I recently wrote another postcard
to my grandkids and to my mother-in-law. I like keeping in physical touch with
them by sending cards that show places we’ve visited. My specific focus was on
writing the words I wanted to put on the cards. But after I was finished and
put them in the mailbox, I thought about my actual writing process.
How did I do it? In this case I
used a modern rollerball pen that precisely spread its ink onto the card to
form letters and words I was writing. As I’m writing these very words about
word-writing, I’m using a keyboard and word-processing software to display my
words digitally on the computer monitor in front of me. Both these examples of
my wordspersonship (aka, penmanship) are the culmination of more than 5000
years of human history.
Over the great span of humanity,
those 50 centuries are practically yesterday, and they began a very long
time ago. Many creatures communicate with their friends and family by uttering
sounds, including crows, chimpanzees, prairie dogs and whales. But our writing
distinguishes humans from every other life-form we’ve so far discovered. It permits
us and our societies to transmit information and to share knowledge over more
than a moment.
I offer here the interesting,
fluid tale of the history of writing. It winds its way from cuneiform tablets
to quill and fountain pens and word processing.
As you know, written text is
distinct from spoken language as well as from symbolic systems. Anthropogenists
believe humans developed the capacity for language at least 50,000 years ago. Human
writing systems were developed much more slowly than our spoken languages. Symbolic
communications systems, that include painting, maps and signs, often do not
require prior knowledge of a spoken language or written text to be understood. That’s
not true for writing.
Humans have been painting for a
long time. The oldest known cave paintings are more than 44,000 years old,
during the Upper Paleolithic period. The Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in southern
France contains some of the best-preserved figurative cave paintings,
drawn about 32,000–30,000 years ago.
A few written systems can be
thought to straddle symbolic and written text. An example is ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics
that used picture words to write. Hieroglyphic writing started as early as 3000
BCE, at the onset of pharaonic civilization. It was a very complex way of
writing. Depending on how one counts them, there are from 700 to 1000 different
hieroglyphic symbols. That’s a lot more than 26 letters. Modern humans
were unable to read hieroglyphic scripts before the Rosetta stone was
discovered in 1799. Sign language and braille (probably the first digitally-based
languages) are two examples of contemporary symbolic communication languages.
Researchers now believe that
writing was independently developed in at least four ancient civilizations:
Mesopotamia (between 3400 and 3100 BCE); Egyptian hieroglyphics, mentioned
above, China (2000 BCE) and Mesoamerica (by 650 BCE).
Cuneiform is a system of
writing developed by ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia, first in the city of Uruk. It is distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets
made by a blunt reed stylus. Many Sumerians wrote cuneiform. Up to two million
cuneiform tablets have been excavated in modern times. Cuneiform script was
used for recording laws and maps, compiling medical manuals, documenting
religious stories and beliefs as well as writing personal letters. In addition,
businesses recorded their sales and inventories on tablets, delighting
paleo-economists. I wonder what their Annual Reports looked like. Cuneiform had
quite a run; it was used for more than 30 centuries, until the second century CE.
The modern English alphabet, which
is the foundation of all our writing, is a Latin alphabet. It originated around
the 7th century from Latin script that was in turn derived from the Greek
alphabet, the first alphabet that had both consonants and vowels. As you may
remember from grade school, the word “alphabet” is a compound of first two
letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. For you etymological nerds. Q:
What’s the most- and least-frequently used letters in the English alphabet?[1]
So now we have the alphabet, all
we need is a device to place the letters on something other than a clay tablet.
Ta da, the pen.
There has been a surfeit of pen
types used for writing through the ages. The first was the reed pen,
made from sea rushes, most likely developed by Egyptians to write on papyrus
scrolls or parchment as far back as the First Dynasty (3000 BCE). Reed pens
have had a long ride in human hands. They were still widely used in the Middle
ages, and were slowly replaced by quill pens from birds’ flight feathers after
the 7th century. Even now, reed pens made from bamboo are used in parts of
Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Like reed pens, quill pens
were prominently used for more than 1,000 years. Quills were broadly available
and the primary writing instrument in the western world from the 6th through
the 19th century. Hence James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin
and other political VIPs wrote the US Constitution in 1787 with their quills. Geese
were a preferred source of feathers for quill pens. Did regular citizens take a
gander at these notables when they deliberated about the Constitution in
Philadelphia? Most likely.
Next up in the hands of writers
was the nib or dip pen. A nib is the end part of a quill, dip pen or fountain
pen, that comes into contact with the writing surface in order to deposit ink. They’re
called dip pens because, like quills, there is no reservoir of ink in the pen.
You have to periodically dip your pen into the ink well to keep writing.
Ancient Egyptians experimented
with metal-nibbed pens made from copper and bronze. Generally the writing
quality from such metal-nibbed pens was poorer to that of reed pens. It wasn’t
until the early 19th century that pens made with split-steel nibs became
popular, principally because their nibs retained a sharp point far longer than
quills. Pens with easily replaceable nibs – of differing widths and designs to
allow for distinctive writing– were quite popular. Pen-makers have used many
types of metal for their nibs, including copper, stainless steel and gold. A
copper nib was found in the Pompei ruins (79 CE). After the platinum group of
metals was discovered in the mid-18th century, extravagant dip pens became
objects d’art with iridium-tipped gold nibs in the early 19th century. Most nibs
now use stainless steel alloys.
