My Science School

The first practical mechanized type casting machine was invented in 1884 by Ottmar Mergenthaler. It is regarded as the greatest advance in printing since the development of moveable type 400 years earlier.Born in Germany, Mergenthaler was trained as a watch and clockmaker. He arrived in Baltimore in 1872, and took a job in a machine shop, eventually working his way up into a partnership. At the age of 32, he designed and built his first practical printing machine. With it, the two operations of setting and casting type in leaden lines were performed simply by touching the keys of a board similar to the keyboard of a typewriter Mergenthaler’s machine enabled one operator to be machinist, type-setter, justifier, type-founder, and type-distributor. His invention was called the ‘Linotype’.   Since the machine was first used in 1886 by the New York Tribune, great improvements on its design have been made. Probably more than 1,500 separate patents have been taken out in connection with it!

The Chinese and Japanese used wooden blocks carved with characters for printing. These were known as woodblocks.  The blocks were made of pear or jujube wood. The text of a page was first written out by hand in ink. It was then laid face down on the block, and the block was cut with a mallet and chisel so that the letters stood out in relief and in reverse.The printer next spread ink over the block, and pressed the block onto paper, so that the text appeared the right way around.  You will agree that this process of printing was quite time consuming indeed!

As you can imagine, writing a book by hand was a very long and difficult process. Though printing was invented more than a thousand years ago in China, it was not adapted for use with European scripts until the 15th century. The Chinese, however, were adept at printing scrolls and books using wooden blocks with whole pages of characters carved into them. In the west, the pioneer of printing was a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg who invented a moveable type 557 years ago. This made it possible to print books much more quickly and cheaply.

Don’t you love to just curl up with a good book? Well, in ancient times, before printing was discovered, books were very different from what they are today. All books were in the form of manuscripts that were beautifully written and illustrated by hand. These books were mostly religious books, which were carefully written by monks in elaborate and sometimes decorative hand-writing. There were also practical books that were useful in everyday life, like books on herbs and there healing properties.  The ink for these manuscripts books was made from lampblack mixed with gum. The colours for the drawings were obtained from ground up minerals and metals. The books were written on almost any kind of material…thin strips of tree bark and bamboo, silk, palm leaves, and of course paper and parchment. The books were often rolled into scrolls, or folded like a concertina, while palm leaves were strong together to form a book.The most expensive materials used for manuscript books were gold for decoration and fine parchment for writing. Did you know that sometimes a whole flock of sheep was needed for the parchment to write a book?

When you started learning the alphabet, do you remember your teacher telling you how each letter should be pronounced? Alphabets are different from pictograms in that an alphabet consists of different letters, with each letter representing a sound in a language.  Words are made of different letters put together.An alphabet is the quickest and most efficient way to write. Just imagine… with only 26 letters you can write all the words in the English language! Of course, different languages have their own alphabets. The Greek alphabet is different from the Hebrew alphabet, just as the Hindi alphabet is different from the Malayalam one! The Roman alphabet, which is widely used to this day, was derived from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets. The letters of an alphabet are written in different ways in different languages too. Some are round, while some have square, or even triangular shapes. With some alphabets, the words and sentences are written from left to right, while, with others, they are written from right to left!

It is not known who invented the first pencil. The pencil was first documented in 1565 by Conrad Gesner, and it consisted of a piece of graphite inserted into a wood shaft. European craftsmen (woodworkers) were the first known pencil manufactures, and it wasn’t until the late 1700’s that manufacturing techniques similar to those practiced today were developed

