Great Inventions and Discoveries

mus, the Ph?nicians, or whoever

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rs. We ought to reverence books, to look at them as useful and mighty things." Milton calls a good book "the precious life blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life." Cicero likens a room without books to a body without a soul. Ruskin says, "Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as

at there I may sit and commune with the master spirits of all the centuries? Socrates, Plato, Homer, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Paul, David,

ow. 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 centur

re 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 w

l people, who lived along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. They were a maritime nation and scattered their

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

er 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 pap

d 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 wor

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

. 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,

or books gave way to paper. At first paper was made of cotton, but during the twelfth century it was produced from

he 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 b

d withered. Passing on from east to west, civilization knocked at the door of Rome and awakened there such military and legal genius as the world had not yet seen. Then a horde of wild barbarians poured over the mountains of northern Italy and overthrew th

laces at the same time. Of all the events that have made for civilization and have influenced the progress of the human race, this event at Haarlem or Mainz is the most important. It is the invention of printing. Before this time, ever since man began to record his thoughts, whether on plank, stone, or papyrus, on bark of tree, skin of animal, or tablet

f Caxton, the Firs

inting was used. The words or letters were carved on a block of wood; the bloc

se classics were cut upon tablets of stone, that these tablets were placed outside the university, and that impressions were made from them. However, we are not indebted to China or Japan for the art of printing. The real invention of printing, so far as the ci

e probably perished in the plague that visited Haarlem in 1439-40. Gutenberg was born of noble parents at Mainz, Germany, in 1410. He had an active mind and gave attention to the m

Coster, while walking in the woods one autumn afternoon, chanced to make for his little grandchild some letters from the bark of a tree; that these letters suggested to him the idea of metallic types; and that he, and not Gutenberg, was the inventor of printing. As th

e kingdom of Cyprus. By about 1477 A.D. printing had extended from Mainz to all the chief towns of Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Franc

lace introducing their art, it seems that not one carried away the types of his master but each made his own anew. Type was originally made and set up by hand, piece by piece, so that even the production of printed books was very slow

s in Boston at Wh

century. It is believed that the Weekly News, started in London in 1622, was the first newspaper published in England. In the United States there was a printing press attached to Harvard College, at Cambridge, Massachusetts, as early as 1638, two years after the college was founded, and only six years after the settlement of B

he managing editor are other editors who have control over various departments of the paper. The telegraph editor looks after news sent by telegraph; the city editor has charge of happenings in the city of publication; the exchange editor clips items from other papers; the religious editor attends to affairs of religion; the sporting editor collects and arranges news of sports and games; the commercial editor works with the markets and matters of commerce and business; the society editor giv

n cable direct into the newspaper office. A king has died; a battle has been fought; storm, earthquake, or fire has destroyed a city; or there has been some achievement in science or

, called galleys, are locked up in a form which is the size of a page. The form is next sent to the stereotyping room, where an exact reproduction is made in metal. The metal plates are put in place on the presses. The machinery is started. Tons of white paper are fed into the presses at one end. Out at another in an instant comes the finished newspaper, printed, cut, and folded. These papers are

picture and a long sketch of his life. How is this possible in so short a time? The papers have on file, arranged in alphabetical order, photographs of prominent persons and places and

ious devices for transmitting news. For some years messengers riding ponies brought news from Washington to the New York

and 340 of all other kinds. 20,184 of these papers were English; 619 German; 158 Scandinavian; 58 Italian; 41 French; 44 Bohemian; 31 Spanish; 18 Hebrew; 21 Dutch; 7 Chinese; 9 Japanese; 5 Greek; 46 Polish; 5 Hungarian; 3 Arabic; and two each in the Welsh, Syrian and Gaelic languages. The capital invested in printing and publishin