Great Inventions and Discoveries

by Willis Duff Piercy

Great as books are, however, the world has not long had them. For many generations after man's advent, he had no language. He communicated with his fellows by means of gestures or gave vent to his feelings in rude grunts or cries, much as the lower animals do now. But God gave to man something He did not bestow upon the other animals—the power of articulate speech. Certain sounds came to represent certain ideas and a kind of oral language grew up. This became more and more highly developed as time went by. For centuries the traditions, stories, and songs of men were handed down orally from father to son and were preserved only in the memory. The poems of Homer, the great Greek bard, were recited by readers to large audiences, some of them numbering probably twenty thousand.

By and by men felt the need of preserving their thoughts in some more permanent way than by memory, and there grew up a rude system of writing. At first pictures or rude imitations of objects were used; a circle or a disc might represent the sun, and a crescent the moon. The idea of a tree was denoted by the picture of a tree. The early Indians of North America were among the peoples who used a system of picture writing. In process of time, as men grew in knowledge and culture, certain fixed signs began to denote certain sounds, and a phonetic system of writing was developed.

For the first phonetic alphabet it is generally supposed that we are indebted to the Phœnicians, an active, commercial people, who lived along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. They were a maritime nation and scattered their alphabet wherever they sailed, so that some kind of phonetic alphabet finally existed throughout the civilized world.

Books among the ancients were very different from the books of the present. Paper has not been known long, nor, indeed, has the art of printing. When man began to preserve his thoughts and deeds in more permanent form than in the memory, various substances were used to write upon. Josephus, an historian of the Jews, mentions two columns, one of stone and the other of brick, upon which the children of Seth wrote accounts of their inventions and astronomical discoveries. Tablets of lead containing the works of Hesiod, a Greek writer, were deposited in the temple of the Muses in Bœotia. According to the Bible, the ten commandments which the Lord gave to Moses on Mount Sinai for the children of Israel were engraved on two tablets of stone; and the laws of Solon, the great Grecian law-giver, were carved on planks of wood.

Sixty centuries ago on the banks of the Nile in northern Africa flourished the civilization of the Egyptians. There grew abundantly in Egypt a marsh reed called the papyrus. From the name of this plant is derived our word paper. The Egyptians made their books from the papyrus plant. With a sharp instrument they cut lengthwise strips through the stalk, put these strips together edge to edge, and on them at right angles, placed another layer of shorter strips. The two layers were then moistened with Nile water, pressed together, and left to dry. A leaf of writing material was thus produced. Any roughness on the surface of the sheet was polished away with some smooth instrument. A number of leaves were then glued together so as to form a long piece of the material. The Egyptians took reeds, dipped them in gum water colored with charcoal or with a kind of resinous soot, and wrote on the long papyrus strip. Sometimes ink was made of the cuttle fish or from lees of wine. After the papyrus had been written upon, it was rolled up and became an Egyptian book. Papyrus was used for writing material not only by the Egyptians but by the Greeks and the Romans also, and for a long time it was the chief substance used for writing throughout the civilized world. It continued in use to a greater or less extent till about the seventh century after Christ.

On the plains of Asia lived the Chaldeans, whose civilization was about as old as that of the Egyptians. But their books were very different. Men use for their purposes the things that are close at hand. In Egypt the papyrus plant was utilized for making books. In Chaldea, instead of this marsh reed, there were great stores of clay and of this material the ancient Chaldeans, and the Babylonians and the Assyrians who followed them, made their books. The Chaldeans took bricks or masses of smooth clay and, while they were yet soft, made impressions on them with a metal stiletto shaped at the end like the side of a wedge. In Latin the word for wedge is cuneus. Hence this old writing of the Chaldeans is called cuneiform or wedge-shaped. Some of these wedge-shaped impressions stood for whole words, others for syllables. After the clay tablets had been written upon, they were burned or dried hard in the sun. A Chaldean book was thus made very durable and lasted for ages. During recent years many of them have been dug up in ancient Babylonia and deciphered. They consist of grammars, dictionaries, religious books and hymns, laws, public documents, and records of private business transactions.

The early Greeks and Romans used for their books tablets of ivory or metal or, more commonly, tablets of wood taken from the beech or fir tree. The inner sides of these tablets were coated with wax. On this wax coating the letters were traced with a pointed metallic pen or stiletto called the stylus. Our English word style, as used in rhetoric, comes from the name of this instrument. The other end of the stylus was used for erasing. Two of these waxed tablets, joined at the edges by wire hinges, were the earliest specimens of bookbinding. Wax tablets of this kind continued in partial use in Europe through the Middle Ages. Later the leaves of the palm tree were used; then the inner bark of the lime, ash, maple, or elm.

The next material that came into general use for writing purposes was parchment. This was made from the skins of animals, particularly sheep or lambs. Next came vellum, the prepared skin of the calf. Parchment and vellum were written upon with a metallic pen. As these substances were very costly, sometimes one book was written over another on the same piece of parchment or vellum. Of course this made the reading of the manuscript very difficult.

About the end of the ninth century or the beginning of the tenth, after Christ, parchment and vellum as material for books gave way to paper. At first paper was made of cotton, but during the twelfth century it was produced from linen. It is not known who invented linen paper, but its introduction gave the first great impulse to book making.

In the early Greek books the lines ran in opposite directions alternately. That is, there would be a line from left to right across the page, and then the next lower line would begin at the right and run towards the left. Among some of the Orientals the lines ran from right to left. In the old Chinese books the lines were vertical down the page, as they are still. Among Western and Northern peoples the lines ran from left to right as in our modern books.