 I identified 8 editions or states:

(1) During the early days of the exhibition a small number of preliminary "Rough Proof" copies of the catalogue were available. This I have not seen.

(2) A bit later during the exhibition a "Preliminary Issue" with 404pp. and 10 leaves of advertisements was issued in pale blue printed wrappers for sale at 1s. This version, which was called "Preliminary Issue" on both its printed wrapper and title page, listed 4633 entries. In it Class C was entitled "The Comparative Development of the Art of Printing in England and Foreign Countries Illustrated by Specimens of the Holy Scriptures and Liturgies." The number of entries in Class C ended at 1351, leaving a gap of 100 items between the next entry in the catalogue, No. 1451 beginning "Class D. Specimens Noticeable for Rarity or for Beauty and Excellence of Typography." This indicates that the cataloguing of Class C was incomplete at the time the Preliminary Issue was printed.

(3) Later during the exhibition a version with 456pp and 11 leaves of advertisements was issued. My copy of this is bound in original brown cloth, edges untrimmed. It lists 4734 entries. In this version pp. xiv-xviii were reset to allow the addition of several names to various committees. Also the entire Class C. was substantially rewritten and expanded, which required resetting numerous pages. In this version Class C. is headed "The History of Printing Illustrated by the Printed Bible, 1450-1877, By Henry Stevens." A new gathering  M*was inserted, between gatherings M and N, its pages numbered 176a to 176q, bringing the Bibles catalogued up to No. 1450, and the Liturgies numbered 1450a-1450θ. Since  Henry Stevens's introduction to Class C is dated July 25, 1877 we may presume that this version came out either very late in July or during August. 

(4) Virtually at the end of the exhibition a "Revised Edition" of the catalogue was issued in tan printed wrappers, containing 472 pages and 11 leaves of advertisements at the back. The designation "Revised Edition" appeared only on the upper printed wrapper, and not the title page. This was priced 2s. 6d. My copy of this version bears the inscription of George William Reid, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, who, according to Bullen's Introduction (p. xi), catalogued the various woodcuts, copper-plates and other engravings in Class G. of the exhibition. Reid's inscription is dated September 1877.  Without the printed wrappers the different versions can be determined by the number of pages. It is evident that many or all gatherings were reprinted for this edition in which the entries were renumbered in one series with continuous pagination.

(5) After the exhibition 157 hand-numbered large-paper copies of the revised edition with 472pp. were available on "superfine toned hand-made paper," edges untrimmed in a special original brown cloth binding for 1 guinea, and

(6) 12 hand-numbered copies were available on extra large thick hand-made paper at the cost of 5 guineas, likewise in an original brown cloth binding, edges untrimmed.  No copies of  (5) or (6) that I have seen had wrappers or ads.

(7)  After the exhibition some of the copies of the catalogue printed on regular paper were bound in cloth for sale. I have a copy bound in original green cloth, edges trimmed, without ads.

(8) I also have a copy bound in original red cloth, edges trimmed, stamped "PRESENTATION COPY" on the upper cover with an inscription to British Museum Librarian, G. W. Porter, from J. S. Hodson, Honorary Secretary of the Executive Committee dated November 17, 1877. This copy contains 2 leaves of ads at the back. In his introduction to the catalogue George Bullen credits Hodson, who was Secretary of the "Printers' Pension, Almshouse and Orphan Asylum Corporation," for "having originated this celebration," the proceeds of which went to support the Printers charities that Hodson managed.

The most extensive section in the exhibition, and also the most extensively annotated portion of the catalogue, was "Class C. The History of Printing Illustrated by the Printed Bible, 1450-1877" by the American bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller Henry Stevens who lived in London.  Stevens ran into conflicts with the organizers of the exhibition, who were concerned that Stevens's extensive exhibition and detailed cataloguing was unduly prominent in the exhibition. They may also have been irritated that some of Stevens's cataloguing was not finished until the middle of show. At the end of his introduction to Class C Stevens indicated that he would publish a revised edition of his portion of the catalogue after the show. This he duly published as an unillustrated 151 page book in 1878 under the following verbose title:

The Bibles in the Caxton Exhibition MDCCCLXXVII or a bibliographical description of nearly one thousand representative Bibles in various languages chronologically arranged from the first Bible printed by Gutenberg in 1450-1456 to the last Bible printed at the Oxford University Press the 30th June 1877. With an Introduction on the History of Printing as Illustrated by the printed Bible from 1450 to 1877 in which is told for the first time the true history and mystery of the Coverdale Bible of 1535 Together with bibliographical notes and collations of many rare Bibles in various languages and divers versions printed during the last four centuries.  

This book Stevens issued both as an octavo trade edition on ordinary paper and clothbound, and on large paper printed on Whatman hand-made paper. Large paper copies were advertised for 15s in a half-roan binding or in red morocco extra by Bedford for £4.4s.  My copy of the large paper edition is in an original green cloth binding matching the binding of the trade edition, and comes from the library of Henry Frowde of Oxford University Press, who became Publisher of the press in 1880.  In his book Stevens explained that his efforts were the culmination of 30 years of work on Bible bibliography. For the exhibition he borrowed Bibles from sources including the British Museum, the Bodleian, Queen Victoria, Earl Spencer, the Earl of Leicester, Francis Fry, the Signet Library and its librarian, David Laing of Edinburgh and Henry J. Atkinson of Gunnersbury House in Middlesex.

In association with Henry Stevens, Henry Frowde of Oxford University Press undertook the publication of a pocket-sized Bible that would demonstrate advances in printing technology since its introduction in England by Caxton. The small bible was printed and bound by Oxford University Press in an edition of 100 numbered copies in only twelve hours on the opening day of the exhibition, June 30, 1877.  Copy no. 1 was presented to Gladstone when he opened the show.  In  March 1878 Stevens published a small 30-page book entitled The History of the Caxton Memorial Bible printed and bound in twelve consecutive hours on June 30, 1877.  In this book Stevens told the story of this remarkable achievement in which copies of the 1052-page 16mo volume were printed from standing type, on paper specially made for the edition by Oxford University Press only a few days before printing. The printed sheets were artificially dried and hand-bound in turkey morocco by 101 binders assigned to the task.  Stevens calculated that had type composition been necessary it would have taken "2000 compositors and 200 readers to set up and properly read the Bible in these same twelve hours."  Stevens seems to have had copies of his 16mo history bound in different styles since the copy in my library is bound in a more elaborate leather binding than that reproduced by the Internet Archive.

The remarkable exhibition of rare books on the history of printing and typography described in the exhibition catalogue for the Caxton Celebration was loaned in its entirety by William Blades, who also catalogued all the Caxtons and other early English printed books in the exhibition. In addition Blades wrote a separate  32-page pamphlet entitled A Guide to the Objects of Chief Interest in the Loan Collection of the Caxton Celebration, Queen's Gate, South Kensington that was distributed during the exhibition. Blades was also a collector of medals relating to the history of printing and hoped to have a medal struck commemorating the 1877 celebration. For the purpose he issued a prospectus with a reproduction of the proposed design; however, there were insufficient subscribers, and the medal is known only from the prospectus, the design from which was reproduced by Henry Morris in his introduction to the 2001 facsimile reprint of Bigmore & Wyman.

The superb exhibition of type specimens in the show was curated by writer, typefounder, historian of type foundries, and son of Sir Charles Reed, Talbot Baines Reed. 

♦ Perhaps the most unusual Caxton Celebration item I collected is an 8-page 4to pamphlet entitled Caxton Celebration June 1877. A Biographical Notice of William Caxton The First English Printer Reprinted from the "Leisure Hour" for May, 1877 in Phonetic Spelling with a Specimen page of Caxton's Type and Woodcuts. This pamphlet, with an introduction by Isaac Pitman dated May 29, 1877, was issued by Fred. Pitman in London and offered for sale at the price of one penny, presumably at the Caxton Celebration exhibition. In his lengthy introduction Issac Pitman referred to the Elementary Education Act of 1870, requiring education of children in England and Wales, and took the opportunity to promote phonetic spelling as a way of simplifying British education and improving national literacy. In a footnote he wrote: "The Educational Blue Book for 1875-6 gives the following statistics:- 2,221,745 children were presented for examination. Of this number, 19,349 (or less than one per cent.) reached Standard VI :- and 53,587 (3 1/2 per cent, including the previous number) reached Standard V, which a pupil must pass before he is permited to leave school under 13 years of age."

Other publications issued in connection with the exhibition were a new edition of William Blades's The Biography and Typography of William Caxton England's First Printer (1877; first published 1861), William Caxton, the First English Printer. A Biography by printer Charles Knight (1877). This was a new edition of a work previously issued.  Also published in 1877 was a 47-page pamphlet entitled, Who Was William Caxton? by "R[owland] H [ill] B[lades]", brother of William Blades. This was intended to fill a need for an inexpensive, relatively brief account of Caxton.

The most elaborate publication associated with the exhibition was a facsimile of Caxton's The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers. A Facsimile Reproduction of the First Book Printed in England by William Caxton in 1477.  This facsimile, printed in two-color photolithography, included an introduction by William Blades printed by letterpress. The volume was offered for sale by the London publisher Elliot Stock at the price of one guinea bound in a heavy coated paper binding over boards, and blindstamped very effectively to resemble a blind-stamped calf binding of the 15th century.

Bigmore & Wyman, A Bibliography of Printing I (1880-84) 124-26. Twyman, Early Lithographed Books (1990) 258.

On August 12, 1877 Thomas Alva Edison of Menlo Park, now Edison, New Jersey, invented the phonograph. In the first test of the machine Edison recited the nursery rhyme, "Mary had a little lamb." Edison's phonograph recorded on a metal cylinder wrapped with metal foil. Following his presentation of the phonograph at the editorial offices of Scientific American in New York on December 7, 1877, Edison applied for the patent on December 24.

A notable aspect of the originality of this invention is that before Edison invented the phonograph few people ever imagined a need for such a device.

In 1878 the Remington Model 2 typewriter, produced by the Remington Typewriter Co. of Ilion, New York, introduced a shift key, allowing the typing of both upper and lower case letters.

In an article published in the North American Review in June 1878 Thomas Edison described future uses for his phonograph, which he had invented on August 12, 1877:

1. Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.
2. Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their part.
3. The teaching of elocution.
4. Reproduction of music.
5. The "Family Record"--a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons.
6. Music-boxes and toys.
7. Clocks that should announce in articulate speech the time for going home, going to meals, etc.
8. The preservation of languages by exact reproduction of the manner of pronouncing.
9. Educational purposes; such as preserving the explanations made by a teacher, so that the pupil can refer to them at any moment, and spelling or other lessons placed upon the phonograph for convenience in committing to memory.
10. Connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication."

James and John Ritty of Dayton, Ohio patented a cash register. It had a large display to record money received and a locked drawer to hold cash receipts.

Thomas Alva Edison produced the first incandescent light bulb capable of burning for a substantial period of time.

George R. Carey, a professional surveyer employed by the city of Boston, proposed one of the earliest systems of television transmission. 

"In the May 17, 1878 issue of Scientific American, the editors alluded to their earlier article about the 'telectroscope invented by M. Senlecq of Ardres.' This was followed by the news that they had before them 'some very ingenious and curious applications of selenium, in which its peculiar property of changing its electrical conductivity when exposed to light varying in intensity is utilized. The several devices are the invention of Mr. George R. Carey, of Boston, Mass.' A more detailed article was published in the June 5, 1880 Scientific American" (Wikipedia article on George R. Carey, accessed 02-05-2012).

Adriano de Paiva, a professor of chemistry and physics at the Polytechnic Academy at Porto (Portugal) issued the first separate publication on television: La telescopie électrique basée sur l'emploi du selenium, a 48-page pamphlet published in Porto.

Paiva's paper represented the first theoretical formulation of the possibility of using selenium to transmit images at a distance. Paiva became interseted in the possibility of transmitting images by wire after the demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell's telephone in Lisbon in November 1877.

On April 1, 1880 American inventor Alexander Graham Bell and his then-assistant Charles Summer Tainter transmitted the first wireless telephone message 213 meters on a beam of light between the roof of the Franklin School and the window of Bell's Washington, D. C. laboratory using the photophone. 

"The photophone used crystalline selenium cells at the focal point of its parabolic receiver. This material's electrical resistance varies inversely with the illumination falling upon it, i.e., its resistance is higher when it is in the dark, and lower when it is exposed to light. The idea of the photophone was thus to modulate a light beam: the resulting varying illumination of the receiver would induce a corresponding varying resistance in the selenium cells, which were then used by a telephone to regenerate the sounds captured at the receiver. The modulation of the transmitted light beam was done by a mirror made to vibrate by a person's voice: the thin mirror would alternate between concave and convex forms, thus focusing or dispersing the light from the light source. The photophone functioned similarly to the telephone, except the photophone used light as a means of projecting information, while the telephone relied on a modulated electrical signal carried over a conductive wire circuit" (Wikipedia article on Photophone, accessed 03-27-2010).

Bell's and Tainter's invention, for which Bell received the master patent (U.S. Patent 235,199) in December 1880, was the forerunner of wireless telecommunications and the far-advanced forerunner of fiber-optic telecommunications.

According to Long & Groth, Bibliography of Early Optical (Audio) Communications (2005) Bell's first paper on the photophone, "Prof. A. G. Bell on Selenium and the Photophone," was first published in The Electrician No 5, 18 September 1880, 220-221 and 2 October 1880, 237. The complete paper also was published in Nature (London) Vol 22, 23 September 1880, 500 - 503. Thus the first complete publication appears to be the version published in Nature.

Bell's longer paper "On the Production and Reproduction of Sound by Light: the Photophone" was first published in American Assocation  for the Advancement of Science, Proceedings, Vol 29., October 1880, 115-136. This paper was widely reprinted in other journals. "In these papers, Bell accords the credit for the first demonstrations of the transmission of speech by light to a Mr A C Brown of London 'in September or October 1878' "(Wikipedia article on Photophone, accessed 03-27-2010).

German-American clock-maker and inventor Ottmar Mergenthaler of Baltimore invented the first mechanical typesetting machine or composing machine that could set complete lines of type, or slugs. By speeding up typesetting this machine revolutionized print production, first in newspapers where speed in producing frequent daily editions was required.  The machine eventually became known as the Linotype.

Mergenthaler developed the first simple prototype in 1883, and in 1884 he

"conceived the idea of assembling a line of dies or female matrices and casting into them molten metal to form a complete slug or line of type. . . . The matrices in these machines were stamped on the edges of upright bars, each bar containing the letters of the entire alphabet, the operation of the keyboard acting to set up stops which allowed these bars to descend to the proper distance, when a cast was taken from the aligned matrices. The wedge justifier, or the invention of which litigation afterward developed, was incorporated in the second machine built, in 1885.

"The impossiblity of correcting errors as soon as discovered led to the conception of the independent matrix machine, which was next built in 1885, and this marked the advent of the Linotype as a new factor in the printing world."

The first "direct band type casting machine" was in test operation by July 1884.  The first machine with "independent or free matrices" was in operation on July 15, 1885.

Schlesinger ed., The Biography of Ottmar Mergenthaler, Inventor of the Linotype (1989) 18-23. Thompson, History of Composing Machines (1904) 100.

The world's oldest running motor car, a 1884 De Dion-Bouton Dos-a-Dos Steam Runabout, sold for $4.62 million at RM Auctions in Hershey, Pennsylvania on October 8, 2011.

Commissioned by French entrepreneur, Count de Dion, the car was named ‘La Marquise’ after his mother. 

"In 1887, the Count of Dion drove La Marquise in an exhibition that has sometimes been called the world’s first car race, though his was the only car that showed up. It made the 20-odd-mile Paris-to-Versailles round trip at an average speed of almost 16 m.p.h. The next year, he beat Bouton on a three-wheeler with an average speed of 18 m.p.h.

"Fueled by coal, wood and bits of paper, the car takes half an hour to forty minutes to build up enough steam to drive. Top speed is 38 miles per hour (61 km/h).

As the oldest car, it wore the number "0" in the 1996 London to Brighton Veteran Car Run. The vehicle was sold at the 2007 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance for US$3,520,000" (Wikipedia article on La Marquise, accessed 10-09-2011).

