| 1725 |
Having formed a company in London called
The Picture Office in 1721 to produce color prints by his trichromatic
method of color printing, Christophe le Blon privately publishes a pamphlet
called Coloritto,
describing the process that he has invented. This is the first published
description of color printing. |
| |
The son of an organ maker, Basile Bouchon of Lyon adapts the concept of musical automata controlled by pegged cylinders to the repetitive task of weaving. He invents a loom that is controlled by perforated paper tape. |
| 1727 |
With the support of t he Grand Vizier,
Ibrahim Muteferrika addresses a petition to
the Sultan of Constantinople in the form of an essay entitled Wasilat
al-Tiba'a, "The
Utility of Printing." Convinced by this essay of the value
of printing, Sultan Achmet III issues an edict permitting the establishment
of printing presses in the Ottoman empire. The authorities also rule that
only secular works may be printed -- to protect the more than 4,000 professional
manuscript copyists of Constantinople, whose work consists almost entirely
in copying the Koran, the collections of canonical traditions, and legal
texts. |
| 1728 |
In order to make the input of instructions to the loom more flexible Jean Falcon substitutes a chain of punched paper cards for the perforated paper tape employed by his colleague Basile Bouchon. |
| 1729 |
Two years after he has received permission
to print, Ibrahim
Muteferrika founds the first printing press in Turkey, at
Constantinople. His first publication is an Arabic-Turkish vocabulary by
Muhammed Ben Mustapha. |
| 1731 |
Benajmin Franklin and a group of his friends
(the "Junto", "a discussion group of young men seeking social, economic,
intellectual, and political advancement") establish the Library
Company of Philadelphia as a subscription
library. |
| |
Jacques Vaucanson begins construction his first automaton, or android, The Flute Player, "a life-size figure of a shepherd that played the tabor and the pipe and had a repertoire of twelve songs." This is most probably the first automaton to perform a series of mechanical procedures long enough and complex enough to provide a credible imitation of life. |
| 1737 |
Pierre-Simon Fournier le Jeune publishes Tables
des Proportions des Differens Caracteres de l'imprimerie. This describes
his point-system or
typographic unit for the sizes of type--all multiples of a unit which he
terms a "point
typographique" based on a scale of 144 points. Fournier's point system
will undergo numerous revisions through the nineteenth century. |
| 1738 |
Vaucanson presents his first complete automaton, The Flute Player, at the Academie Royale des Sciences. |
| 1739 |
Vaucanson completes his Canard Digerateur or Digesting Duck, an automaton that imitates or simulates the process of eating kernels of grain, of metabolism, and of defecation. This is the first automaton to simulate biological processes. |