Almost 2000 years ago, in 105AD, a Chinese court official named Cai Lun watched a wasp making its nest. He saw the insect chew up pieces of bamboo, and then mix it with its own saliva to produce a pulp. The pulp was next flattened into a sheet by the wasp, by using its legs. This sheet was used to line the wasp’s nest. Cai Lun copied the wasp, and made a paste of bamboo and water. He then flattened the paste into a thin sheet, dried the sheet in the sun… and paper was invented! Paper soon replaced papyrus and parchment as the most popular writing material. The Chinese used mulberry bark and bamboo to make paper, while the Europeans preferred linen and cotton rags. Nowadays, paper is made from the wood of fast growing trees such as pines, fir and spruce. Paper mills have sprung up wherever there is a good supply of water and wood, producing paper of every colour and texture imaginable. Today, the ever increasing demand for forests into pulp to feed the paper mills. So it is very important that we do not waste paper, and also that we learn to recycle and reuse it

The Indus Valley civilization was one of the greatest civilizations of ancient times. We get much of our knowledge about this civilization from over 2000 inscribed seals that have been discovered in good condition. The Indus people did not engrave inscriptions on stones or place papyrus scrolls in the tombs of their dead. All we know of their writing is derived from the simple inscriptions on their seals. The inscriptions are in the form of some 400 signs. The signs are the written language of these people.These seals tell us a lot about the way the people lived, the gods and goddesses they worshipped, the animals they reared and, other interesting bits of information about their culture

The people in the countries around the Mediterranean and the Chinese all started using signs as a means of writing at about the same time. the people of the island of Crete developed a script known as Linear B which has ideograms, numbers and signs.  The Chinese way of writing was very complex, and has over 50,000 signs! Fortunately, only a few thousand are needed for everyday life, but Chinese is still a difficult language to learn. It has changed very little during the last 4000 years, which means that modern scholars can still read the ancient texts.  The Chinese characters are made up of 26 different strokes, and the Chinese place a lot of importance on the art of fine handwriting. In fact, Chinese children spend a lot of time copying characters before they can write quickly and correctly!

We know that the first form of writing was in the form of pictures of animals, people and objects. These were called pictograms, and they first appeared about 3000 BC. It was easy to read this type of writing since it was easy to recognize the symbols. But it was also a little confusing, because these pictures could not always express ideas or actions fully. So, ideograms or symbols to express thoughts and actions were developed. For example, a picture of a pair of legs walking can mean ‘go’.In time, these symbols changed their shape into signs that did not look much like the real thing… but they kept their meaning. In ancient Indian civilization for example, there were over 400 signs that represented things, and names of people and places

Can you imagine what it would be like if there was no writing? We would have to pass on information only through spoken words, and remember everything in our heads! There would be no books from which we could learn, and we would not be able to communicate with people far way.Writing is a method of putting down information so that it can be stored, and passed on to others. No one person invented writing. It evolved gradually from the need to keep accounts or record events. Writing took many different forms over the ages, from simple picture writing to modern scripts. It was done on different types of materials too… on rocks, clay, pottery… and of course, paper.

The ding-dong theory holds that speech arose because there is a mysterious connection between sound and our senses. People react to stimuli in the world around them by spontaneously producing sounds. For example, a nursing baby produces a sound similar to ‘mmmmm’ as it drinks milk, and this sound eventually became the word ‘mama’!

When you are surprised or hurt you make sounds like ‘OH!’ or ‘OUCH’. Some people believe that the sounds we make when we are angry, frustrated, sad or happy were the starting point for the development of language. This is called the ‘pooh-pooh’ theory about how language began… but to be frank, many people ‘pooh-pooh’ this theory!

Have you noticed how people use their hands to emphasize a point when they are speaking? The gesture theory about the origin of language states that man first started using gestures to communicate. These gestures began to be accompanied by sound that eventually developed into a language.We do know that American Indians used an elaborate system of gestures to communicate with each other. However, most people believe that speech and gestures developed together. There is really no proof that gestures came before speech, so the gesture theory is not accepted by many.

We all know that when a dog barks, it goes ‘bow-wow’. But how does that explain the origin of language? According to the bow-wow theory, language began as imitations of the sounds made by animals and other natural sounds. Thus the word ‘moo’ describes the noise made by a cow, while ‘meow’ sounds just like a kitten’s cry, and ‘plop’ sounds just like a drop of water falling!But this is just a theory, and many people do not agree with it.