Though efforts to invent a fountain pen occurred much earlier, efficiently functioning fountain pens were developed in several places by several different inventors from the 1850s through 1880s.

"Starting in the 1850s there was a steadily accelerating stream of fountain pen patents and pens in production. It was only after three key inventions were in place, however, that the fountain pen became a widely popular writing instrument. Those inventions were the iridium-tipped gold nib, hard rubber, and free-flowing ink" (Wikipedia article on Fountain Pen, accessed 04-15-2011).

The development of free-flowing ink was the invention of the American insurance salesman Lewis E. Waterman of New York City who employed the capillarity principle to allow air to induce a steady and even flow of ink in his fountain pen, receiving U.S. patent number 293545 in February 1884. Waterman's mechanism allowed a careful balance between ink leaving the pen and air entering:

"The downward flow of the ink by gravity and through the action of capillary attraction in the act of writing causes it to pass through [a] groove, and tends to create a vacuum within the reservoir, which is met by the influx of air passing upward through the groove. The direction of the current of air entering the ink-reservoir being opposite to that of the outflowing ink, the volume of the latter is somewhat lessened, and excessive discharge prevented" (Patent 293545).

♦ Thanks to Norman Hills for suggesting this entry and supplying key information.

German engineer, industrial designer and industrialist Gottlieb Daimler invented the internal combustion engine, and with his business partner Wilhelm Maybach fitted this to a two-wheeler— the first internal combustion motorcycle. In 1886 Daimler and Maybach fitted the engine to a stagecoach, and a boat. Daimler baptized it the Grandfather Clock engine (Standuhr) because of its resemblance to an old pendulum clock. 

In 1885 German engine designer and automobile engineer of Mannheim Karl Benz designed the Benz Patent Motorwagon, the first automobile designed to generate its own power, not work as a motorized stage coach or horse carriage.

"The Benz Patent Motorwagen was a three-wheeled automobile with a rear-mounted engine. The vehicle contained many new inventions. It was constructed of steel tubing with woodwork panels. The steel-spoked wheels and solid rubber tires were Benz's own design. Steering was by way of a toothed rack that pivoted the unsprung front wheel. Fully-elliptic springs were used at the back along with a live axle and chain drive on both sides. A simple belt system served as a single-speed transmission, varying torque between an open disc and drive disc.

"The first Motorwagen used the Benz 954 cc single-cylinder four-stroke engine. This new engine produced ⅔ hp (½ kW) at 250 rpm in the Patent Motorwagen, although later tests by the University of Mannheim showed it to be capable of .9 hp (0.7 kW) at 400 rpm. It was an extremely light engine for the time, weighing about 100 kg (220 lb). Although its open crankcase and drip oiling system would be alien to a modern mechanic, its use of a pushrod-operated poppet valve for exhaust would be quite familiar. A large horizontal flywheel stabilized the single-cylinder engine's power output. An evaporative carburettor was controlled by a sleeve valve to regulate power and engine speed" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent_Motorwagen, accessed 06-01-2009).

The Motorwagen was patented on January 29, 1886 as DRP-37435: "automobile fueled by gas."

"The 1885 version was difficult to control, leading to a collision with a wall during a public demonstration. The first successful tests on public roads were carried out in the early summer of 1886. The next year Benz created the Motorwagen Model 2 which had several modifications, and in 1887, the definitive Model 3 with wooden wheels was introduced, showing at the Paris Expo the same year" (Wikipedia article on Karl Benz, accessed 06-01-2009).

Bookseller and publisher, A. Roux, in textile center Lyon, France, issued Livre de Prières tissé d'après les enluminures des manuscrits du XIVe au XVI siecle. It consisted of monochrome sheets of woven silk, designed by Father J. Herver after pages from manuscript books of hours from the 14th to 16th century.

The pages included elaborate borders, decorative initials, and three miniatures of the Virgin and Child, Crucifixion and Nativity produced on the Jacquard loom by J. A. Henry, the designs having been punched into thousands of Jacquard cards. The work was issued with the approval of the Archbishop of Lyon.

The technical virtuosity, and degree of finesse achieved in this production represented a high point in the application of the Jacquard loom to the weaver's art. The original designs for the whole work are held by the Musée Historique des Tissus in Lyon.

P. Arizzoli-Clementel, La Musée des Tissus de Lyon (1990) 100.

Ottmar Mergenthaler's Linotype composing machine was first used by the New York Daily Tribune newspaper on page four of its issue of July 3, 1886. The parts composed by the Linotype can be distinguished from the hand-set type because of a single wrong-font bold face apostrophe. This appears in only three of the stories in columns two and three of the page.

Mechanical composing machines resulted in greatly increased production speed, and lowered typesetting cost, resulting in longer newspapers. Because of the time involved in hand-typesetting, and constant deadlines to be met, before the Linotype no newspaper consisted of more than eight pages.

Schlesinger, ed., The Biography of Ottmar Mergenthaler, Inventor of the Lintotype (1989) 113-116, with a full-size facsimile of page 4 of the July 3, 1886 issue of the newspaper folded into the volume. Schlesinger, who was an experienced Linotype operator, discovered the first published typesetting done on the Linotype, as the the New York Daily Tribune quietly introduced the new technology without an announcement.

In 1887 Emile Berliner invented the flat disc Gramophone in Washington, D.C. The flat disc eventually replaced the Edison wax cylinder as a recording and playback device, and enabled the birth of the recording industry.

In 1887 American inventor Tolbert Lanston of Washington, D.C. demonstrated his prototype of the Monotype machine. Lanston's typesetting machine consisted of a keyboard producing a perforated record of a job in a paper spool, something like a player piano roll, which controlled an associated machine for fashioning types from cold strips of metal with 196 matrices.

"The perforated tapes, of which he employed two, caused a strip of type metal to be fed into a compression box and the proper die to be centered above it, a section of the type metal cut off and compressed to form the type, which was then ejected on to the gallery, the entire operation of the typemaking machine being automatic. Justification was provided for on a novel principle.  A scale indicated to the operator of the perforating mechanism on completion of a line the amount of space yet unfilled and the perecentage which this bore to the filled space, he thereupon striking certain keys to cause perforations to be made at the end of the line. The tape was fed backward through the automatic typemaking machine and these last perforations caused the body of each letter in the line, or, if desired, only the spaces therein, to be increased above the normal such a percentage as to produce a line of justified type. In this machine electromagnets were employed to control the mechanism" (Thompson, History of Composing Machines  [1904] 120-21).

Notably Lanston demonstrated his machine three years after Mergenthaler invented the Linotype, and one year after the Linotype was usefully applied to production of the New York Daily Tribune Newspaper.

Both Lanston's U.S. and British patents are dated June 7, 1887. The British patent specification No. 8183, Improvements in the Art of Printing, in my collection makes 64 claims with respect to a mechanism for line justification and a method of type forming. It consists of 29 pages of text and 9 diagrams, of which 8 are double-page.

Lanston's statement begins:

"While astonishing progress has been made in those branches of the art of printing which relate to the taking of impressions and to the folding and delivery of the matter printed, but comparatively little practical advance has been made in that department which relates particularly to the setting up and justification of the lines from which the impressions are to be taken.

"Type setting machines of more or less efficiency it is true have been employed to assemble the types but, even where such machines have been successfully used it has always been found necessary to subject each line of composition to a process of justification involving, usually the introduction of suitable mechanism, or by hand, of additional spaces, or of the substitution of wide or narrow spaces, and vice versa, much the same as in the case of matter set up by hand.

"Machines have also been constructed with a view to the production of solid lines of justified composition, even in such machines the justification of the line is only secured by justifying the dies or molds which produce them and this justifying operation is performed in the ordinary manner, above referred to.

"My invention is a wide departure from the previous methods and proceeds upon a principle, which I believe to be radically new. Instead of producing a line of composition and then justifying it I form my types for a given line in such manner as to cause them when assembled, to form a complete justified line ready for printing direct or for making an impression for stereotype or electrotype purposes without further manipulation.

"In attempting to surplant by machinery the ancient process of setting type by hand the advantages to be derived from copying as many of the conditions of such hand set type as possible as [sic; should be "are"] manifest. By so doing, the mechanical products will be in harmony with all the other conditions of the art of printing as now practiced, will involve no departure from its usages and will permit the same method of correction of errors, interpolations, shifting of matter &c. as are now in vogue. It is well known that in ordinary composition where common type is used it rarely ever exactly fills a line of given length, the rule being that a space of greater or less length is left at the end of the line which must be filled up or absorbed in the process of justification. Now, since it is apparent that in every case this unoccupied space at the end of the line must bear a certain relation to the part of the line filled by the characters or in other words, represent a certain percentage of the combined width of such characters, it follows, that if there be added to the normal width of the body of each of the assembled types a percentage of increase, corresponding to the percentage which said unoccupied space represents to the occupied space, the line composed of types so formed will be rendered self justifying. . . . "(pp. 1-2).

In 1894 Thomas Edison of Menlo Park (now Edison), New Jersey formally introduced the Kinetograph, the first practical moving picture camera, and the Kinetoscope, a hand-cranked, single-viewer, lighted box to display the resulting films.

This group of inventions was for the most part developed by Edison's employee, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson.

"In 1888, American inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Alva Edison conceived of a device that would do 'for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear'. In October, Edison filed a preliminary claim, known as a caveat, with the U.S. Patent Office outlining his plans for the device. In March 1889, a second caveat was filed, in which the proposed motion picture device was given a name, the Kinetoscope. Dickson, then the Edison company's official photographer, was assigned to turn the concept into a reality.

"Dickson invented the first practical celluloid film for this application and decided on 35 mm for the size, a standard still used.

"Dickson and his team at the Edison lab then worked on the development of the Kinetoscope for several years. The first working prototype was unveiled in May 1891 and the design of system was essentially finalized by the fall of 1892. The completed version of the Kinetoscope was officially unveiled at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on 9 May 1893. Not technically a projector system, it was a peep show machine showing a continuous loop of the film Dickson invented, lit by an Edison light source, viewed individually through the window of a cabinet housing its components. The Kinetoscope introduced the basic approach that would become the standard for all cinematic projection before the advent of video. It creates the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter. Dickson and his team also devised the Kinetograph, an innovative motion picture camera with rapid intermittent, or stop-and-go, film movement, to photograph movies for in-house experiments and, eventually, commercial Kinetoscope presentations" (Wikipedia article on William Kennedy Dickson, accessed 02-15-2013).

Kinetescope parlors were supplied with fifty-foot film snippets shot by Dickson, in Edison's "Black Maria" studio. The invention was a widely imitated, international success.

In June 1894 Dickson and his sister Antonia published "Edison's Invention Of The Kineto-Phonograph" in Century Magazine, and the following year they published History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope and Kinetophonograph. In 2001 the Museum of Modern Art published a facsimile edition of Dickson's own annotated copy of this 55-page pamphlet.

Inventor and entrepreneur George Eastman of Rochester, New York used Cellulose Nitrate as a base for photographic roll film. Cellulose nitrate was used for photographic and professional 35mm motion picture film until the 1950s, eventually creating one of the most dramatic problems in the preservation of media.

"It is highly inflammable and also decomposes to a dangerous condition with age. When new, nitrate film could be ignited with the heat of a cigarette; partially decomposed, it can ignite spontaneously at temperatures as low as 120 F (49C). Nitrate film burns rapidly, fuelled by its own oxygen, and releases toxic fumes.

"Decomposition: There are five stages in the decomposition of nitrate film:

"(i) Amber discolouration with fading of picture.
"(ii) The emulsion becomes adhesive and films stick together; film becomes brittle.
"(iii) The film contains gas bubbles and gives off a noxious odour
"(iv) The film is soft, welded to adjacent film and frequently covered with a viscous froth
"(v) The film mass degenerates into a brownish acrid powder.

"Film in the first and second stages can be copied, as may parts of films at the third stage of decomposition. Film at the fourth or fifth stages is useless and should be immediately destroyed by your local fire brigade because of the dangers of spontaneous combustion and chemical attack on other films. Contact your local environmental health officer about this.

"It has been estimated that the majority of nitrate film will have decomposed to an uncopiable state by the year 2000, though archives are now deep-freezing film."

Charles Babbage’s son Henry Prevost Babbage completed and published his father’s unfinished edition of writings on the Difference Engine No. 1 and the Analytical Engine, together with a listing of his father’s unpublished plans and notebooks. These appear under the title of Babbage’s Calculating Engines.

This work was the principal source of information for the technical operation of Babbage’s Difference and Analytical engines. Toward the end of his life, Babbage began assembling his own and other’s previously published writings on his Difference and Analytical Engines with the intent of publishing a history of his work designing the machines, and descriptions of the way that the machines would operate. However, Babbage died before he could accomplish this task. He had the first 294 pages of this work typeset and printed on slightly varying qualities of paper during his lifetime. The differences in the paper used for portions of the work would suggest that sections were printed intermittently rather than all at one time. It would appear that Babbage’s purpose in producing this work was to collect the most significant published writings on his calculating engines, most of which had appeared as obscure pamphlets or in little-read journals, together with a listing of what remained unpublished, including all of Babbage’s notebooks and engineering drawings (listed on pp. 271-294), in the hope that his unfinished projects might be completed at some future date.

Almost twenty years after Babbage’s death, his youngest son, Major-General Henry Prevost Babbage, to whom Babbage had bequeathed his parts for his calculating engines, and everything else pertaining to them, completed the book, incorporating the printed sheets that Babbage had produced along with concluding material, reflecting his own frustrated efforts to effect realization of Babbage’s engines. Were it not for this volume, and for the bibliography of Babbage’s works published both here (on the last three printed pages of the book) and in Babbage’s autobiography, Babbage’s achievements might have been forgotten. Henry Babbage also completed six small demonstration pieces of the Difference Engine No. 1, and in 1910 at the age of 86, Henry Babbage also completed an experimental four-function calculator for the Mill for the Analytical Engine.  This was the only portion of the Analytical Engine that was ever produced in metal.

As it turned out Babbage’s designs were not implemented until the 20th century because in the era of human computers there was no pressing need for the machines that Babbage envisioned and designed. Yet because of these published works, Babbage’s ambitions and his ideas remained alive in the minds of people working in mechanical computation long after his technology had fallen into obsolescence. When Vannevar Bush suggested in 1936 that electromechanical technology might be the way to realize “Babbage’s large conception” of the Analytical Engine, he cited this volume among his references; and in building the electromechanical Harvard Mark I, Howard Aiken saw himself fulfilling Babbage’s ambition. However, some experts have inferred that Aiken’s knowledge of Babbage’s work may have been limited to what he read in Babbage’s autobiography, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, as Aiken did not include conditional branching in the design of the Mark I—a key idea that Babbage designed into the Analytical Engine.

Hyman, Charles Babbage, Pioneer of the Computer, 254. Van Sinderen, Alfred W. "The Printed Papers of Charles Babbage" Annals of the History of Computing, 2 (April 1980) :169-185 mentions in item CB80, that Babbage listed a History of the Analytical Engine as being “in the press” in 1864.

in 1889 about 77 windmill factories scattered across the United States employed about 1,100 workers. They sold water-pumping windmills to railroads, who needed water for their steam locomotives, and to farmers, to pump water for their animals.

German pioneer of human aviation known as the Glider King Otto Lilienthal published Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst. Lilienthal's study of the method and aerodynamics of bird flight was the first textbook of mechanical flight. Lilienthal applied the the results of his bird-flight studies to the problem of human flight, constructing one-man gliders based on the shape of a bird's wing; the experiments he conducted with these from 1891 until his tragic death in 1896 demonstrated the practical application of his theories of flight and inspired others to build upon his initial investigations.

On 9 August 1896 Lilienthal fell from a height of 17 m (56 ft), breaking his spine. He died the next day, saying, "Kleine Opfer müssen gebracht werden!" ("Small sacrifices must be made!") and was buried at Lankwitz public cemetery in Berlin.

