The first communications revolution was precipitated by the invention of writing in Mesopotamia a little more than five millennia ago.4 To begin with, the invention seemed of use only to ancient accountants, those who counted up the sheep in the sheepfold and the wares in the warehouse. Soon enough, its manipulators discovered that it could also be useful for recording more complex human events (history) and even for making more permanent records of the tales they told one another (literature). But because writing soon required the mastery of thousands of separate symbols, its use was confined to those who had the leisure to master such a complicated system. Literacy came to serve as a new means of political control.
The second communications revolution took place a little to the west of Mesopotamia in the Levant, where someone—perhaps a little before the era of Moses, about midway through the second millennium BC—devised the first alphabet, based on Egyptian hieroglyphs but using only twenty-odd symbols to represent not words but sounds. This was an astounding simplification, enabling almost anyone, even a slave, to become a reader. Direct descendants of that first alphabet remain with us to this day as written Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic. Centuries later, the Greeks would make an alphabet in imitation of the Semites (though with innovative symbols added for vowel sounds, which are largely absent from the Semitic alphabets); last of all, the Romans would make an alphabet of their own, based on the Greek. The book you are reading was composed in this Roman alphabet.
The third communications revolution was a rather drawn-out affair. It involved several inventions: paper, movable type, and the printing press.5 In the early fifteenth century all these things came to Europe from East Asia, where the Chinese and the Koreans had been using them for hundreds of years. But movable type—manufactured symbols, such as the letters of the alphabet, that could be locked in a frame, inked, and impressed onto paper by a mechanical press—proved far more useful to alphabetical Europeans than the invention had ever been to Asians, who needed to draw on thousands of separate pictographic symbols in order to create a text, since their written languages, like those of Mesopotamia, had never known an alphabet.6
Johannes Gutenberg, the German who introduced printing to the West, was a jeweler and goldsmith who knew how to fashion metals into shapes. He realized he would need to use extremely hard material if he was to set up an assembly that could repeatedly stamp letters onto paper (thwack, thwack!) without the letters breaking up. He was the first to make durable alphabetical typefaces out of lead and similar metals. (In the East, far less durable forms, fashioned from ceramic, wood, and sometimes bronze, had been employed.) For his press, he used a slightly altered winepress.
A little before 1440, Gutenberg produced his first printed pages, and by about 1452 he was printing his first Bible. It was a large Latin Bible, using the Vulgate, the traditional translation made by Saint Jerome in the late fourth and early fifth centuries from the original Hebrew and Greek texts. It is thought that 180 copies were printed, 135 on paper and 45 on vellum. Two colors of ink were used, black and red, and spaces were left for illuminations (in the medieval manner) to be added later by hand. In most copies the sheets were divided into two bound volumes. Fewer than fifty copies of this first Bible have survived, most of them now quite incomplete.
What was most astounding about Gutenberg’s project—which he called Das Werk der Bücher, The Work of the Books—was the number of Bibles produced in his first print run. For in this period the catalogues of all the great university libraries of Europe barely contained, on average, more than one hundred separate book titles apiece. In the future made possible by Gutenberg, books of all kinds would be everywhere in multiple copies, and soon enough everyone would be reading, comparing, checking, communicating.
But it inevitably takes a while for human beings to absorb the changes that each new invention will work in our lives. We are certainly not so good at predicting what these changes will be. This is because, as one observer has remarked, “real innovation in technology involves a leap ahead, anticipating needs that no one really knew they had.”7 When, for instance, motion pictures were invented at the end of the nineteenth century, most audiences and most entrepreneurs thought they would be extensions of theater. The great French stage actress Sarah Bernhardt, already in her mid-sixties, enthusiastically repeated her most praised performances for the movie camera. “This,” she exulted, “is my one chance at immortality!”
What we see today is an aging woman, putting on weight, gesticulating silently and wildly, overacting in parts written for much younger actresses. Whatever Bernhardt’s talents, they are hidden from the camera. She should have had a look at what her fellow Frenchmen, the brothers Lumière, were doing with their new movie camera, making their unflamboyant but exceedingly observant and natural documentaries, such as Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, which gives us a much better idea of the capabilities and limitations of the new medium in its astonishing realism. Alternatively, she could have consulted another of her countrymen, Georges Méliès, the original Cinemagician, who in such beguiling and awesome spectacles as A Trip to the Moon was the first to experiment with film’s fantastic capacity for trick photography. What film has never been especially good at, however, is extending the experience of live theater.
The first printed book was a Bible, impressed in a language intelligible only to educated Europeans. To those few who took note of what Gutenberg was up to, his must have seemed a commendably pious effort, a more efficient way of doing what had always been done by scribes in monastic scriptoriums—and nothing more.
How wrong they would have been.
1 This cultural movement is the subject of Volume V of the Hinges of History, Mysteries of the Middle Ages.
2 This exhortation sounds false to me, part of the general disdainful mischaracterizations of the peasantry by the educated classes. It is at one with the conspiratorial exhortation of Dick the Butcher in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2—“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers!”—also used to demonstrate the supposed villainy of the villeins. But then, Shakespeare was hardly a fan of peasant uprisings.
3 More than four and a half centuries after her martyrdom at the hands of churchmen, Joan was canonized by the pope and named a patron of France.
4 See Volume II of the Hinges of History, The Gifts of the Jews,Chapter I. Quite recent and isolated finds—a few undecipherable hieroglyphs on tiny bone tags—at Abydos in Egypt may indicate that the Egyptians invented writing at almost the same time as the Mesopotamian Sumerians. But it would appear from the fragmentary evidence that the Sumerians disseminated their invention more quickly and used it far more extensively than did the Egyptians of this period.
5 The economist W. Brian Arthur argues in The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves that new technologies are seldom, if ever, accidents but normally emerge as novel combinations of already existing technologies, brought together by human beings who are searching for means to ends they have already identified.
6 Though Korean, like several other Eastern languages, would eventually adopt an alphabet, the Chinese languages would never do so. It is enlightening, however, to list, as Eduardo Galeano, that great list maker, has done, the principal inventions that have come to the West from China: “Silk began there, five thousand years ago. Before anyone else the Chinese discovered, named, and cultivated tea. They were the first to mine salt from below ground and the first to use gas and oil in their stoves and lamps. They made lightweight iron plows and machines for planting, threshing, and harvesting two thousand years before the English mechanized their agriculture. They invented the compass eleven hundred years before Europe’s ships began to use them. A thousand years before the Germans, they discovered that water-driven mills could power their iron and steel foundries. Nineteen hundred years ago, they invented paper. They printed books six centuries before Gutenberg, and two centuries before him they used mobile type in their printing presses. Twelve hundred years ago, they invented gunpowder, and a century later the cannon. Nine hundred years ago, they made silk-weaving machines with bobbins worked by pedals, which the Italians copied after a two-century delay. They also invented the rudder, the spinning wheel, acupuncture, porcelain, soccer, playing cards, the magic lantern, fireworks, the pinwheel, paper money, the mechanical clock, the seismograph, lacquer, phosphorescent paint, the fishing reel, the suspension bridge, the wheelbarrow, the umbrella, the fan, the stirrup, the horseshoe, the key, the toothbrush, and other things hardly worth mentioning.”
7 The speaker is David B. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School, commenting on the role of Steve Jobs in computer technology.