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TIMELINE

38,000 BCE	A red dot painted on the El Castillo cave in Northern Spain is thought to be the oldest image drawn by man.
3500 BCE	Oldest writing ever found in Mesopotamia on limestone.
3300 BCE	Oldest writing on clay tablet found in Uruk, southern Babylonia (Iraq), the beginning of cuneiform.
3000 BCE	Date of oldest papyrus, a blank scroll in the tomb of Saqqara, near Cairo.
3000 BCE	Beginning of Egyptian Hieroglyphic writing.
2500 BCE	First script in the Indus valley.
2400 BCE	Oldest known Egyptian book, written on woven linen.
2200 BCE	Writing on copper and pottery in the Indus valley.
2100 BCE	Date of the oldest piece of tapa, a fragment found in Peru.
1850 BCE	Date of the oldest-known document written on leather, an Egyptian scroll.

18TH CENTURY BCE First writing system in Crete.

1400 BCE	Writing on bones in China.
1300 BCE	Writing on bronze, jade, and tortoise shell in China.
1200 BCE	Characters for Chinese language developed.
1100 BCE	Egyptians begin exporting papyrus, first to Phoenicians.
1000 BCE	Phoenician alphabet begins.
600 BCE	Zapotec/Mixtec writing in Mexico.
600 BCE	Accounts written on wooden tablets in China and Greece.

5TH CENTURY BCE Chinese write on silk.

400 BCE	The Ionian alphabet becomes standard in Greece.
400 BCE	True ink from lampblack invented in China.
300 BCE	King Eumenes II of Pergamum, barred from importing papyrus, builds a library of 200,000 volumes in parchment.

3RD CENTURY BCE Library at Alexandria.

255 BCE	First mention of seals in China but used without ink in clay.
252 BCE	The dating of the oldest piece of paper ever found in Lu Lan, China.
250 BCE	In China Meng Tian invents the camel’s hair brush for calligraphy.
250 BCE	Mayan hieroglyphic writing.
207 BCE	Beginning of the Chinese Han dynasty, in which paper is developed.
63 BCE	Strabo, the Greek geographer, writes of marveling at a watermill in the palace of Mithridates, King of Pontus, along the Black Sea.
31 BCE	The earliest known Olmec glyph writing.
30 BCE	Romans conquer Egypt and spread papyrus in the Mediterranean world.

1ST CENTURY CE Wax tablets used for temporary writing in Rome.

75 CE	The last inscription written in cuneiform.
105 CE	The eunuch Cai Lun of the Chinese Han court is credited with inventing paper.

2ND CENTURY CE Runic alphabet created in Scandinavia.

250–300	Approximate date of paper found in Turkestan.
256	First known book on paper, the Phi Yu Ching, produced in China.
297	Earliest known Mayan calendar, carved in stone.
394	Last inscription written in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

5TH CENTURY Japanese develop their own alphabet.

450	Date of earliest known writing on palm-leaf fragments of a manuscript found in northwestern China.
476	Official end of classical antiquity as the last Western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, is overthrown.
500	Mayans begin writing on amate.
500–600	Mayans develop bark paper.
548	The king of Paekche (Korea) sends sutra and statues made of paper to Japan.
610	Korean monk Dancho takes papermaking to Japan.
630	Muhammad conquers Mecca.
651	Paper is made in Samarkand.
673	Monks at the temple of Kawahara begin copying Buddhist scriptures, which soon became a major activity in Japan.

8TH CENTURY China starts printing.

706	Arabs bring paper to Mecca
711	An Arab-led Berber army crosses the Straits of Gibraltar from Morocco into Spain.
712	Earliest known piece of Japanese literature, Kojiki, is written in Chinese.
720	Use of paper in Japan greatly expands as Japan becomes Buddhist.
751	Papermaking in Samarkand begins.
762–66	Baghdad founded.
770	Japanese empress Shōtoku orders the first known printing on paper, 1 million copies of a prayer to drive away disease.
795	Rag paper mill opened in Baghdad.
800	Paper first used in Egypt.
832	Muslim conquest of Sicily.
848	Date of the oldest-known complete book in Arabic on paper.
850	Estimated date of earliest known version of One Thousand and One Nights.
868	The Diamond Sutra, the oldest printed book ever, is found.
889	Mayans begin writing all their records on paper rather than stone.

LATE 9TH CENTURY Baghdad becomes an important papermaking center.