"Lilienthal's book [became] one of the chief bibles for the aeronautical world after he demonstrated that his theories could be put into practice. . . . It was the basis on which the Wrights first started building their aerodynamic work, and they were always high in praise of its pioneering value, even when they were led to modify Lilienthal's findings" (Gibbs-Smith, The Invention of the Aeroplane [1799-1909] 23, and 23-25).

Lilienthal's work was translated into English as Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation and published in London in 1911.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1353.

The "Millionaire" mechanical calculator, about the size of a small desk top, was introduced in Switzerland.

The "Millionaire" was the first commercially successful calculator that could perform multiplication directly, rather than by repeated addition. It was designed by Otto Steiger, a Swiss engineer and was first patented in Germany in 1892. Patents were issued in France, Switzerland, Canada and the USA in 1893. Production by Hans W. Egli of Zurich started in 1893, and continued to 1935. Most models were driven by hand-crank but some were electrified.

Roughly 4000-5000 Millionaires were sold. 

Karl Benz of Mannheim, Germany created the Victoria, a two-passenger, 4-wheeled automobile with a 3-hp engine, which could reach the top speed of 11 mph and had a pivotal front axle operated by a roller-chained tiller for steering. The model was successful with 85 units sold in 1893.

"In 1894 Benz improved this design in his new Velo model. This was produced on such a remarkably large scale for the era—1,200 total from 1894 to 1901— that it may be considered the first production automobile. The Benz Velo also participated in the first automobile race, the 1894 Paris to Rouen Rally" (Wikipedia article on Karl Benz, accessed 06-01-2009).

By the end of the nineteenth century Benz was the largest automobile company in the world with 572 units produced in 1899.

The recently established Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung held an exhibition in Munich of Mathematical and Mathematical-Physical Models, Apparatus, and Instruments.

This was the first international exhibition limited to mathematical devices, including calculating instruments; it reflected the huge growth in the field since the London exposition of 1876. The exhibition had been planned for the previous year but was canceled because of an outbreak of cholera in northern Germany.

Charles Duryea and Frank Duryea demonstrated their one-cylinder "Ladies Phaeton" at Chicopee, Massachusetts. This was the first successful gas-engine automobile built in the United States.

In 1894 the brothers built a second automobile. This car, driven by Frank, won the Chicago Times Herald race in Chicago on a snowy Thanksgiving day in 1895. Frank Duryea travelled 54 miles (87 km) at an average 7.5 mph (12 km/h), marking the first U.S. auto race in which any entrants finished. That same year, the brothers founded the Duryea Motor Wagon Company, and began commercial production, selling thirteen cars by the end of 1896.

American railroad engineer Octave Chanute published his book, Progress in Flying Machines, in New York at the press of the American Engineer and Railroad Journal. This book was the first organized and published collection of aviation research, and a work which profoundly influenced the Wright Brothers. Chanute first became interested in aviation in 1875, and after his retirement in 1890 devoted all of his time to promoting this new science. He began collecting data from flight researchers all over the world, which he published in a series of articles in The Railroad and Engineering Journal between 1891 and 1893, and collected a year later for publication in book form.

In collaboration with other researchers, Chanute also conducted several experiments with various types of gliders, concluding from these investigations that the best way to achieve extra lift without a prohibitive increase in weight was to stack several wings one above the other. This led him to design the unmotorized Chanute biplane, upon which the Wright brothers based their first glider. Chanute and the Wright brothers became acquainted in 1900, when Wilbur Wright wrote to Chanute after reading Progress in Flying Machines. Chanute visited Kitty Hawk several times and helped to publicize the Wrights' work.

The first mainline electrification was installed on a four-mile stretch (Baltimore Belt Line) of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

Louis Jean and Auguste Marie Louis Nicholas Lumière of Lyon patented the cinématographe, a three-in-one motion picture camera, developer and projector.

Prior to inventing the cinématographe the Lumière brothers invented sprocket holes in the film strip as a means of getting the film through the camera and projector.

Tolbert Lanston of Washington, D.C., the American inventor of the typesetting machine that would later be called Monotype, obtained a patent for a typesetting system based on hot-metal casting.

On August 21, 1897 Ransom E. Olds founded the Olds Motor Vehicle Company in Lansing, Michigan.  In 1899 copper and lumber magnate Samuel L. Smith bought Olds' company and renamed it Olds Motor Works. The new company was relocated from Lansing to Detroit, and Smith became President while Olds became vice president and general manager. 

In 1901 Olds designed and introduced the Curved Dash Oldsmobile.  Selling for $650, this was the first high-volume, mass-produced, low-priced American motor vehicle, produced on the first assembly line, a development of immense consequence which Olds patented. Although the factory was destroyed by fire that year, the company still sold over 600 models of the Curved Dash. The assembly line approach to building automobiles enabled Olds to more than quintuple his factory’s output, from 425 cars in 1901 to 2,500 in 1902, to up to 5000 units in 1904.

American inventor Wilbur Wright of Dayton, Ohio published "Some aeronautical experiments," Journal of the Western Society of Engineers 6 (1901) 489-510.

This speech delivered at the Western Society of Engineers in Chicago on September 18, 1901 was the Wright brothers' first publication on aeronautics, and the work which first made their experiments with motorless gliders known to the world. Wilbur Wright's paper, illustrated with photographs, described the brothers' progress over three seasons of glider flight, including their work from 1900 and 1901 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, during which they began to master the art of flight control and they solved the problem of wing warp drag by the addition of a vertical rear rudder. 

Wright made this address to the Western Society of Engineers at the urging of Octave Chanute, who was to a large degree responsible for encouraging the brothers' early work. The paper is prefaced by some remarks by Octave Chanute, discussing the possibility of motorized flight using a new lightweight steam or gas engine.

From October to December 1901 the Wrights built a six-foot wind tunnel in their shop and conducted systematic tests on miniature wings.

"The 'balances' they devised and mounted inside the tunnel to hold the wings looked crude, made of bicycle spokes and scrap metal, but were 'as critical to the ultimate success of the Wright brothers as were the gliders.' The devices allowed the brothers to balance lift against drag and accurately calculate the performance of each wing. They could also see which wings worked well as they looked through the viewing window in the top of the tunnel."

". . . The Wrights took a huge step forward and made basic wind tunnel tests on 200 wings of many shapes and airfoil curves, followed by detailed tests on 38 of them. The tests, according to biographer Howard, 'were the most crucial and fruitful aeronautical experiments ever conducted in so short a time with so few materials and at so little expense'. An important discovery was the benefit of longer narrower wings: in aeronautical terms, wings with a larger aspect ratio (wingspan divided by chord—the wing's front-to-back dimension). Such shapes offered much better lift-to-drag ratio than the broader wings the brothers had tried so far.

"With this knowledge, and a more accurate Smeaton number, the Wrights designed their 1902 glider. Using another crucial discovery from the wind tunnel, they made the airfoil flatter, reducing the camber (the depth of the wing's curvature divided by its chord). The 1901 wings had significantly greater curvature, a highly inefficient feature the Wrights copied directly from Lilienthal. Fully confident in their new wind tunnel results, the Wrights discarded Lilienthal's data, now basing their designs on their own calculations.  

"With characteristic caution, the brothers first flew the 1902 glider as an unmanned kite, as they had done with their two previous versions. Rewarding their wind tunnel work, the glider produced the expected lift. It also had a new structural feature: a fixed, rear vertical rudder, which the brothers hoped would eliminate turning problems. By 1902 they realized that wing-warping created 'differential drag' at the wingtips. Greater lift at one end of the wing also increased drag, which slowed that end of the wing, making the aircraft swivel—or yaw—so the nose pointed away from the turn. That was how the tailless 1901 glider behaved.

The improved wing design enabled consistently longer glides, and the rear rudder prevented adverse yaw—so effectively that it introduced a new problem. Sometimes when the pilot attempted to level off from a turn, the glider failed to respond to corrective wing-warping and persisted into a tighter turn. The glider would slide toward the lower wing, which hit the ground, spinning the aircraft around. The Wrights called this 'well digging'. Orville apparently visualized that the fixed rudder resisted the effect of corrective wing-warping when attempting to level off from a turn. He wrote in his diary that on the night of October 2, 'I studied out a new vertical rudder'. The brothers then decided to make the rear rudder movable to solve the problem. They hinged the rudder and connected it to the pilot's warping 'cradle', so a single movement by the pilot simultaneously controlled wing-warping and rudder deflection. Tests while gliding proved that the trailing edge of the rudder should be turned away from whichever end of the wings had more drag (and lift) due to warping. The opposing pressure produced by turning the rudder enabled corrective wing-warping to reliably restore level flight after a turn or a wind disturbance. Furthermore, when the glider banked into a turn, rudder pressure overcame the effect of differential drag and pointed the nose of the aircraft in the direction of the turn, eliminating adverse yaw.

"In short, the Wrights discovered the true purpose of the movable vertical rudder. Its role was not to change the direction of flight, but rather, to aim or align the aircraft correctly during banking turns and when leveling off from turns and wind disturbances. The actual turn—the change in direction—was done with roll control using wing-warping. The principles remained the same when ailerons superseded wing-warping.

"With their new method the Wrights achieved true control in turns for the first time on October 8, 1902, a major milestone. During September and October they made between 700 and 1,000 glides, the longest lasting 26 seconds and covering 622.5 feet (189.7 m). Hundreds of well-controlled glides after they made the rudder steerable convinced them they were ready to build a powered flying machine. Thus did three-axis control evolve: wing-warping for roll (lateral motion), forward elevator for pitch (up and down) and rear rudder for yaw (side to side).  

"On March 23, 1903, the Wrights applied for their famous patent for a 'Flying Machine', based on their successful 1902 glider. Some aviation historians believe that applying the system of three-axis flight control on the 1902 glider was equal to, or even more significant, than the addition of power to the 1903 Flyer. Peter Jakab of the Smithsonian asserts that perfection of the 1902 glider essentially represents invention of the airplane" (Wikipedia article on Wright Brothers, accessed 12-19-2009).

♦ On June 24, 1903 Wilbur Wright delivered a second paper at the Western Society of Engineers entitled "Experiments and Observations in Soaring Flight." This paper, illustrated with photographs, was published in the Journal of the Western Society of Engineers VIII (1903) 400-417. It contained a summary of their work leading up to the patent application. During the question session after the paper Wilbur stated that "We have not applied a motor to any of machines. The driving force has been gravity." (p. 415). 

Of the work described in their second paper Wilbur later testified in 1912:  

"This was the first time in the history of the world that lateral balance had been achieved by adjusting wing tips to respectively different angles of incidence on the right and left sides. It was also the first time that a vertical vane had been used in combination with wing tips, adjustable to respectively different angles of incidence, in balancing and steering an aeroplane . . . .We were the first to functionally employ a movable vertical tail in a flying aeroplane. We were the first to employ wings adjustable to respectively different angles of incidence in a flying aeroplane. We were the first to use the two in combination in a flying aeroplane (quoted in Freudenthal Flight into History.The Wright Brothers and the Air Age [1949] 60).

Upon returning to Kitty Hawk, the Wrights built their first motorized flyer, the Wright Flyer 1. Wilbur made the first unsuccessful attempt to fly it on December 14, 1903. On December 17th they made the first "sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight"over the Kill Devil Hills (852 feet in 59 seconds). During the two following years the Wrights developed their flying machine into the first practical fixed wing aircraft. But until their patent was granted they made no public demonstration of motorized flight and published nothing further about their invention.

♦ The Wrights were granted patent 821,393 for their "Flying-Machine" on May 22, 1906. The patent described their method of three-axis control.

"The patent illustrates a non-powered flying machine—namely, the 1902 glider. The patent's importance lies in its claim of a new and useful method of controlling a flying machine, powered or not. The technique of wing-warping is described, but the patent explicitly states that other methods instead of wing-warping could be used for adjusting the outer portions of a machine's wings to different angles on the right and left sides to achieve lateral (roll) control. The concept of varying the angle presented to the air near the wingtips, by any suitable method, is central to the patent. The patent also describes the steerable rear vertical rudder and its innovative use in combination with wing-warping, enabling the airplane to make a coordinated turn, a technique that prevents hazardous adverse yaw, the problem Wilbur had when trying to turn the 1901 glider. Finally, the patent describes the forward elevator, used for ascending and descending" (Wikipedia article on Wright Brothers, accessed 12-19-2009).

Gibbs-Smith, The Invention of the Aeroplane 1799-1909 (1966) 37-40. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 2266 & 2267 (stating incorrectly that Wright's second paper discusses motorized flight).

In 1903 Russian schoolteacher and scientist Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (Tsiolkovskii) (Константи́н Эдуа́рдович Циолко́вский) published from Saint Petersburg "Issledovanie mirovykh prostrantsv’ reaktivnymi priborami" ["Exploration of Space Using Reactive Devices"] in Научное Обозрьніе [Nauchnoe Obozrenie (Science review)] no. 5, May 1903, followed by part 2: "Issledovanie mirovykh prostrantsv’ reaktivnymi priborami" in Въстникъ Воздухоплаванія [Vestnik’ Vozdukhoplavania] / Revue de navigation aérienne (1911-12), numbers 19, 20, 21, 22, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, followed by part 3: Issledovanie mirovykh prostrantsv’ reaktivnymi priborami privately issued by Tsiolkovsky as a pamphlet in Kaluga in 1914.

These papers represented the beginnings of the modern era of spaceflight theory, preceding the earliest publications of Robert Goddard (1919) and Robert Esnault-Pelterie (1913). "Tsiolkovsky had grasped the principle of reaction flight as early as 1883, and his 'Exploration of Space Using Reactive Devices' (1903) contains the first mathematical exposition of the reaction principle operating in space. In ‘Issledovanie mirovykh prostranstv reaktivnymi priborami’ . . . Tsiolkovsky set forth his theory of the motion of rockets, established the possibility of space travel by means of rockets, and adduced the fundamental flight formulas” (Dictionary of Scientific Biography).

“Tsiolkovsky not only solved theoretically such age-old questions as how to escape from the Earth’s atmosphere and gravitational field, but he also described several rockets. The first, conceived in 1903, was to be powered by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen—a very modern propellant combination . . . [Tsiolkovsky] made another discovery—the multistage rocket, which he called the ‘rocket train.’ Actually, this concept was not as new as Tsiolkovsky, who discovered it independently, thought; firework makers had used the principle for at least 200 years. But Tsiolkovsky was the first to analyze the idea in a sophisticated manner. The multistage technique, he concluded, was the only feasible means by which a space vehicle could attain the velocity necessary to escape from the Earth’s gravitational hold” (Von Braun & Ordway, History of Rocketry and Space Travel [1975] 42).

Tsiolkovsky’s “Issledovanie mirovykh prostrantsv’ reaktivnymi priborami” was published in three parts, issued irregularly over a period of 13 years. Both the first and second parts were published as journal articles, the second part appearing over ten numbers of the Vestnik’ Vozdukhoplavania between 1911 and 1912. The third part, published by Tsiolkovsky, was intended as a supplement to the first two parts, which even then had become very difficult to find: In a note printed on the inside front cover of the 1914 pamphlet, Tsiolkovsky stated that the earlier works were unobtainable, and that he himself had only one copy.  According to historian of rocketry Frank Winter, most copies of Tsiolkovsky's 1903 paper were suppressed, as  “the May 1903 issue of Nauchnoe Obozrenie also contained a politically revolutionary piece that led to the confiscation of almost all issues by the authorities” (Winter, "Planning for Spaceflight: 1880s to 1930s," in Blueprint for Space, ed Ordway and Liebermann [1992] 104-05.)

The significance of Tsiolkovsky's work in rocketry and space travel was greatest in Russia where it inspired the early development of rocketry and aerospace research independent of American and European workers. Tsiolkovsky's writings were also known to German rocketry researchers by the 1920s.