The French government provided a patent
for a fountain pen invented by a Romanian student in Paris in 1827. His
fountain pen used a swan's quill as its ink reservoir. The invention of the
nibbed fountain pen solved the basic problem with dip pens. The “fountain” is
an ink reservoir built into the pen itself that diminished the need for frequent,
repeated use of an ink well. The modern fountain pen nib can be traced back to
an original gold nib that had a tiny fragment of ruby attached to its
wear-point.
Interestingly, Leonardo da Vinci
created an inventive fountain pen. According to Wikipedia, there is “compelling
evidence” that he constructed a working fountain pen during the late-15th
century Renaissance. Leonardo’s journals show detailed illustrations (is there
any other kind for Leonardo) of a reservoir pen. Leonardo bibliophiles note
that his pen-based handwriting (that often was a mirrored, right-to-left shorthand)
displays a consistent contrast, rather than periodic fading typical of a quill
pen’s ink re-dipping.
Time-consuming technological
innovation was required to mass produce reliable, inexpensive and leak-less
fountain pens. This happened by the mid-19th century, when more than half of
the world’s the steel nib fountain pens were manufactured in Birmingham,
England. The rapid increase of fountain pens’ use in turn encouraged the expansion
of education, literacy and, of course, writing.
Next up in this pen parade are ballpoint
pens. The first patent for a ballpoint pen was issued in the US in 1888 to
John J. Loud, who wanted a writing instrument that would work on rough surfaces
like wood, that fountain pens could not. His pen was mildly successful
operationally, but no one then wanted one. That would have to wait until after
WWII. Rollerball pens utilize the same ballpoint mechanism as ballpoints, but apply
water-based inks instead of oil-based inks.
Marcel Bich, a Frenchman, dropped
the last letter of his name and created Bic pens. Bic introduced a ballpoint
pen in the US in 1950. It was his firm’s first product. His inexpensive,
disposable Bic Cristal pen has been the world’s most widely-sold pen for some
time. They now come in 18 different colored inks. The 100 billionth Bic pen was
sold in September 2006.
What about pencils? We’ve used pencils
for ages as drawing instruments. Contrary to the usual term, lead pencils have
no lead in them, only graphite usually surrounded by wood. In the mid-16th
century a massive deposit of very pure, solid graphite was discovered near
Cumbria, England. It’s the only large-scale solid graphite deposit ever found.
Because graphite is quite soft, it needs some type of encasement to be used.
Way back then, the graphite sticks were wrapped in sheepskin. Now we use wood
casing.
One of my memories of grade-school
is the bright yellow wood-encased pencils. Indeed, the hexagonal Ticonderoga #2
yellow pencil was created in the late 19th century and is still made and used. Its
manufacturer, Dixon, used yellow-colored wood to case their pencils with Chinese graphite
because in China yellow denoted royalty. Who knew? Alas for Dixon, pencils have
long become a commodity; their Ticonderoga pencil hasn’t been cool or prized
for a protracted time.
Speaking of grade-school and
pencils, learning long-hand cursive
script may still be briefly
taught, but its days are clearly numbered because of the gigantic rise of
digital writing for everyone.
In high school and college when writing
papers, formal letters and other documents I used a typewriter. In
college I had a sea-green Hermes 3000 portable typewriter, shown below. A
typewriter is a mechanical or electro-mechanical machine for placing
alphanumeric characters on paper. In 1575, an Italian printmaker invented the scrittura
tattile (literally: tactical writing), a machine to impress letters onto
papers, a very crude ancestor of the typewriter. By the 1880s commercial
typewriters were becoming more common. Interestingly, the QWERTY keyboard
layout was initiated in 1873, and hasn’t changed much despite occasional
hand-felt pleas. Like many students, I took a typewriting course in high
school, which should have been called qwerty-ing, not typewriting.
Standard designs for typewriters
were not common until after 1910. Such standards spurred sales. Thereafter, the
typewriter quickly became an indispensable tool for virtually all writing other
than personal handwritten correspondence. Typically, a typewriter has an array
of keys, and when pressed by a finger each key causes a different single
character to be produced on the paper via a typebar, by means of a ribbon with
dried ink struck against the paper by a type element. In the office market IBM
introduced its Selectric typewriter in 1961 that transformed the electric
typewriter market by disposing of the typebars with an easily-replaceable, spherical
element (or typeball). By the 1970s, IBM had succeeded in establishing the
Selectric as the prevailing typewriter in mid- to high-end office environments.
During the 1980s typewriters began to be displaced by digital devices.
Here’s the digital last-stop on my
tour. The majority of writing in Western nations now is done digitally ultimately
using zeros and ones, not styluses, pens or pencils of any sort. Digital
writing involves word processing software on your computer and/or phone.
The term “word processing” first
appeared in offices in the early 1970s, as a productivity tool for typists.
Centralized, word processing-specific microcomputers slowly edged into
businesses. Wang Laboratories became a popular system in the mid-1970s and
early 1980s. When home/personal computers (PCs) became more prevalent in the
late 1970s and 1980s, centralization fundamentally folded. Everyone became a “typist,”
except the typists who became nonessential. Both commercial and individual
microcomputer owners bought WordStar and then WordPerfect to write documents
after laboriously installing them on their computers. Microsoft Word was put on
the IBM PCs in 1984. Macintoshes had MacWrite. The “email and authoring market”
software
is currently dominated by MS Office, which had 87.5% of the 2019 market. Google
Docs has 10.4%.
This synopsis of our 5000-year journey
of script has reached its finale. It’s covered much territory and innumerable written
pages of prose and poetry. Imagine what might be coming next.
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