A Basic History
Signal fire
Hebrew shofar
Roman bucina
Cavalry bugle
Semaphore tower
Writing
What is writing?
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Turning sound symbols (talking) into visual
symbols
Sound symbols are gone in an instant
Visual symbols can last forever
Lascoux Cave painting ca. 17,000
BCE
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Just a noun and a verb
Marriage contract ca. 17,000 BCE pictures reduced to essentials
Pictures for abstractions
Means “Man”
Means “Soul”
Hieroglyph syllables
Hieroglyph letter - L
Evolution of pictures to symbols
Cuneiform
Phoenician traders
Symbols become an alphabet
Phoenician ca. 1050 BCE
ST
What’s the word?
Greek alphabet added vowels
Caen
L’chaim
loch
Hand written lasted 1000 years
Illuminated text
First change from
handwriting to printing
came in 888 CE
The Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist
scripture, created with block printing
Chinese block printing – ca. 1000 CE
Entire page with one block
Chinese type – entire words
ca. 1040 CE
Another little side trip
The Black Death – 1347-1351
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After the Black Death people had two things:
 Lots of money
 A desire to enjoy life
 Fun and games like fairs and celebrations
 The fanciest clothes they could afford
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The rich wore silk
and gold wire
The middle class
wore woolens
Everyone wore linen,
especially --
Linen underwear
What this has to do with printing
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What was necessary to printing was paper
 The only thing available up to this time was
parchment, expensive and uncommon
Linen sheets and underwear wore out and were
thrown away
Linen rags can be turned into paper
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Now there’s plenty of paper
 Everyone uses it as trade and investing
increases
 Contracts
 Record
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keeping
However, because of the Black Death there
weren’t enough scribes for all the paperwork
Something had to be done
The next, and greatest change in
printing came in 1450 CE
Johannes Gutenberg c. 1398-1468
Moveable Type
Gutenberg Press
William Caxton –
First printer in English
Spelling was idiosyncratic
Knight
Knife
First Folio of Shakespeare
Images could be printed
Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette
American Magazine - 1758
Poor Richard’s Almanack
Paine’s Common Sense
Sheet-fed rotary press - 1863
Roll-fed rotary press - 1866
Mergenthaler’s Linotype Machine 1884
Newspapers
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Started in the early 1600s
Corontos, one page Dutch news sheets
imported to England
Diurnals – English news sheets started 1641
First American newspaper
Boston News-Letter – 1704
New-England Courant
Zenger’s Weekly Journal
Effects of these 3 newspapers
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a newspaper with popular support could
challenge authority
financial independence can lead to editorial
independence
government should not control the press
because it can stifle the truth
The Daily Sun
Joseph Pulitzer
William Randolph Hearst
Explosion of USS Maine in Havana
Harbor
Canons of Journalism and Statement
of Principles – 1923
“The right of a newspaper to attract and hold
readers is restricted by nothing but
considerations of public welfare.”
The beginnings of the modern ideal of
journalism: be objective, don’t be
sensationalistic, operate for the public good
Magazines
American magazines – 1740s
Saturday Evening Post
Keys to success
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Rapidly rising literacy rates
Lower printing costs
Spread of social movements like abolition and
labor reform
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Made for compelling reading
The use of specialty writers rather than general
reporters or book authors
Growth of magazines
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Rise of women’s magazines that advertisers
loved
Postal Act of 1879 that lower mailing rates for
magazines
Railroads crisscrossing the entire country
Made magazines the first truly national medium
Life Magazine