English physicist and electrical engineer John Ambrose Fleming, who had worked with Thomas Edison’s company in London, invented and applied for the patent for the two-electrode vacuum-tube rectifier on November 16, 1904.  He filed the complete specification on August 15, 1905 and received British patent no. 24,850 on September 21, 1905 for "Improvements in Instruments for Detecting and Measuring Alternating Electric Currents." Fleming had been aware since 1884 of the “Edison effect,” more commonly known as thermionic emission, of “unilateral flow of particles from negative to positive electrode, and he repeated some of the experiments, with both direct and alternating currents, beginning in 1889. . . . [In 1904] he returned to his experiments on the Edison effect, with a view to producing a rectifier that would replace the inadequate detectors then used in radiotelegraphy. He named the resulting device a ‘thermionic valve,’ for which he obtained a patent in 1904. This was the first electron tube, the diode, ancestor of the triode and the other multielectrode tubes which have played such an important role in both telecommunications and scientific instrumentation” (Dictionary of Scientific Biography). 

Fleming's first written document on the valve was the British patent. However, his first distributed publication on the topic was "On the Conversion of Electric Oscillations into Continuous Currents by Means of a Vacuum Valve," Proceedings of the Royal Society 74 (1905) 476-487, which appeared in the issue of the Proceedings dated March 16, 1905. Fleming’s patent, and this scientific paper introducing the basic principle of the two-electrode vacuum tube or diode, marked the beginning of electronics.

Aside from its multitude of users in radio, radar and other devices, before the development of the transistor the vacuum tube became the first switch used in the earliest electronic computers. Using vacuum tubes as switches, the first general purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC, operated 10,000 times the speed of a human computer. By comparison, the Harvard Mark 1, which used electromechnical relays as switches, computed at 100 times the speed of a human computer.

Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 396 (Proc. Roy. Soc. paper)

Lee de Forest introduced a third electrode called the grid into the vacuum tube. The resulting triode could be used both as an amplifier and a switch.

Chemist, historian of chemistry, and bibliographer John Ferguson published Bibliotheca Chemica. A Catalogue of the Alchemical, Chemical, and Pharmaceutical Books in the Collection of the Late James Young of Kelly and Duris.  The work was finely printed on handmade paper by James Maclehose of Glasgow in an edition of unknown size, in full buckram or quarter morocco bindings, and presented "With the Compliments of the Trustees and Family of the Late Dr. James Young of Kelly."

One of the earliest technical chemists, Young's discovery of the distillation of paraffin from coal and oil-shales made him the founder of the Scottish shale oil industry. In about 1850 Young set out to collect the classic original works in the history of alchemy, chemistry, and pharmacy, eventually aided in this pursuit by Ferguson. Along with Augustus de Morgan and Latimer Clark, Young was one of the earliest collectors of the history of science.

The Young collection numbered about 1400 separate items, many of which were already of the greatest rarity by the end of the nineteenth century. Ferguson's 2-volume catalogue of more than a thousand densely printed quarto pages, with bibliographical details of each work, biographical notices of each writer, and exhaustive lists of references in chronological order, set a new standard in scope and accuracy for the descriptive bibliography of the history of science. Sir William Osler considered Ferguson's catalogue the model of descriptive scientific bibliography, writing in his inimitable style:

"though an absorbing and profitable study, the results of bibliography are too often recorded in tomes of intolerable dullness. The merit that appeals to me [in Ferguson's Bibliotheca Chemica] is the combination of biography with bibliography. Beside the book is a picture of the man sketched by a sympathetic hand "

The Young collection is preserved in the Andersonian Library, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

The assembly line American industrialist Henry Ford sponsored for the Ford Model T began development in 1908 and became operational in Detroit on December 1, 1913, and fully operational in 1915. Contrary to popular mythology, Ford did not invent the automotive assembly line.  That was accomplished by Ransom E. Olds in 1901. (Examples of assembly line production have survived from as early as 215-210 BCE.)

"Despite oversimplistic attempts to attribute it to one man or another, it [Ford's Model T assembly line] was in fact a composite development based on logic that took 7 years and plenty of intelligent men. The principal leaders are discussed below. The basic kernel of an assembly line concept was introduced to Ford Motor Company by William "Pa" Klann upon his return from visiting a Chicago slaughterhouse and viewing what was referred to as the 'disassembly line', where animals were butchered as they moved along a conveyor. The efficiency of one person removing the same piece over and over caught his attention. He reported the idea to Peter E. Martin, soon to be head of Ford production, who was doubtful at the time but encouraged him to proceed. Others at Ford have claimed to have put the idea forth to Henry Ford, but Pa Klann's slaughterhouse revelation is well documented in the archives at the Henry Ford Museum and elsewhere, making him an important contributor to the modern automated assembly line concept. The process was an evolution by trial and error of a team consisting primarily of Peter E. Martin, the factory superintendent; Charles E. Sorensen, Martin's assistant; C. Harold Wills, draftsman and toolmaker; Clarence W. Avery; Charles Ebender; and József Galamb. Some of the groundwork for such development had recently been laid by the intelligent layout of machine tool placement that Walter Flanders had been doing at Ford up to 1908.

"In 1922 Ford (via his ghostwriter Crowther) said of his 1913 assembly line:

'I believe that this was the first moving line ever installed. The idea came in a general way from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers use in dressing beef.'

Charles E. Sorensen, in his 1956 memoir My Forty Years with Ford, presented a different version of development that was not so much about individual 'inventors' as a gradual, logical development of industrial engineering:

" 'What was worked out at Ford was the practice of moving the work from one worker to another until it became a complete unit, then arranging the flow of these units at the right time and the right place to a moving final assembly line from which came a finished product. Regardless of earlier uses of some of these principles, the direct line of succession of mass production and its intensification into automation stems directly from what we worked out at Ford Motor Company between 1908 and 1913. Henry Ford is generally regarded as the father of mass production. He was not. He was the sponsor of it.'

As a result of these developments in method, Ford's cars came off the line in three minute intervals. This was much faster than previous methods, increasing production by eight to one (requiring 12.5 man-hours before, 1 hour 33 minutes after), while using less manpower. It was so successful, paint became a bottleneck. Only japan black would dry fast enough, forcing the company to drop the variety of colors available before 1914, until fast-drying Duco lacquer was developed in 1926. In 1914, an assembly line worker could buy a Model T with four months' pay.

"The assembly line technique was an integral part of the diffusion of the automobile into American society. Decreased costs of production allowed the cost of the Model T to drop within the budget of the American middle class. In 1908, the price of a Model T was around $825, and by 1912 it had dropped to around $575. This price reduction is comparable to a drop from $15,000 to $10,000 in dollar terms from the year 2000" (Wikipedia article on Assembly Line, accessed 02-16-2012).

In a letter written to the journal Nature, A.A. Campbell-Swinton described his concept of electronic television using the cathode ray tube which had been invented in 1897 by the German physicist and Nobel Prize winner Karl Ferdinand Braun.

Swinton "proposed using an electron beam in both the camera and the receiver, which could be steered electronically to produce moving pictures. He lectured on the subject in 1911 and displayed circuit diagrams, but no one, including Swinton, knew how to realize the design. Although his system was never built, the cathode ray tube did come to be used to display images in almost all television sets and computer monitors until the invention of the LCD panel."

In 1909 William D. Weaver published Catalogue of the Wheeler Gift of Books, Pamphlets, and Periodicals in the Library of the American Institute of Engineers.With Introduction, Descriptive and Critical Notes by Brother Potamian. This 2-volume work, which remains the most comprehensive historical bibliography on the subjects, described primarily the library of Latimer Clark, a British electrical engineer and inventor working in London who, in partnership with Sir Charles Tilson Bright, was responsible for laying many of the first submarine telegraphic cables. While pursuing a remarkably successful and creative scientific and entrepeneurial career, Clark also found time to build one of the most complete collections ever formed of early books and manuscripts on the history of electricity and magnetism, including virtually every known publication in English on these subjects prior to 1886.

In collecting the history of electricity and telegraphy Clark followed in the path of Francis Ronalds, another telegraphy pioneer who assembled a somewhat smaller library on the subjects, the catalogue of which appeared in 1880. Nearly coincident with the publication of the catalogue of the Ronalds Library, in 1881 Francesco Rossetti and Giovanni Cantoni issued Bibliografia Italiana di Elettricità e Magnetismo, on the occasion of an international fair on electricity held in Paris in 1881. This briefly annotated bibliography presented the history of the Italian literature on the subject.

In 1901 Clark's library was purchased by the American engineer, Schulyer Skaats Wheeler, and donated by him to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [IEEE]) in New York. The extensively annotated and illustrated catalogue of the collection of 5,966 items, edited by William Weaver and annotated by Brother Potamian, was financed by Andrew Carnegie. Though the title page of the catalogue takes no notice of it, a high percentage of the items in Clark's library, particularly the final 2000 items, concern telegraphy.

♦ Problematic Management of the Latimer Clark Library in the Twentieth Century:

"In 1913 the Engineering Societies Library was established in New York City, a joint venture of the AIEE, the ASME (Mechanical Engineers), and the AIME (Mining Engineers), funded by a $1.5 million gift from Andrew Carnegie. The AIEE’s main contribution to the Library was the Wheeler Gift Collection. For many years the collection was accessible according to the terms above, but in the 1990s the ESL decided that it could no longer maintain its Manhattan premises and closed the library there.

"By that time the Wheeler Gift Collection had been merged with other works at the library, and had suffered from neglect over the years, much of the material being kept in poor physical conditions. A 1985 survey of the collection showed about 9% (532 items) were missing, and it seems unlikely that the situation improved in the following ten years, prior to the dispersion of the collection.

"Constrained by the terms of the Gift to keep the collection in New York City, the ESL boxed up whatever could be definitely identified as part of the original Wheeler Gift and in 1995 sent 205 cartons of books and papers to the Humanities and Social Sciences division of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street. The rest of the collection, including items in the 1909 catalog that were part of the Wheeler Gift but did not have identifying labels, went to Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, MO"(http://atlantic-cable.com/CablePioneers/LatimerClark.htm, accessed 07-31-2009).

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2001) No. 211.

In 1909 English writer E. M. Forster published a short story entitled The Machine Stops.

Describing a world in which people live beneath the surface of the earth, with technology running virtually all aspects of their lives, the story anticipated instant messaging and videoconferencing with a machine called "the speaking apparatus." It also anticipated television with a machine called the "cinematophote."

The only book that the main character in the story uses is an enormous technical manual about "the Machine."

Reacting to H. G. Wells's optimism about science and technology, and fearing that man might be unable to live without the all-encompassing technology that he created, or eventually might not even remember that the technology was man-made, Forster stressed the value of actual or direct experience versus "virtual" experience.

Charles R. Flint, a noted trust organizer, merged Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company with the Computing Scale Company, the International Time Recording Company, and the Bundy Manufacturing Company to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), producing and selling Hollerith tabulating equipment, time clocks, and other business machinery. The new company was based in Endicott, New York and had 1300 employees.

In 1924 CTR became International Business Machines (IBM).

Brunsviga of Braunschweig, Germany boasted that they sold twenty thousand calculators based on the variable-toothed gear technology.

French aeronautics engineer, pilot, and theoretician of space flight Robert Esnault-Pelterie published "Considérations sur les résultats d’un allégement indéfini des moteurs," Journal de physique théorique et appliqué, cinquième série, 3 (1913) 218-230.  

Esnault-Pelterie’s lecture on “the unlimited lightening of engines,” delivered in 1912 in both St. Petersburg, Russia, and Paris, was the first European work to demonstrate theoretically that space travel was possible.

“The lecture contains all the theoretical bases of self-propulsion, destroying the myth that rockets need atmospheric support and giving the real equation of motion. Anticipated is the use of auxiliary propulsion for guidance and complete maneuverability of rockets. Also contained are calculations of the escape velocity, the phases of a round-trip voyage to the Moon, and the times, velocities, and durations, of trips to the Moon, Mar s, and Venus, as well as thermal problems related notably to the surface facing the sun . . . . (Blosset, 9).

As noted above, the use of rockets for space travel had been discussed by the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky  in his Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reactive Devices (1903, 1911-12). "Tsiolkovsky had grasped the principle of reaction flight as early as 1883, and his 'Exploration of Space Using Reactive Devices' contained the first mathematical exposition of the reaction principle operating in space. In ‘Issledovanie mirovykh prostranstv reaktivnymi priborami’ . . . Tsiolkovsky set forth his theory of the motion of rockets, established the possibility of space travel by means of rockets, and adduced the fundamental flight formulas" (Dictionary of Scientific Biography).

Tsiolkovsky’s work was published only in Russian, and remained little known to Western scientists until the 1920s. Whether Esnault-Pelterie (known as REP to friends and colleagues) knew of Tsiolkovsky's work before he wrote his 1912 paper is unclear. However, considering that he had published little up to this time, one wonders how he would have been invited to speak in Russia if he had not been in communication on these topics with people in Russia before this date. This leaves open the possibility that he may have had access to Tsiolkovsky's work in some form prior writing his paper. REP did not refer to Tsiolkovsky’s work in his 1912 paper-- at least not in the abridged form it which it was published-- but at the very minimum he must have been informed of Tsiolkovsky's work during his trip to Russia, as by this time Tsiolkovsky's paper had been published twice in Russian. What sort of reception his speech received seems also to be unknown. In his L’Astronautique  (1930) Esnault-Pelterie mentioned that his 1912 speech was never published in Russia. He also acknowledged Tsiolkovsky's contributions in print for the first time when he mentioned Tsiolkovsky's papers in the historical introduction (pp. 17-38) of his L’Astronautique.

Esnault-Pelterie’s 1912 lecture first appeared in print in the Journal de physique théorique et appliqué, but in abridged form, due to both space considerations and the trepidations of the Journal’s editor, who was shocked by Esnault-Pelterie’s ideas on space travel.

“REP deplored the exaggerated condensation of the lecture, which was the cause for an apparent divergence between Goddard’s and his own opinions concerning the possibility at the time of building vehicles capable of escaping from the earth’s gravitation. In fact, Goddard wanted only to send a projectile loaded with powder to the moon and observe its arrival by telescope. REP considered the conditions necessary for transporting living beings from one celestial body to another and returning them to the earth; his more pessimistic conclusions were based on considerations of the substantial initial mass required for a rather small final mass, in view of the limited means available at the time” (Blosset, “Robert Esnault-Pelterie: Space pioneer,” in Durant and James, First Steps toward Space [1974] 5-31; pp. 23-31 contain an English translation of the unabridged lecture).

———

Fourteen years after his initial publication on space travel, on June 8, 1927, REP gave a lecture at the Sorbonne before the Société Astronomique de France on rocket exploration of the upper atmosphere and the possibility of interplanetary travel, in which he communicated the results of his continuing theoretical research in astronautics; this lecture was published the following year under the title "L’Exploration par fusées de la très haute atmosphère et la possibilité des voyages interplanétaires." In his lecture Esnault-Pelterie devoted special attention to the problem of escape velocity necessary to overcome the earth’s gravitational pull, estimating this at 10,000 meters / second (22,369 mph); the accepted figure at present is c. 25,000 mph. This paper was published as a supplement to the March 1928 issue of the Bulletin de la Société Astronomique de France.

Continuing to research rocketry and space travel, in 1930 REP published his most extensive work on the subject, entitled L'Astronautique. L’Astronautique was the first work to popularize the word astronautics among the scientific community. The book encompassed all that was then known about rocketry and space flight. The work was

"a veritable treatise on space vehicles that served as a basis for all later works on this subject. It is a very profound theoretical study based on the thorough knowledge of celestial mechanics, astrophysics, and ballistics, as well as physical chemistry and physiology. Nothing in it has yet been invalidated.

"This book is a basic text for all interested in astronautics. One needs only to scan the chapter titles to see that it is both a scientific and technical document and an encyclopedia of precious practical knowledge:

-Rocket Motion in Vacuum and Air

-Density and Composition of the Very High Atmosphere //-Expansion of Combination Gases through a Nozzle

-Combustion in a Chamber

-Possible Use of Rockets (high altitude exploration, launching projectiles to the moon, high-speed travel around the earth, and travel through the atmosphere)

-Interplanetary Travel (with sections on the conditions under which trips around the moon will be carried out, the design of the spaceship, guidance, navigation and piloting devices, the conditions for habitation).

"For these last points, [Esnault-Pelterie] states that the spaceship could be filled with pure oxygen, which would reduce the pressure to about a tenth that of the atmosphere . . . [He] also suggests that the spaceship, for its return to earth, be turned and braked first by its own engines (today’s retrorockets) and then by the use of a parachute" (Durant and James, First Steps toward Space, pp. 11-12).