900	Egyptians begin making paper.
969	Earliest known use of playing cards in China.
1041–48	Date of earliest known moveable type in China made of earthenware set in an iron form.
900–1100	Mayans write the Dresden Codex.
1140	Papermaking begins in Muslim Spain in Xátiva.
1143	The Qur’an is translated into Latin.
1264	First record of papermaking in Fabriano, Italy.
1282	First watermarks, in Fabriano, Italy.
1308	Dante begins writing The Divine Comedy.
1309	Paper first used in England.
1332	Paper first used in Holland.
1338	Papermaking starts in Troyes.
1353	Boccaccio writes The Decameron.
1387	Chaucer starts writing Canterbury Tales.
1389	German papermaking begins in Nuremberg.
1403	King Taejong of Korea orders bronze type.
1411	Papermaking begins in Switzerland.
1423	Earliest known European block prints.
1440–50	First European block books.
1456	Gutenberg completes printing his first Bible with moveable type.
1462	Mainz is destroyed and its printers disperse.
1463	Ulrich Zell starts the Cologne printing industry.
1464	The Subiaco Monastery near Rome becomes the first print house in Italy.
1469	Epistolae ad Familiares by Cicero is the first book printed in Venice.
1473	Lucas Brandis establishes first printing press in Lübeck.
1475 OR 1476	Le livre de merveilles du monde becomes the first book printed in the French language.
1477	William Caxton opens Britain’s first printing press
1494	Aldus Manutius starts the Aldine Press in Venice.
1495	John Tate establishes the first paper mill in England in Hertfordshire.
1502–20	Aztec tribute book lists forty-two papermaking centers. Some villages produce half a million sheets of paper annually.
1515	Albrecht Dürer starts etching.
1519	Hernán Cortés lands near Vera Cruz and begins the destruction of Aztec culture.
1520	Martin Luther’s To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation is printed and 50,000 copies are distributed in two years.
1528	Fr. Juan de Zumárraga arrives in Mexico as protector of the Indians, and burns books.
1539	Spanish begin first printing press in Mexico to make books for the indigenous people.
1549	Mayan library burned by the Spanish.
1575	Spanish build the first paper mill in Mexico.
1576	Russians begin papermaking.
1586	A decree authorizing papermaking in Dordrecht is earliest record of Dutch papermaking.
1605	Publication of Cervantes’s Don Quixote.
1609	The world’s first newspaper, Avisa Relation oder Zeitung, published in Strasbourg.
1627	The Catholic siege of La Rochelle in France drives Huguenot papermakers to England.
1635	Papermaking begins in Denmark.
1638	First English printing press is brought to America.
1672	With invention of the Hollander beater, Holland becomes a net exporter rather than importer of fine white paper.
1690	William Rittenhouse establishes first paper mill in America.
1690	America’s first newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, published in Boston.
1690	First paper money in the American colonies issued in Massachusetts.
1698	Thomas Savery designs the first steam engine to pump out mines.
1702	The Daily Courant in London, the first daily newspaper, begins publishing.
1719	René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur describes how wasps make paper from wood.
1728	Papermaking in Massachusetts begins.
1744	A Little Pretty Pocket Book, the first illustrated children’s book, is published in England
1744	Papermaking in Virginia begins.
1767	Papermaking in Connecticut commences.
1768	Abel Buell is the first to cut and cast type in the American colonies.
1769	First manufacturer of printing presses in the British American colonies, Isaac Doolittle begins in New Haven.
1773	Papermaking in New York begins.
1774	The Swedish apothecary Carl Scheel discovers chlorine, which eventually leads to bleach.
1785	An independent London newspaper, The Daily Universal Register, begins publishing. Three years later it changes its name to The Times.
1790	Thomas Bewick becomes the most sought-after illustrator in Britain.
1798	Nicolas-Louis Robert applies for a patent for his continuous-paper machine.
1798	Artist J. M. W. Turner begins his experiments with watercolors.
1799	Alois Senefelder invents the lithograph.
1800	Lord Stanhope invents a cast iron printer.
1801	Joseph-Marie Jacquard invents the automatic loom, operated by punch cards.
1804	Bryan Donkin builds the first working Fourdrinier machine.
1809	John Dickinson patents his cylinder papermaking machine.
1810	Friedrich Koenig invents a steam-powered printer.
1811	The Luddites start smashing automatic looms in England.
1814	The Times of London uses Koenig’s steam-powered printer.
1818	Joshua Gilpin builds the first continuous-paper machine in America.
1820	More than 29 million newspapers are sold in Britain this year.
1825	Joseph Nicéphore Niépce makes the first photograph.
1830	New bleaching process makes white paper from colored rags possible.
1833	An English patent is granted for making paper from wood.
1840	William Henry Fox Talbot makes first permanent photo on paper.
1841	Ebenezer Landells starts the London satirical magazine Punch.
1843	American Richard M. Hoe invents the steam-powered rotary printing press.
1863	American papermakers start using wood pulp.
1867	English wood pulp grinder exhibited in Paris.
1867	Wood pulp for paper first ground in the United States in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
1867	Typewriter invented.
1872	United States surpasses Britain and Germany to become the largest paper producer in the world.
1874	Yukosha Company begins making machine-made paper in Tokyo, and six other companies follow in Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe.
1890	US census tabulated by punch-card machines.
1899	Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, while excavating the ruins of the vanished city of Lu Lan, finds paper from 252 BCE, completely upsetting the history of paper.
1931	Vannevar Bush builds an analog electromechanical computer.
1945	John von Neumann publishes a paper on using binary numbers to program electronic memory.
1947	Transistor invented at Bell Labs.
1951	Remington Rand produces forty-six UNIVAC I computers with memory storage and output on magnetic tape.
1958	Microchip invented.

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