The dawn of written communication began more than thirty-two thousand years ago, when prehistoric humans drew pictures and paintings on cave walls. Explorers have found these caves in Spain, France, Great Britain, and other countries. Over time, small pictures began to represent words. A picture of a snake meant the word snake. From this, the ancient Egyptians invented a form of writing called hieroglyphics. A string of pictures expressed a complete thought. A long string of hieroglyphics might tell a story.
The Sumerians and the Babylonians, in what is modern-day Iraq, started using wedge-shaped characters that stood for speech sounds. We call this cuneiform writing. 87 Writers placed the cuneiforms in a certain order to mean certain ideas. Strings of cuneiforms resemble our present-day sentences. Cuneiform writing was a major step toward the invention of modern alphabets. As the years passed, alphabets developed in many forms all over the world. To write, there has to be something to write on and to write with. Early humans wrote on rocks, wood, skins, and cloth. Ancient Egyptians pressed out papyrus plants to make a paper-like writing material. In 104 AD, in China, a man named Tsai Lun invented paper made out of wood fibre.
Over the centuries, this became the most common writing material. Early people wrote with sharpened stones, bones, or sticks dipped in dye or some other coloured liquid. The Greeks introduced the earliest writing tool similar to a pen. It was a stylus made of metal, bone, or ivory. Quill pens appeared around 700 AD. Writers made quill pens by sharpening the ends of bird feathers. The feathers of geese, hawks, owls, and turkeys made the best pens. The first fountain pen appeared in the mid-tenth century. The caliph of Egypt ordered his staff to invent a writing tool that would hold ink and feed it to the writing tip. Gravity pulled the ink down from a storage area.
When the storage area ran dry, the writer added more ink to it. The following centuries brought various improvements on the fountain pen. In 1500 AD, the English invented pencils. In 1938, a Hungarian editor named Laszlo Biro made the first ballpoint pen. It was not as messy as a fountain pen. And it didn’t need to be refilled. After the script was fully developed and writing materials—pen, ink and paper—were invited, man felt the need for producing written documents in large quantity. So, the need for printing technology was felt. The need led to the invention of the printing press in due course of time. 88 In the eleventh century, in China, a man named Bi Sheng invented a movable type device mad e of wood. In the thirteenth century, the Koreans invented a movable type device made of metal.
Movable type allows the printer to move letters around and reuse them. Before this invention, a printer had to carve all the letters and words for a page or group of pages from a single block of wood. The printer made copies, but the wood soon wore out, and new blocks had to be carved. It took a long time to print anything, and few copies could be made. To print another book, the printer had to carve other pages. Movable metal letters changed that. We give credit to a German citizen, Johannes Gutenberg, for inventing a movable type printing press for the Western world in about 1450. In this type, there were separate letters cast in lead alloy which could be used over and over again. This was definitely a great improvement over the Chinese wooden blocks that could be reused. The nature of European language that revolved around only 25 letters, unlike the Chinese make this possible. Allowing for upper and lower case letters, numbers and punctuation marks, Gutenberg still needed only 300 different pieces of metal type to print his first book the Gutenberg Bible in 1456. Pages still need to be set letter by letter but, even so, it was quicker than carving wood blocks. In 1500 there were nearly 2000 printing press in Europe, including William Caxton’s press in London. It was this press that launched Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous book The Canterbury Tales for the first time in 1478. They had produced 40, 000 titles; 20 million books in all were in circulation. This development made possible the rapid spread of information and ideas, one of the foundations of the modern civilization. Aldus Manutius’ Aldine Press in Venice produced the first modern printed copies of ancient Greek and Rome texts. Books became cheaper and more accessible. More people learnt to read. Human communication changed in the years after Gutenberg. His and other people’s printing firms provided many inexpensive copies of books. This meant that the written word could be spread around the world. Having books available made people everywhere want to read. And this want changed the face of the world entirely. We can only imagine today, how the world would be, if alphabets were not developed, and books had never come into the scene of the world! (Information credit: Donald Cleveland)