In 1934 REP published L'Astronautique complément “in which he presented the practical conditions and the advantages of interplanetary trips” (Durant and James, p. 12). The work included studies of rocket motion, combustion gas expansion nozzles and combustion thermodynamics, as well as prophetic considerations of nuclear propulsion and the use of radioactive elements in rocketry.

 Von Braun & Ordway, History of Rocketry and Space Travel, 74-75.

German American inventor Edward Kleinschmidt invented the teletype, which replaced Morse code clickers in delivering news to newspapers. The teletype was first used by United Press.

In his junior year of college studying electrical engineering at Columbia University American Edwin Armstrong invented and patented the regenerative circuit from his parents' home in Yonkers, New York.

"Lee De Forest filed a patent in 1916 that became the cause of a contentious lawsuit with the prolific inventor Armstrong, whose patent for the regenerative circuit had been issued in 1914. The lawsuit lasted twelve years, winding its way through the appeals process and ending up at the Supreme Court. The Court ruled in favor of De Forest, although the experts agree that the incorrect judgment had been issued.

"At the time the regenerative receiver was introduced, vacuum tubes were expensive and consumed lots of power, with the added expense and encumbrance of heavy batteries or AC transformer and rectifier. So this design, getting most gain out of one tube, filled the needs of the growing radio community and immediately thrived. Although the superheterodyne receiver is the most common receiver in use today, the regenerative radio made the most out of very few parts" (Wikipedia article on regenerative circuit, accessed 11-10-2009).

Engineer Lucien Alphonse Legros, son of the painter Alphonse Legros, and writer John Cameron Grant published Typographical Printing-Surfaces. The Technology and Mechanism of their Production (London, 1916).  This 732 page work, with 609 figures in the text and 109 plates, became the standard and most authoritative work on hot-metal casting and composition technology. It also contained a complete listing of British patents pertaining to printing through 1912, and American patents through 1913.

Austrian mathematician Johann Radon, professor at Technische Universität Wien, introduced the Radon transform. He also demonstrated that the image of a three-dimensional object can be constructed from an infinite number of two-dimensional images of the object.

About sixty-five years later Radon's work was applied in the invention of computed tomography.

Working under the British Board of Invention and Research, Canadian physicist Robert William Boyle and  Albert B. Wood, produced a prototype active sound detection system. 

"This work, for the Anti-Submarine Division, was undertaken in utmost secrecy, and used quartz piezoelectric crystals to produce the world's first practical underwater active sound detection apparatus. To maintain secrecy no mention of sound experimentation or quartz was made - the word used to describe the early work ('supersonics') was changed to 'ASD'ics, and the quartz material 'ASD'ivite. From this came the British acronym ASDIC. In 1939, in response to a question from the Oxford English Dictionary, the Admiralty made up the story that the letters stood for 'Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee', and this is still widely believed, though no committee bearing this name has ever been found in the Admiralty archives."

During World War II Americans developed a similar underwater active sound detection system which they called SONAR, and this term eventually replaced the British ASDIC.

The American Engineering Standards Committee (AESC) was formed by the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers (AIMME) and the American Society for Testing Materials (ASTM).

Its purpose was to establish a national body to coordinate standards development and to serve as a clearinghouse for the work of standards developing agencies. The U.S. Departments of War, Navy and Commerce were invited to join this organization. AESC became the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1969.

American physicist and inventor Robert H. Goddard published A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. "Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections" 71, no. 2.  

This was earliest practical treatise on the development of rocketry for space flight. Like the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (Tsiolkovskii; Russian: Константи́н Эдуа́рдович Циолко́вский);and the Romanian-German Hermann Oberth, Goddard worked out the theory of rocket propulsion independently. Having explored the mathematical practicality of rocketry since 1906 and the experimental workability of reaction engines in laboratory vacuum tests since 1912, Goddard began to accumulate ideas for probing beyond the Earth’s stratosphere. His first two patents in 1914, for a liquid-fuel gun rocket and a multistage step rocket, led to modest recognition and financial support from the Smithsonian Institution.

The publication in 1919 by the Smithsonian of A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes gave Goddard distorted publicity because he had suggested that rocket power or jet propulsion could be used to attain escape velocity and that this theory could be proved by crashing a flash-powder missile on the moon. Sensitive to criticism of his moon-rocket idea, he worked quietly and steadily toward the perfection of his rocket technology and techniques.

"Goddard began experimenting with liquid oxygen and liquid-fueled rockets in September 1921, and tested the first liquid-fueled engine in November 1923. It had a cylindrical combustion chamber, using impinging jets to mix and atomize liquid oxygen and gasoline.

"He launched the first liquid-fueled (gasoline and liquid oxygen) rocket on March 16, 1926, in Auburn, Massachusetts. His journal entry of the event was notable for its laconic understatement: 'The first flight with a rocket using liquid propellants was made yesterday at Aunt Effie's farm.' The rocket, which was dubbed "Nell", rose just 41 feet during a 2.5-second flight that ended 184 feet away in a cabbage field, but it was an important demonstration that liquid propellants were possible." (Wikipedia article on Robert H. Goddard, accessed 05-15-2010)

Among Goddard’s successful innovations were "fuel-injection systems, regenerative cooling of combustion chambers, gyroscopic stabilization and control, instrumented payloads and recovery systems, guidance vanes in the exhaust plume, gimbaled and clustered engines, and aluminum fuel and oxidizer pumps" (Dictionary of Scientific Biography).

On March 19, 1936 the Smithsonian published Goddard's Liquid Propellant Rocket Development.  The remainder of his work was documented in patents.

"Goddard avoided sharing details of his work with other scientists, and preferred to work alone with his technicians. Frank Malina, who was then studying rocketry at the California Institute of Technology, visited Goddard [in Roswell, New Mexico] in August of 1936. Goddard refused to discuss any of his research, other than that which had already been published in Liquid-Propellant Rocket Development. Theodore von Kármán, Malina's mentor at the time, was unhappy with Goddard's attitude and later wrote, 'Naturally we at Caltech wanted as much information as we could get from Goddard for our mutual benefit. But Goddard believed in secrecy. . . . The trouble with secrecy is that one can easily go in the wrong direction and never know it.' Goddard's concerns about secrecy led to criticism for failure to cooperate with other scientists and engineers.  

"By 1939, von Kármán's Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Caltech [GALCIT] had received Army Air Corps funding to develop rockets to assist in aircraft take-off. Goddard learned of this in 1940, and openly expressed his displeasure. Malina could not understand why the Army did not arrange for an exchange of information between Goddard and Caltech, since both were under government contract at the same time. Goddard did not think he could be of that much help to Caltech because they were designing rockets with solid fuel and Goddard was using liquid fuels" (Wikipedia article on Goddard).

Goddard’s booklet of 1919 was preceded by the theoretical writings of Tsiolkovsky published in Russian 1903-14 and the theoretical paper by Robert Esnault-Pelterie published in French in 1913. 

Goddard & Pendray, The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, I, 233-38.

In 1920 Czech novelist, playwright, journalist and translator Karel Capek published R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) in Prague. This play, written in Czech except for the title, introduced the word “robot” and explored the issue of whether worker-machines would replace people.

English mathematician, physicist, meteorologist, psychologist and pacifist Lewis Fry Richardson, an early advocate of the team approach to the solution of large-scale computing problems, published Weather Forecasting by Numerical Process at Cambridge at Cambridge University Press.  In this work Richardson described a fantasy weather forecast “factory” of sixty-four thousand human computers working in “a large hall like a theatre,” calculating the world’s weather forecasts from meteorological data supplied by weather balloons spaced two hundred kilometers apart around the globe.

Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian immigrant to the United States, working at Westinghouse Laboratories in Pittsburgh, patented the iconoscope, the first electronic television camera. His design, however, was incomplete:

"Vladimir Zworykin is also sometimes cited as the father of electronic television because of his invention of the iconoscope in 1923 and his invention of the kinescope in 1929. His design was one of the first to demonstrate a television system with all the features of modern picture tubes. His previous work with Rosing on electromechanical television gave him key insights into how to produce such a system, but his (and RCA's) claim to being its original inventor was largely invalidated by three facts: a) Zworykin's 1923 patent presented an incomplete design, incapable of working in its given form (it was not until 1933 that Zworykin achieved a working implementation), b) the 1923 patent application was not granted until 1938, and not until it had been seriously revised, and c) courts eventually found that RCA was in violation of the television design patented by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, whose lab Zworykin had visited while working on his designs for RCA. 

"The controversy over whether it was first Farnsworth or Zworykin who invented modern television is still hotly debated today. Some of this debate stems from the fact that while Farnsworth appears to have gotten there first, it was RCA that first marketed working television sets, and it was RCA employees who first wrote the history of television. Even though Farnsworth eventually won the legal battle over this issue, he was never able to fully capitalize financially on his invention" (http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Colour-television, accessed 12-22-2009).

German electrical engineer and inventor Arthur Scherbius began marketing a mechanical cipher rotor machine based on rotating wired wheels, and called Enigma.

Thousands of the machines are thought to have been produced from the 1920s to the end of World War II, during which the devices were used by the Third Reich to encrypt messages in a form they believed was undecipherable.

On September 11, 2011 a three-rotor Enigma machine in its original wooden box, and dated circa 1939, sold at Christie's London for £133,250.  This was a record price for an Enigma Machine.  The machine had been used in the 2001 film entitled Enigma.

Romanian-German physicist Hermann Oberth published Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen in Munich and Berlin at the press of R. Oldenbourg.

This book began as a doctoral thesis on the rocket in interplanetary space which Oberth submitted to the University of Heidelberg in 1922. When the thesis was rejected by the university Oberth paid for its commercial publication. The work was highly influential on the founding in 1927 of the German amateur rocket society, Verein für Raumschiffahrt, to which most of the early German rocketeers belonged, and which became a focal point of early rocketry research.

In his book Oberth set out to prove four propositions: (1) that the technology of the time permitted the building of machines capable of rising above the earth’s atmosphere; (2) that these machines could attain velocities sufficient to prevent their falling back to earth, or even to escape the earth’s gravitational pull; (3) that such machines could be built to carry human beings; and (4) that under certain conditions, their manufacture might be profitable. Oberth demonstrated that a rocket can operate in a vacuum and that it can surpass the velocity of its own exhaust; he also pointed out the superiority of liquid fuels in producing maximum exhaust velocity. He described in detail the designs of a prototypical instrument-carrying rocket and a theoretical space-ship, and developed the first sketchy model of a space station.

Oberth's work became more widely known through its greatly expanded third edition, retitled Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (1929), which contained over 400 pages compared to the 1923 edition’s 92 pages.

Oberth dedicated the 1929 work to Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, director and writer respectively of Frau im Mond (1929) one of the world’s first serious science fiction films. Oberth served as a consultant on the film, which was the first to present the basics of rocketry to a mass audience, and his income from that project was crucial in allowing him to complete the book.

Wege zum Raumschiffahrt was the first work to receive the REP-Hirsch International Astronautics Prize established in 1928 by French rocketry pioneer Robert Esnault-Pelterie and André-Louis Hirsch; the prize was awarded annually between 1929 and 1939. The purpose of the prize was to recognize “the best original theoretical or experimental works capable of promoting progress in one of the areas permitting the realization of interstellar navigation or furthering knowledge in a field related to astronautics.” In the epilogue to his book, Oberth acknowledged receipt of the REP-Hirsch Prize and expressed his surprise and gratitude that a French organization “would award such a prize to a German . . . It is encouraging to see that science and education are able to bridge national differences” (p. [424]).

An English translation of Oberth's 1929 book, Ways to Spaceflight, was published by NASA in 1972, and is downloadable from NASA's website.

In 1924 the research organization that would in 1925 be known as Bell Labs developed the first high-fidelity sound recording. It extended the reproducible sound range by more than an octave on the high and low end.

In 1925 Walter Gifford, president of AT&T, consolidated Western Electric Research Laboratories and part of the engineering department of the American Telephone & Telegraph company (AT&T)  to form Bell Telephone Laboratories. From 1925 to 1966 the physical location of Bell was was 463 West Street in Manhattan.

On January 26, 1926 Scottish engineer and inventor John Logie Baird gave the world's first demonstration of his electromechanical television system to fifty scientists assembled in his attic workshop at 22 Frith Street in the Soho district of London.

German-Austrian engineer Fritz Pfleumer invented magnetic tape for recording sound, coating very thin paper with iron-oxide using lacquer as glue. He sold the rights to AEG in 1932.

On April 7, 1927 newspaper reporters and dignitaries gathered at the AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories auditorium in New York City to see the first American demonstration of television. The live picture and voice of Secretary of Commerce (later President) Herbert Hoover were transmitted over telephone lines from Washington, D.C., to New York.  

“Today we have, in a sense, the transmission of sight for the first time in the world’s history,” Hoover said. “Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance in a new respect, and in a manner hitherto unknown.”

A second telecast followed that day, via radio transmission from Whippany, N.J. The telecasts demonstrated television’s potential as an adjunct to telephone service and as a medium for entertainment.

The live demonstration of television at Bell Labs was filmed, and in February 2013 that short movie was viewable on Facebook at this link:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=116047015077905.

In April 1930 Bell Labs issued a pamphlet entitled Two-Way Television and a Pictorial Account of its Background, documenting the technology involved and the historic demonstration, plus some later developments.  An unusual dust jacket added to the 40-page illustrated pamphlet dramatized the new technology.

On September 7, 1927 American inventor Philo T. Farnsworth transmitted an image through the purely electronic means of a device called an "image dissector." This was the first all-electronic television.

"When Philo T. Farnsworth was 13, he envisioned a contraption that would receive an image transmitted from a remote location—the television. Farnsworth submitted a patent in January 1927, when he was 19, and began building and testing his invention that summer. He used an "image dissector" (the first television camera tube) to convert the image into a current, and an "image oscillite" (picture tube) to receive it. On this day his tests bore fruit. When the simple image of a straight line was placed between the image dissector and a carbon arc lamp, it showed up clearly on the receiver in another room. His first tele-electronic image was transmitted on a glass slide in his S[an] F[rancisco] lab at 202 Green St" (http://www.timelines.ws/subjects/Television.HTML, accessed 12-22-2009).

Having introduced the first feature-length part-talkie film, The Jazz Singer in 1927,  the following year Warner Brothers introduced the first all-talking feature film, Lights of New York, directed by Bryan Foy.  "The film, which cost only $23,000 to produce, grossed over $1,000,000. It was also the first film to define the crime genre. The enthusiasm with which audiences greeted the talkies was so great that by the end of 1929, Hollywood was producing sound films exclusively" (Wikipedia article on Lights of New York (1928 film), accessed 06-04-2012). Lights of New York was shot at 24 frames per second, which became the industry standard.

Edwin Albert Link of Binghamton, New York designed and constructed  the Link Trainer, the first flight simulator, as a safe way to teach new pilots how to fly by instruments.

Link used his knowledge of pumps, valves and bellows to create a flight simulator that responded to the pilot's controls and gave an accurate reading on the included instruments.

Link Trainers became famous in World War II and were used by almost every combatant nation. The Link Company became a leader in flight simulation and training.

In 1930 American engineer, educator, and visionary of information management Vannevar Bush of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed the differential analyzer, a large analog computer more accurate than previous devices of this type.

On May 16, 1930 John Clarence Karcher and Eugene McDermott founded Geophysical Service in Newark, New Jersey. This was the origin of Texas Instruments. Geophysical Service was the first independent contractor specializing in the reflection seismograph method of exploration of oil fields in Texas.

In 1931 Lázló Biró, a Hungarian newspaper editor frustrated by the amount of time wasted filling up fountain pens and cleaning up smudged pages, noticed that the ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge-free. He tried using the same ink in a fountain pen but found that it would not flow into the tip, as it was too viscous. Working with his brother Georg, a chemist, Biró developed a new tip consisting of a tiny ball that was free to turn in a socket, which would pick up ink from a cartridge as it turned, and then roll to deposit it on the paper. He presented the first production of the ball pen at the Budapest International Fair in 1931, and patented it in Paris in 1938. This was the first commercially successful ballpoint pen, still known in England as a "Biro."

"Earlier pens leaked or clogged due to improper viscosity of the ink, and depended on gravity to deliver the ink to the ball. Depending on gravity caused difficulties with the flow and required that the pen be held nearly vertically. The Biro pen both pressurized the ink column and used capillary action for ink delivery, solving the flow problems."

On December 29, 1931 Emanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon in Dresden received U.S. Patent No. 1,838,389 for a photoelectric microfilm selector which he called "Statistical Machine."

Goldberg designed the machine by May 1927. The patent, applied for in 1928, and similar patents Goldberg obtained in other countries, described an electromechanical machine for searching through data encoded on reels of film, using "radiating energy to actuate a recorder when the explored indications upon the search plate and record element are identical, the indications on one of said elements being penetrable by the rays and the indication on the other element being impenetrable by the rays."

"Two prototypes were built at Zeiss Ikon by 1931 and, perhaps, constitute the first successful electronic document retrieval. Microfilm selector technology was known in at least two leading research centers in the U.S.A. (Eastman Kodak and IBM) by 1931 or shortly thereafter and in both cases a direct connection to Goldberg can be shown. This technology was reported at international congresses in 1931 and 1935 and a number of U.S. inventors were working on it by 1938 (e.g. Bryce, H. Davis, Gould, and Morse)" (http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldbush.html, accessed 02-20-2012).

Vannevar Bush incorporated technology similar to this in the Rapid Selector machine on which he began development in 1938. The existence of Goldberg's patent prevented Bush from patenting his Rapid Selector. Bush's machine became famous after publication in 1945 of his article, "As We May Think" describing the Memex.

Austrian-German aerospace engineer Eugen Sänger published Raketenflugtechnik in 1933. This treatise on rocket flight engineering was Sänger's thesis for a degree in engineering, which had been rejected by the Technical University of Vienna as "too imaginative." Sänger was allowed to graduate when he submitted a more mundane thesis on the statistics of wing trusses. Raketenflugtechnik was the first study leading to the eventual development of a reusable human-piloted rocket-powered space plane, a concept which evolved into the X-planes and the space shuttle.

Sänger introduced his goals and purposes for the book as follows: 

“By rocket flight is meant here the motion of such a vehicle within the general air space, the propulsive force being provided by a rocket motor. 

“Rocket flight in the narrow sense is taken to be motion in the upper levels of the stratosphere with a speed such that inertial forces arising from the curvature of the path have a marked effect on the lift.

“This type of rocket flight is the next major development from trophospheric flight, which has been the product of the last thirty years; it is also the forerunner of space travel, the greatest technical problem of the present time.

“This forerunner and the installation of a space station* are the noblest tasks of rocketry, but for the present they are still not realizable.

“There are also several directly practical purposes to be served. Rocket flight should especially:

"1. Provide rapid intercontinental travel around the globe with the highest possible terrestrial speeds.

"2. Advance scientific research in certain fields, especially geophysics and astrophysics.

"3. If necessary provide a war weapon of exceptional power.

“These three purposes can now be reckoned as in part technically feasible. The present book is concerned with the technical basis of the realization of this first stage of rocket flight.

“* In cosmonauts’ plans this is a vehicle that revolves around the Earth outside the sensible atmosphere with a speed such that the weight is balanced by the centripetal force. The space station would serve as starting point for flights to even greater heights” (Sänger, Rocket Flight Engineering. Nasa Technical Translation F-223 [1965] 3).

Sänger and his associate, Irene Bredt, who later became his wife, intended to publish their continuing researches as a second volume of Raketenflugtechnik.  However, with the advent of World War II, their space vehicle project had to be repurposed for military use if it was to survive. A 900-page report on space vehicles, prepared by the two in 1941, was rejected by the German Research Institute for Aviation due to its size and complexity; Sänger and Bredt reworked this into a shorter 376-page secret report on a long range bomber with a rocket engine, intended to drop a dirty bomb on a U.S. city, issued as the GRIA’s “Secret Command Report” UM 3538. The report entitled Über einen Raketenantrieb für Fernbomber was issued in a highly-controlled edition of 100 copies for the Nazi German State Ministry for Aviation in 1944. In 2011 three copies of this original report were recorded worldwide in OCLC, one in the United States.

The Sänger-Bredt Silverbird (Silbervogel), the designs for which were described in the secret report, was a reusable winged vehicle “propelled by a rocket engine burning liquid oxygen and kerosene, capable of reaching Mach 10.0 at altitudes in excess of 100 miles” (Jenkins, Space Shuttle, p. 1).  The Sänger/Bredt report was "the first serious proposal for a vehicle which could carry a pilot and payload to the lower edge of space" (Wikipedia article on Silbervogel).

In order to realize his concept of a reusable rocket engine, Sänger had to solve the major problem of how to cool the engine. “Between 1932 and 1934, [Sänger] performed a series of pioneering experiments with reinforced cooled liquid rocket motors capable of burning mixtures of gas-oil and liquid oxygen (LOX), achieving thrust levels up to 30kp, pressures up to 50 bars, and exhaust velocities of about 3,000 m/s” (Sänger & Szames, “From the Silverbird to interstellar voyages,” 2).

In 1934 Sänger published these studies in "Neuere Ergebnisse der Raketenflugtechnik," Flug: Zeitschr. f. d. gesamte Gebiet der Luftfahrt, Sonderheft 1. This paper contained the results of Sänger’s extensive tests of various rocket engine models in 1933 and 1934, leading up to his 1935 patent for regenerative forced-flow cooling of rocket engines. This he accomplished by designing a “regeneratively cooled” engine cooled by its own fuel circulating around the combustion chamber. This rocket engine was a lasting feature of the Silverbird design. "Almost all modern rocket engines use this design today and some sources still refer to it as the Sänger-Bredt design" (Wikipedia article on Silbervogel).

“Sänger’s former rocket-powered civilian space transport airplane project now evolved into an Earth-orbiting, single-stage, rocket-powered intercontinental bombing machine with a launch weight of 100 tons . . . It would be propelled by a rocket engine using highly efficient fuels with liquid oxygen used as an oxidizer in a combustion chamber at a pressure of 100 atmospheres and creating 100 tons of thrust” (Myrha, p. 78).

This rocket-powered bomber was designed to attack strategic targets in the United States: New York City, Washington DC, Chicago and the steel-refining plants in Pittsburgh. Page 339 of Sänger and Bredt’s report shows a map of lower Manhattan superimposed with a bull’s-eye and containing calculations of the expected destruction pattern.  

After World War II Sänger emigrated from Germany to France where he worked for the Arsénal de l’Aéronautique. During his time in France “he was the subject of a botched attempt by Soviet agents to win him over. Joseph Stalin had become intrigued by reports of the Silvervogel design and sent his son, Vasily, and scientist Grigori Tokaty to convince [Sänger] to come to the Soviet Union, but they failed to do so. It has also been reported that Stalin instructed the NKVD to kidnap him” (Wikipedia). In 1954 Sänger returned to Germany, where he founded a research center in Stuttgart and earned unwelcome notoriety through his involvement with Egypt’s military buildup in the early 1960s. From 1963 until his death, he was a professor of astronautic technologies at the technical university in Berlin.

An English translation of the Sänger-Bredt report, prepared by the Technical Information Branch of U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics in 1946, was also limited to a small number of copies.  A condensed version of the translation was published in 1952. The work was also studied in Russia where a Russian translation was published.

Sänger-Bredt, “The Silver Bird story: A memoir,” in Hall, ed., Essays on the History of Rocketry and Astronautics, vol. 1 (1977), pp. 195-228. Sänger-Bredt & Engel, “The development of regeneratively cooled liquid rocket engines in Austria and Germany, 1926-42,” Durant & James, eds., First Steps toward Space, 217-46. Myrha, Sänger: Germany’s Orbital Rocket Bomber in World War II (2002).

American engineer and inventor Laurens Hammond of Chicago received patent 1,956,350 for an "Electrical Musical Instrument," and introduced the Hammond Organ Model A the following year.

The Hammond Organ was originally sold to churches as a lower-cost alternative to wind-driven pipe organs, but in the 1960s and 1970s it became a standard keyboard instrument for jazz, blues, rock music and gospel music.

"The original Hammond organ used additive synthesis of waveforms from harmonic series made by mechanical tonewheels which rotate in front of electromagnetic pickups. The component waveform ratios are mixed by sliding drawbars mounted above the two keyboards. Although many different models of Hammond organs were produced, the Hammond B-3 organ is the most well-known type. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the overdriven sound of B-3 (and in Europe, the C-3) organs were widely used in progressive rock bands and blues-rock groups. Although the last electromechanical Hammond organ came off the assembly line in the mid-1970s, thousands are still in daily use.

"In the 1980s and 1990s, musicians began using electronic and digital devices to imitate the sound of the Hammond, because the vintage Hammond organ is heavy and hard to transport. By the 1990s and 2000s digital signal processing and sampling technologies allowed for better imitation of the original Hammond sound" (Wikipedia article on Hammond organ, accessed 08-30-2009).

Engineers at AEG developed the Magnetophon K1. The K1 was the first practical reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorder, using magnetic tape invented by Fritz Pfleumer.  It was first demonstrated at the Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin (International radio exhibition Berlin, aka 'Berlin Radio Show') in 1935.

Musicians Leopold Godowsky, Jr. and Leopold Mannes developed Kodachrome, the first color transparency film. Kodachrome 16mm movie film was released for sale in 1935, and in 1936 Kodachrome 35mm still and 8mm movie film were released. To some it was the best slide and movie film ever produced.

Kodak produced the film and the chemical required to develop it from 1935 to 2009, by which time digital photography had, for all intents and purposes, replaced film photography.

According to the The New York Times, the last remaining roll of Kodachrome was developed on at Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas on December 30, 2010.

As head of the Radio Research Station at Ditton Park near Slough, England, Robert Watson-Watt published a report entitled The Detection of Aircraft by Radio Methods.

"On February 26, 1935 Watson-Watt and [his assistant Arnold] Wilkins demonstrated a basic radar system to an observer from the Air Ministry Committee the Detection of Aircraft. The previous day Wilkins had set up receiving equipment in a field near Upper Stowe, Northamptonshire, and this was used to detect the presence of a Handley Page Heyford bomber at ranges up to 8 miles by means of the radio waves which it reflected from the nearby Daventry shortwave radio transmitter of the BBC, which operated at a wavelength of 49 m (6 MHz). This convincing demonstration, known as the Daventry Experiment, led immediately to development of radar in the UK."

Between 1936 and 1939 electronic and acoustic engineer Homer Dudley and a team of engineers at Bell Labs produced the first electronic speech synthesizer, called the Voder ("Voice Operation DEmonstratoR").

The Voder was demonstrated at the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York and the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island, San Francisco Bay, by experts who used a keyboard and foot pedals to play the machine and emit speech.

In Los Angeles Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed and starred in the film, Modern Times.

In his final silent-film appearance Chaplin portrayed his Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the industrialized world in which assembly lines dehumanize work and robots replace people. The film is also a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression — conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization. The movie also starred Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Stanley Sandford and Chester Conklin.

Elektro, a robot built by the Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse Electric Corporation in its Mansfield, Ohio facility between 1937 and 1938, was seven feet tall and weighed 265 pounds.  Humanoid in appearance, he (it) could walk by voice command, speak about 700 words (using a 78-rpm record player), smoke cigarettes, blow up balloons, and move his head and arms. Elektro became the most famous robot of the 1930s.

Elektro's body consisted of a steel gear, cam and motor skeleton covered by an aluminum skin. His photoelectric "eyes" could distinguish red and green light. He was on exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair and reappeared at that fair in 1940, with "Sparko", a robot dog that could bark, sit, and beg.

"Elektro toured North America in 1950 in promotional appearances for Westinghouse, and was displayed at Pacific Ocean Park in Venice, California in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He also appeared as "Thinko", in Sex Kittens Go to College (1960), which starred Mamie Van Doren and Tuesday Weld. In the 1960s, his head was given to a retiring Westinghouse engineer and his body was sold for scrap." (Wikipedia article on Elektro, accessed 02-21-2012).

Remarkably Elektro seems to have survived the scrap heap, and in 2012 was reportedly being restored for the Mansfield Memorial Museum.

Claude Shannon, in his master’s thesis entitled A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, submitted to MIT on August 10, 1937, and published in a revised and abridged version in 1938, showed that the two-valued algebra developed by Boole could be used as a basis for the design of electrical circuits.

This thesis became the theoretical basis for the electronics and computer industries that were developed after World War II. Shannon wrote the thesis while working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City. As examples of circuits that could be built using relays, Shannon appended to the thesis theoretical descriptions of "An Electric Adder to the Base Two," and "A Factor Table Machine." The "Factor Table Machine" was not included in the published version.

Shannon's thesis was later characterized as the most significant master's thesis of the 20th century, (See Reading 12.1.)

Shannon's thesis was first published in Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers 57 (1938) 713-23.

John Atanasoff at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, planned the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), a special-purpose electronic computer.

American physicist, inventor, and patent attorney Chester F. Carlson invented xerography, originally called electrophotography in Astoria, Queens, New York. Xerography did not become a commercial success until the wide adoption of the xerographic copier first introduced in 1949.

In his short story, "Waldo," published in Doubleday's Astounding Science Fiction Magazine in August 1942 under the pseudonym Anson MacDonald, American science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein wrote about a mechanical genius who developed a device patented as "Waldo F. Jones' Synchronous Reduplicating Pantograph."

"Wearing a glove and harness, Waldo could control a much more powerful mechanical hand simply by moving his hand and fingers. This and other technologies he develops make him a rich man, rich enough to build a home in space. In the story, these devices became popularly known as "waldoes". In reference to this story, the real-life remote manipulators that were later developed also came to be called waldoes" (Wikipedia article on Waldo (short story), accessed 03-13-2012).

Heinlein's idea was extensively implemented in telerobotics used in surgery, space, etc.

Shakespear scholar Charlton Hinman developed the Hinman Collator, a mechanical device for the visual comparison of different copies of the same printed text. By 1978, when the last machine was manufactured, around fifty-nine had been acquired by libraries, academic departments, research institutes, government agencies, and a handful of pharmaceutical companies. Though built for the study of printed texts and used primarily for the creation of critical editions of literary authors, the Hinman Collator was also employed in other projects where the close comparison of apparently identical images is required: from the study of illustrations to the examination of watermarks to the detection of forged banknotes. 

"Hinman's invention greatly increased not only the speed at which texts could be compared but also the effectiveness of such comparisons, and it made collation on a large scale possible for the first time. The most famous use of the machine was by its inventor and resulted in his Printing and Proof-reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963) and the Norton facsimile of the First Folio (1968). Hinman estimated that without the aid of his machine, the research for these projects would have taken over forty years. Without the collator, as he himself recognized, his study would have been a "practical impossibility", as would have the work of the many scholars who compiled dozens of bibliographies, produced hundreds of volumes of critical editions, and undertook countless bibliographical and textual investigations on his machine over the next five decades.

"The purpose of the machine for which he was seeking a patent was straightforward and grew directly from the needs of his research. During the Renaissance, the period of his specialty, books were proofread and corrected continually during the printing process, and early uncorrected sheets were commonly bound up with corrected ones from later in the print run. Thus the printed matter in the last book sold could, and usually did, differ substantially from that of the first, as it also could and quite often did from nearly every other copy in the printing. These variations are precisely the details the collator was developed to help detect. The operation of the device Hinman would eventually build was also straightforward. The operator sets up one book turned to a particular page on a platform on one side of the machine and another copy from the same printing turned to the same page on a platform on the other. He or she then views these items, which are superimposed via a set of mirrors, through a pair of binocular optics. After making adjustments to bring the two objects into registration, the operator activates a system of lights that alternately illuminates each page. If the pages are identical, they more or less appear as one; if they are not identical, the points of difference are called to the operator's eye by appearing to dance or wiggle about" (Smith, " 'The Eternal Verities Verified': Charlton Hinman and The Roots of Mechanical Collation," Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 53 [2000] includes images of the machines). 

In 1945, after the end of World War II, the Research and Intelligence Branch of the U. S. Army Forces in the Branch European Theatre issued a secret report entitled The story of Peenemünde or what might have been [cover title; title-page reads “Peenemünde east, through the eyes of 500 detained at Garmisch”]. After the classification was reduced from "Secret" to "Restricted" they issued a few copies of this 749-page collection of reports reproduced from typescript. The report included numerous halftone reproductions of photographs, and diagrams. The punched sheets were held together by metal clips. The front wrapper was illustrated with an aerial photograph of Peenemünde.

Compiled by the U. S. Army between May and September 1945, describing rocketry research conducted by the Nazi regime between 1937 and 1945 at Peenemünde East, this document marks the first account published outside of Nazi Germany of the rocketry program conducted at Peenemünde East. The Story of Peenemünde is also the first document to record the transfer of German rocketry technology to the United States as part of what came to be known as Operation Paperclip, which culminated in the development of America’s space program, and advanced missile weapons systems, and helped transform the United States into a global superpower. Many historians have stated that had the United States not essentially smuggled the Rocket Team into the U.S., the United States might have fallen behind drastically in the post war arms race.

The document consists of 118 separate reports, including transcripts of the U.S. Army’s original interrogations of key German rocket scientists at Garmisch, Germany, and heavily illustrated plans of various advanced rocket designs, guidance systems, etc., which only appeared in print in this form. The quality of typescript and printing varies considerably throughout, indicating a rushed, relatively non-professional production. When we checked in February 2013 OCLC cited seven copies of The Story of Peenemünde in libraries, five of which were U.S. government institutions (Naval Postgraduate School, U.S. Air Force Academy, Smithsonian Institution, Combined Arms Res. Library, U. S. Army Heritage and Education Center); the remaining two were the University of Illinois and the University of Alabama at Huntsville, the city close to the Redstone Arsenal where the Wernher von Braun and the Nazi Rocket Team were eventually based in the U. S. 

In the final years of World War II the Peenemünde East facility developed the V-2 rocket, the world’s first long-range supersonic combat-ballistic missile. Under the guidance of Wernher von Braun, head of Peenemünde’s scientific and engineering team, the Peenemünde rocketry group also worked on several other pioneering designs including the Wasserfall surface-to-air antiaircraft missile and the A-9 intercontinental ballistic missile, both of which were still under development at the war’s end (the Nazis planned to use the A-9 to attack the United States). The Nazi rocketry program was at least a generation more advanced than anything developed by the Allied Forces, and when the American military learned of it in 1943 they immediately started a project to study the V-2 and to capture the people who had designed it.

As for the Peenemünde team, when it became clear that the Allies would defeat Germany, General Dornberger and Wernher von Braun “decided it would be best to seek out the Americans, particularly as they wanted to continue working on rockets after the war. It looked as though the Red Army would reach Peenemünde first. Surrendering to the Soviets was never an option, and they knew that the British and French could not afford a major post-war rocket program. They concluded their best opportunity to continue building large rockets would be in America” (Kennedy, p. 25).

On May 2, 1945 the Peenemünde group surrendered to the American 44th Infantry division. Shortly afterwards the Americans seized about 100 V-2 rockets, which were eventually shipped to the proving ground in White Sands, New Mexico to form the basis of America’s new rocketry program; they also captured the entire Peenemünde archive of scientific and engineering documents (totaling nearly 14 tons), and drew up a list of key German rocket personnel to be found and interrogated. This was the start of the American intelligence project that became famous under the name of Operation Paperclip, which was responsible for bringing von Braun, Dornberger and over one hundred other German rocketry experts to the United States. The Story of Peenemünde dates from the very beginning of this operation, when captured German rocket scientists were still being held and interrogated at the U.S. military garrison at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria. Among the 118 separate documents, mostly in English but with a few in German, are:

• Interrogations conducted by U.S. Army Intelligence of key Nazi scientific and engineering personnel, including Walter Dornberger (director of Peenemünde East), and Wernher von Braun, both of whom played critical roles in the creation of the U.S. rocketry and space programs

• Illustrated plans for the Wasserfall surface-to-air antiaircraft missile and the A-9 intercontinental ballistic missile, taken from the Peenemünde archives

• Accounts of rocket components, guidance systems, and liquid and solid fuels

• Ballistics reports

• Description of the Peenemünde wind tunnel—then the largest supersonic wind tunnel in the world—and wind tunnel experiments along with other documents crucial to the establishment of America’s postwar rocketry and space programs. The separately printed mimeographed index indicates that these materials were brought to Washington by “Colonel McCoy”; i.e. Col. Howard McCoy, head of the Air Documents Research Center, which was responsible for translating, cataloguing and indexing captured German documents.

Kennedy, The Rockets and Missiles of White Sands Proving Ground, 1945-1958, pp. 24-26. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich, p. 346 (bibliographical citation). Ordway & Sharpe, The Rocket Team, chs. 4-5, p. 294 (bibliographical citation). Von Braun, Ordway & Dooling, Space Travel: A History, pp. 114-118.

Project Whirlwind at MIT switches from analog to digital electronics.

Though offset lithography from photographic printing plates gained wide acceptance as a printing technology in the first half of the 20th century, until well into the second half of the century typesetting continued in hot metal either by Linotype or Monotype.  In 1946 René Higonnet and Louis Moyroud, electrical engineers at a subsidiary of ITT (formerly International Telephone & Telegraph) in Lyon, France, invented the first successful phototypesetting or photo-composing machine called the Lumitype, and developed the first prototype. 

Finding little interest in the development of their invention in France, Higgonet and Moyroud turned to the American corporation Lithomat which decided to back development, and both Higonnet and Moyroud moved to the United States to develop their product, presenting the first commercial machine, the Lumitype Photon, in New York in 1949.  

Development of the Lumitype moved slowly, and it was not until 1953 that the first book typeset entirely by a phototype imagesetter from Photon, Inc. rather than from hot metal was published: Albro T. Gaul's The Wonderful World of Insects , issued in New York by Rinehart & Company.  It contained 290,[2] pp. and 46 black and white half-tones. The book was typeset on a prototype machine.

On its final leaf Gaul's book contained an unusual colophon which read:

"The Wonderford World of Insects derives added significance from the manner it which it was composed. It is the first volume composed with the revolutionary Higonnet-Moyroud photographic type-composing machine. Absolutely no type, in the conventional [hot metal] sense, was used in the preparation of this book.

"For over five hundred years movable type has been the tradition and the basis of printing, and its invention, credited to Gutenberg, has been hailed as one of man's greatest inventions. The first book printed from movable type, the famouse Gutenber Bible, has become a rare collector's item.

"Until late in the nineteenth century all metal type was set by hand. The Linotype, in 1885, and the Monotype, in 1887, provided equipment for the casting of type by keyboard operation. Today these three methods remain the accepted ways for composing type.

"In 1949, the Graphic Arts Research Foundation, Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts was formed to provide high-level research in the printing industry. It has as its objective the creation of new, better and less costly printing methods. In the Higgonet-Moyroud, or Photon, photographic type composing machine—its first project—the Foundation has perfected an entirely new, faster and far more versatile means of composition which does not employ metal type.

"If, as we believe, time proves the Photon to be the replacement for past typesetting methods, then the printing and publishing industry is on the threshold of a new era. Rinehart & Company is proud that its book was chosen to be the first work composed with this revolutionary machine. . . ."

A year later, The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Massachusetts became the first newspaper to convert its typesetting from hot metal to the Lumitype. 

The first book published in Europe with typesetting from phototype done on a a Lumitype machine was Beaumarchais's La Folle journée ou Le Mariage de Figaro issued in Paris by Berger-Levrault in 1957.

Hungarian electrical engineer and physicist Dennis Gabor, working at British Thomson-Houston, Rugby, England invented holography.

"Holography is a technique that allows the light scattered from an object to be recorded and later reconstructed so that it appears as if the object is in the same position relative to the recording medium as it was when recorded. The image changes as the position and orientation of the viewing system changes in exactly the same way as if the object was still present, thus making the recorded image (hologram) appear three dimensional. Holograms can also be made using other types of waves. The technique of holography can also be used to optically store, retrieve, and process information. While holography is commonly used to display static 3-D pictures, it is not yet possible to generate arbitrary scenes by a holographic volumetric display" (Wikipedia article on holography, accessed 04-26-2009).

In December 1947 the point-contact transistor was invented at Bell Labs by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. Much smaller than vacuum tubes and consuming only a fraction of the energy, the transistor was able to switch currents on and off at substantially higher speeds.

In 1949 the Haloid Company of Rochester, New York introduced the Model A xerographic copier, the first commercial electrophotographic copier. 

"Manually operated, it was also known as the Ox Box. An improved version, Camera #1, was introduced in 1950" (Wikipedia article on Xerox 914, accessed 04-21-2009).

The company renamed itself Haloid Xerox in 1958, and shortened its name to Xerox Corporation in 1961.

After purchasing the patent for the ballpoint pen from Lázló Biró, who had been producing ballpoints in Argentina since 1943, Marcel Bich produced the very inexpensive Bic Cristal in Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine, France.

"A Bic Cristal ballpoint pen contains enough ink to draw a continuous line up to two miles (3.2 km) long. In 2005, Bic sold its hundred billionth ballpoint pen - enough ink to draw a line to Pluto and back more than 20 times."

American inventor David Hammond Shepard, a cryptanalyst at AFSA, the forerunner of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), built "Gismo" in his spare time.

Gismo was a machine to convert printed messages into machine language for processing by computer— the first optical character recognition (OCR) system.

"IBM licensed the [OCR] machine, but never put it into production. Shepard designed the Farrington B numeric font now used on most credit cards. Recognition was more reliable on a simple and open font, to avoid the effects of smearing at gasoline station pumps. Reading credit cards was the first major industry use of OCR, although today the information is read magnetically from the back of the cards.

"In 1962 Shepard founded Cognitronics Corporation. In 1964 his patented 'Conversation Machine' was the first to provide telephone Interactive voice response access to computer stored data using speech recognition. The first words recognized were 'yes' and 'no' " (Wikipedia article on David H. Shepard, accessed 02-29-2012).

Manufacturers began producing vacuum tubes especially designed for use in digital circuits.

Three-dimensional magnetic-core memory replaced electrostatic memory on the Whirlwind I, leading to increased performance and reliability.

The first pocket-sized commercial transistor radio, Regency TR-1, designed by Texas Instruments, was built and marketed by IDEA Corporation.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the National Television Committee’s recommendation for a system of color television broadcasting based on the RCA Dot Sequential Color System.

Texas Instruments manufactured the first silicon transistor, the 900-905 series.

American cinematographer and inventor Morton Heilig described his vision of a multi-sensory theater in a 1955 paper entitled "The Cinema of the Future."

In 1962 Heilig built a prototype of his immersive, multi-sensory, mechanical multimodal theater called the Sensorama, and created five short films to be displayed in it.  On August 28, 1962 Heilig was granted U.S. Patent 3,050,870 for a "Sensorama Simulator."  This invention is considered one of the earliest functioning efforts in virtual reality.

Ray Dolby, Charles Ginsberg and Charles Anderson of Ampex in San Carlos, California, sold the first video tape recorder. It cost $50,000.

MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Reading) was demonstrated to the Bank Management Committee of the American Bankers’ Association.

The Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite, during the International Geophysical Year from Site No.1/5, at the 5th Tyuratam range, in Kazakh SSR (now at the Baikonur Cosmodrome).

In response to the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik, President Dwight Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Planning Agency of the Department of Defense (ARPA). It was renamed DARPA in 1972.

Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments in Dallas, Texas, conceived of the integrated circuit in July 1958 and constructed the first integrated working prototype on September 12, 1958.

"In his patent application of February 6, 1959, Kilby described his new device as 'a body of semiconductor material . . . wherein all the components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated' ” (Wikipedia article on Integrated circuit, accessed 03-03-2012).

Independently of Jack Kilby, Robert N. Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor, Mountain View, California, invented a process that made it practical to manufacture integrated circuits. Based on the "planar" technology, an ealier Fairchild breakthrough, Noyce's invention consisted of a complete electronic circuit inside a small silicon chip. Noyce filed for a patent on "Semiconductor Device-and -Lead Structure" on July 30, 1959.  U.S. patent 2,981,877 was granted on April 25, 1961.

"In 1957, Charles Hard Townes and Arthur Leonard Schawlow, then at Bell Labs, began a serious study of the infrared laser. As ideas developed, they abandoned infrared radiation to instead concentrate upon visible light. The concept originally was called an "optical maser". In 1958, Bell Labs filed a patent application for their proposed optical maser; and Schawlow and Townes submitted a manuscript of their theoretical calculations to the Physical Review, published that year in Volume 112, Issue No. 6.

"Simultaneously, at Columbia University, graduate student Gordon Gould was working on a doctoral thesis about the energy levels of excited thallium. When Gould and Townes met, they spoke of radiation emission, as a general subject; afterwards, in November 1957, Gould noted his ideas for a "laser", including using an open resonator (later an essential laser-device component). Moreover, in 1958, Prokhorov independently proposed using an open resonator, the first published appearance (the USSR) of this idea. Elsewhere, in the U.S., Schawlow and Townes had agreed to an open-resonator laser design – apparently unaware of Prokhorov's publications and Gould's unpublished laser work.

"At a conference in 1959, Gordon Gould published the term LASER in the paper The LASER, Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Gould's linguistic intention was using the "-aser" word particle as a suffix – to accurately denote the spectrum of the light emitted by the LASER device; thus x-rays: xaser, ultraviolet: uvaser, et cetera; none established itself as a discrete term, although "raser" was briefly popular for denoting radio-frequency-emitting devices.

"Gould's notes included possible applications for a laser, such as spectrometry, interferometry, radar, and nuclear fusion. He continued developing the idea, and filed a patent application in April 1959. The U.S. Patent Office denied his application, and awarded a patent to Bell Labs, in 1960. That provoked a twenty-eight-year lawsuit, featuring scientific prestige and money as the stakes. Gould won his first minor patent in 1977, yet it was not until 1987 that he won the first significant patent lawsuit victory, when a Federal judge ordered the U.S. Patent Office to issue patents to Gould for the optically pumped and the gas discharge laser devices. The question of just how to assign credit for inventing the laser remains unresolved by historians.

On May 16, 1960, Theodore H. Maiman operated the first functioning laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories, Malibu, California, ahead of several research teams, including those of Townes, at Columbia University, Arthur Schawlow, at Bell Labs, and Gould, at the TRG (Technical Research Group) company. Maiman's functional laser used a solid-state flashlamp-pumped synthetic ruby crystal to produce red laser light, at 694 nanometres wavelength; however, the device only was capable of pulsed operation, because of its three-level pumping design scheme. Later in 1960, the Iranian physicist Ali Javan, and William R. Bennett, and Donald Herriott, constructed the first gas laser, using helium and neon that was capable of continuous operation in the infrared (U.S. Patent 3,149,290); later, Javan received the Albert Einstein Award in 1993. Basov and Javan proposed the semiconductor laser diode concept. In 1962, Robert N. Hall demonstrated the first laser diode device, made of gallium arsenide and emitted at 850 nm the near-infrared band of the spectrum. Later, in 1962, Nick Holonyak, Jr. demonstrated the first semiconductor laser with a visible emission. This first semiconductor laser could only be used in pulsed-beam operation, and when cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures (77 K). In 1970, Zhores Alferov, in the USSR, and Izuo Hayashi and Morton Panish of Bell Telephone Laboratories also independently developed room-temperature, continual-operation diode lasers, using the heterojunction structure." (Wikipedia article on Laser, accessed 04-25-2013).

The first of the Corona series of American strategic imaging reconnaissance satellites was launched. Produced and operated by the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science and Technology with assistance from the U.S. Air Force, the Corona satellites were used for photographic surveillance of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China and other areas.

"The Corona satellites used 31,500 feet (9,600 meters) of special 70 millimeter film with 24 inch (60 centimeter) focal length cameras. Initially orbiting at altitudes from 165 to 460 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, the cameras could resolve images on the ground down to 7.5 meters in diameter. The two KH-4 systems improved this resolution to 2.75 meters and 1.8 meters respectively, because they operated at lower orbital altitudes. . . .

"The first dozen or more Corona satellites and their launches were cloaked with disinformation as being part of a space technology development program called the Discoverer program. The first test launches for the Corona/Discoverer were carried out early in 1959. The first Corona launch containing a camera was carried out in June 1959 with the cover name Discoverer 4. This was a 750 kilogram satellite launched by a Thor-Agena rocket.

"The plan for the Corona program was for its satellites to return canisters of exposed film to the Earth in re-entry capsules, called by the slang term "film buckets", which were to be recovered in mid-air by a specially-equipped U.S. Air Force planes during their parachute descent. (The buckets were designed to float on the water for a short period of time for possible recovery by U.S. Navy ships, and then to sink if the recovery failed, via a water-dissolvable plug made of salt at the base of the capsule. This was for secrecy purposes.)" (Wikipedia article on Corona (satellite) accessed 11-29-2010).

"The return capsule of the Discoverer 13 mission, which launched August 10, 1960, was successfully recovered the next day. This was the first time that any object had been recovered successfully from orbit. After the mission of Discoverer 14, launch on August 18, 1960, its film bucket was successfully retrieved two days later by a C-119 Flying Boxcar transport plane. This was the first successful return of photographic film from orbit.

Haloid Xerox, Rochester, New York, introduced the Xerox 914, the first successful commercial plain paper xerographic copier, roughly the size of a desk.

". . .  commercial models were not available until March 1960. The first machine, delivered to a Pennsylvania metal-fastener maker, weighed nearly 650 pounds. It needed a carpenter to uncrate it, an employee with 'key operator' training, and its own 20-amp circuit. In an episode of Mad Men, set in 1962, the arrival of the hulking 914 helps get Peggy Olson her own office, after she tells her boss, 'It’s hard to do business and be credible when I’m sharing with a Xerox machine' " (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-mother-of-all-invention/8123/, accessed 06-11-2010).

Electrical engineer Wilson Greatbatch and Drs. William Chardack and Andrew Gage of the University at Buffalo reported the success of the first successful long-term implant in a human patient of a self-contained, internally powered artificial pacemaker in their paper entitled A Transistorized, Self-contained, Implantable Pacemaker for the Long-term Correction of Complete Heart Block. (U. S. patent no. 3,057,356).

Widely considered the first software patent, "Prater-Wei" was about calculating temperatures for petroleum fractionation.  This patent, originally filed by Mobil Oil Corporation in 1960, addressed computerized spectographic analysis. It had many method and apparatus claims that could be performed either on an analog or digital computer, or with pencil and paper. At the time, software was not patentable, so the authors described a non-computer method of choosing the temperatures, using matrix inversion.  However, the description in the patent application used linear algebra notation similar to that of textbooks published late in the 19^th century to disguise the more obvious matrix notation that was invented much later. (adapted from Henry Gladney, Digital Document Quarterly 4.2, and Digital Document Quarterly 7.3, accessed 01-01-2009).

"A Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (CCPA) decision is famous because the question "whether computer programs could contain patentable subject matter" was also before the CCPA.  See Application of Charles D. Prater and James Wei, U.S. CCPA, 415 F.2d 1378, November 20, 1968." (Henry Gladney, Digital Document Quarterly 7,3, accessed 01-01-2009).

In 1960 American physicist Theodore Maiman, head of the Quantum Electronics Section at Hughes Aircraft Company in Malibu, California, created the first working laser.  

"Maiman initially sent a description of his device to Physical Review Letters. But it was rejected because so many manuscripts on masers had been submitted to the journal that its editors made the unusual decision to accept no more papers in the field. So Maiman sent it to Nature, where is now famous paper, "Stimulated optical radiation in ruby", appeared on 6 August 1960 (T. H. Maiman Nature 187, 493-94; 1960). It was very brief, and I have previously commented that this article was probably more important per word than any of the papers published by Nature over the past century" (Charles H. Townes, "Obituary Theodore H. Maiman [1927-2007]. Maker of the first laser," Nature Vol. 447, June 7, 2007, p. 654).

"When lasers were invented in 1960, they were called 'a solution looking for a problem'. Since then, they have become ubiquitous, finding utility in thousands of highly varied applications in every section of modern society, including consumer electronics, information technology, science, medicine, industry, law enforcement, entertainment, and the military.

"The first use of lasers in the daily lives of the general population was the supermarket barcode scanner, introduced in 1974. The laserdisc player, introduced in 1978, was the first successful consumer product to include a laser but the compact disc player was the first laser-equipped device to become common, beginning in 1982 followed shortly by laser printers. Some other uses are:

"Medicine: Bloodless surgery, laser healing, surgical treatment, kidney stone treatment, eye treatment, dentistry

"Industry: Cutting, welding, material heat treatment, marking parts, non-contact measurement of parts

"Military: Marking targets, guiding munitions, missile defence, electro-optical countermeasures (EOCM), alternative to radar, blinding troops.

"Law enforcement: used for latent fingerprint detection in the forensic identification field

"Research: Spectroscopy, laser ablation, laser annealing, laser scattering, laser interferometry, LIDAR, laser capture microdissection, fluorescence microscopy

"Product development/commercial: laser printers, optical discs (e.g. CDs and the like), barcode scanners, thermometers, laser pointers, holograms, bubblegrams. Laser lighting displays: Laser light shows

"Cosmetic skin treatments: acne treatment, cellulite and striae reduction, and hair removal" (Wikipedia article on laser, accessed 11-04-2012).

Maiman published a detailed account of his research as The Laser Odyssey (Blaine, WA: The Laser Press, 2000).

The first symposium on bionics (biological electronics) took place at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. (See Reading 11.7.)

Texas Instruments delivered the first integrated circuit computer to the U.S. Air Force.

“The advanced experimental equipment has a total volume of only 6.3 cubic inches and weighs only 10 ounces. It provides the identical electrical functions of a computer using conventional components which is 150 times its size and 48 times its weight and which also was demonstrated for purposes of comparison. It uses 587 digital circuits (Solid Circuit™ semiconductor net works) each formed within a minute bar of silicon material. The larger computer uses 8500 conventional components and has a volume of 1000 cubic inches and weight of 480 ounces.”

While working as a consulting scientist at General Electric Company in Syracuse, New York, Nick Holonyak Jr. invented the first visible light-emitting-diode (LED). 

On October 1, 1962 J.C. R. Licklider was appointed Director of The Pentagon’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), a division of ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency).

Licklider's  initial budget was $10,000,000 per year. Licklider eventually initiated the sequence of events leading to ARPANET.

Demonstration of DAC-1 (Design Augmented by Computers), a joint development effort between General Motors in Detroit, and IBM, which began development in 1959. This was the first computer-assisted design (CAD) program.

The Printing and the Mind of Man exhibition took place in London at the British Museum and at Earls Court Exhibition Centre during a period of only two weeks, from July 16 to July 27, 1963.

The lengthy and complex title of its catalogue, with an emblem and tailpiece designed and engraved by Reynolds Stone, read: Catalogue of a display of printing mechanisms and printed materials arranged to illustrate the history of Western civilization and the means of the multiplication of literary texts since the XV century, organised in connection with the eleventh International Printing Machinery and Allied Trades Exhibition, under the title Printing and the Mind of Man, assembled at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London, 16-27 July 1963. The catalogue described and illustrated with 32 black & white plates, and a color plate reproducing a page from the Mainz Psalter, more than 656 examples of printing and printing technology documenting the influence of print on the development of Western civilization. This exhibition occurred at Earls Court.  The catalogue also described, and illustrated with 16 black & white plates, an exhibition of 163 examples of Fine Printing mounted at the British Museum from July to September 1963.  At the end of their Acknowledgements on p. 9 of the catalogue the Supervisory Committee for the exhibition– librarian Frank Francis, typographer and historian of typography Stanley Morison and writer and antiquarian bookseller John Carter– stated:

"We pay tribute to the organizers of the Gutenberg Quincentenary Exhibition of Printing, assembled at Cambridge in 1940 (and prematurely disassembled because of the risks from enemy bombing). It was our original inspiration for several sections of our display, and its invigorating catalogue has been our constant friend."

Comparison of the 641 items described in the catalogue of 1940 with those described in the catalogue of 1963 show a great deal of overlap, especially as Percy Muir and John Carter, who had been prime movers in the exhibition in 1940, were extensively involved with the exhibition of 1963. The 1963 exhibition and its catalogue were, of course, significant expansions and improvements over the early wartime effort.

The 1963 catalogue was  followed in 1967 by a further-expanded larger format cloth-bound edition edition with a dramatic double-page engraved title by Reynolds Stone, significantly more detailed annotations, and without discussion of "printing mechanisms," entitled Printing and the Mind of Man. A Descriptive Catalogue Illustrating the Impact of Print on the Evolution of Western Civilization, compiled and edited by antiquarian booksellers and bibliographers John Carter and Percy H. Muir, assisted by book historian and writer Nicolas Barker, antiquarian bookseller H.A. Feisenberger, bibliographer Howard Nixon and historian of printing S.H. Steinberg.

This exhibition, and especially the 1967 book based on it, was, and remains, immensely influential on both institutional and private collectors of landmark books that influenced the development of Western Civilization.   

Taking place at the dawn of online searching and the ARPANET, and roughly twenty years before the development of the personal computer, this exhibition and its catalogues may also record the peak of the print-centric view of information before the development of electronic information technology leading to the Internet. The only references to computing in the exhibition and its catalogues were to Napier on logarithms, and to Leibniz's stepped-drum calculator. The exhibition and catalogues included references to the invention of radio, telephone and films, but not to television. 

Sebastian Carter, "Printing & the Mind of Man," Matrix 20 (2000) 172-180.

In November 1963 touch-tone telephone dialing, developed at Bell Labs, was introduced, enabling calls to be switched digitally. The research leading to the design of the touch-tone keyboard was conducted by industrial psychologist John E. Karlin, head of Bell Labs’ Human Factors Engineering department, the first department of its kind at any American company.

"The rectangular design of the keypad, the shape of its buttons and the position of the numbers — with 1-2-3' on the top row instead of the bottom, as on a calculator — all sprang from empirical research conducted or overseen by Mr. Karlin.  

"The legacy of that research now extends far beyond the telephone: the keypad design Mr. Karlin shepherded into being has become the international standard on objects as diverse as A.T.M.’s, gas pumps, door locks, vending machines and medical equipment" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/business/john-e-karlin-who-led-the-way-to-all-digit-dialing-dies-at-94.html, accessed 02-10-2013).

RCA announced the Spectra series of computers, which could run the same software as IBM’s 360 machines. The Spectra computers were also the first commercial computers to use integrated circuits.

IBM introduced the Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST).

"With this, for the first time, typed material could be edited without having to retype the whole text or chop up a coded copy. On the tape, information could be stored, replayed (that is, retyped automatically from the stored information), corrected, reprinted as many times as needed, and then erased and reused for other projects.

"This development marked the beginning of word processing as it is known today. It also introduced word processing as a definite idea and concept. The term was first used in IBM's marketing of the MT/ST as a 'word processing' machine. It was a translation of the German word textverabeitung, coined in the late 1950s by Ulrich Steinhilper, an IBM engineer. He used it as a more precise term for what was done by the act of typing. IBM redefined it 'to describe electronic ways of handling a standard set of office activities -- composing, revising, printing, and filing written documents.' "

Donald Bitzer, H. Gene Slottow, and Robert Willson at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign invented the first plasma video display for the PLATO Computer System.

The display was monochrome neon orange and incorporated both memory and bitmapped graphics. Built by Owens-Illinois glass, the flat panels were marketed under the name "Digivue."

Texas Instruments in partnership with Zenith Radio introduced the first consumer product containing an integrated circuit— a hearing aid.

In 1965 the U. S. Postal Sevice introduced OCR software to sort mail.

Chinese-British-American electrical engineer and physicist Charles K. Kao of STC's Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in Harlow, Essex, England, and George A. Hockham promoted the idea that the attenuation in optical fibers could be reduced below 20 dB per kilometer, allowing fibers to be a practical medium for communication. Kao and Hockham proposed that the attenuation in fibers available at the time was caused by revovable impurities rather than by fundamental physical effects such as scattering. Eventually fiber optic communication became the technology enabling the Internet backbone.

In 2009 Charles Kao received half of the Nobel Prize in Physics "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication." A more detailed account of Kao's work, placing it in historical perspective, was prepared by the Nobel Prize Committee and may be accessed at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/phyadv09.pdf

Co-founder and Chairman of Intel Corporation Gordon Moore published "Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits," Electronics Magazine,  April 19, 1965. In this article he observed that the the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years, and predicted that this trend would continue. The press called this “Moore’s Law.”

"The term "Moore's law" was coined around 1970 by the Caltech professor, VLSI pioneer, and entrepreneur Carver Mead. Predictions of similar increases in computer power had existed years prior. Alan Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" had predicted that by the turn of the millennium, we would have "computers with a storage capacity of about 10^9", what today we would call "128 megabytes." Moore may have heard Douglas Engelbart, a co-inventor of today's mechanical computer mouse, discuss the projected downscaling of integrated circuit size in a 1960 lecture. A New York Times article published August 31, 2009, credits Engelbart as having made the prediction in 1959. . . .

"Moore slightly altered the formulation of the law over time, in retrospect bolstering the perceived accuracy of his law. Most notably, in 1975, Moore altered his projection to a doubling every two years. Despite popular misconception, he is adamant that he did not predict a doubling "every 18 months". However, David House, an Intel colleague, had factored in the increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months." (Wikipedia article on Moore' Law, accessed 11-19-2011).

American electrical engineer and inventor Robert H. Dennard of IBM invented Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) cells— one-transistor memory cells that stored each single bit of information as an electrical charge in an electronic circuit. DRAM technology permitted major increases in memory density.

"The idea for DRAM came to Dennard in 1966, in an epiphany on his living room couch in Westchester County, New York, as he enjoyed the waning daylight over the Croton River Gorge. That morning, he had attended an all-day meeting of IBM researchers, where they shared projects with one another in an attempt to stir ideas and foster collaboration. At the time, Dennard was working on metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) transistor memories for computers. Earlier in the day, he had listened to the group trying to improve magnetic core memory. Something about his own work and what he saw at the review troubled Dennard. The magnetic memory being developed by his competing researchers had drawbacks, but it was extremely simple. His MOS project had promise, on the other hand, but it was quite complicated, using six transistors for each bit of information.

“ 'I thought, ‘What could I do that would be really simple,’' Dennard recalled. There on his couch, he thought through the characteristics of MOS technology—it was capable of building capacitors, and storing a charge or no charge on the capacitor could represent the 1 and 0 of a bit of information. A transistor could control writing the charge to the capacitor. The more Dennard thought, the more he knew he could make a simple memory out of this.

“ 'I called my boss that night around 10 p.m.,' Dennard said. 'It’s a rare event that I’d call him. He listened to me, then suggested we talk about it tomorrow. I joke that he basically told me to take two aspirin and call him in the morning.' 

Dennard still had to work on the six-transistor memory, so he worked on his new idea in his spare time, eventually figuring out the subtleties of writing a charge to the capacitor by way of an access transistor, and then reading it back through the same transistor. In 1967, Dennard and IBM filed a patent application for his single-transistor dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, and the patent was issued in 1968.

"In 1970, Intel ® built a very successful 1-kilobit DRAM chip using a three-transistor cell design, while several manufacturers produced 4-kilobit chips using Dennard’s single-transistor cell by the mid-1970s. Wave after wave of innovation followed, driven by Moore’s Law and scaling principles pioneered by Dennard and coworkers at IBM in the early 1970s. This progress continued through the years, resulting in the DRAM chips of today with capacities of up to 4,000,000,000 bits. Dennard said he could not foresee how important DRAM would become when he invented it: 'I knew it was going to be a big thing, but I didn’t know it would grow to have the wide impact it has today' " (http://www-943.ibm.com/ibm100/us/en/icons/dram/, accessed 07-021-2011).