|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
From Gutenberg to the Internet Timeline An Annotated Chronology of the History of Information from about 30,000 B.C.E. to the present, by Jeremy M. Norman. |
| 1920194019501960 |
|
| 1775 | Francois-Ambroise Didot revises the point system for typographic units introduced by Pierre-Simon Fournier in 1737. He relates the body size of the type to the legal standard of measurement then in force in France, the "pied du roi" or "royal foot." This results in an augmentation of Fournier's point by a twelfth. Didot's point system becomes the standard unit of type measurement in France. It will be adopted in Germany in the mid-19th century. |
1775 April 17 or 18 |
The American Revolutionary War begins with the rides of Paul Revere and William Dawes on April 17 and the battles of Lexington and Concord the following day. |
1776 July 4 |
John Dunlap prints approximately 200 copies of The Declaration of Independence as a broadside."There is evidence that it was done quickly, and in excitement — watermarks are reversed, some copies look as if they were folded before the ink could dry and bits of punctuation move around from one copy to another. 'We were all in haste,' John Adams later wrote." Surprisingly these printed broadsides are the earliest records of the final draft of the document, as the manuscript dated July 4, 1776 in the National Archives was back-dated. [Twenty-five copies of the Dunlap broadside have survived, as of 2008.] |
| 1785 | Etienne-Louis Boullee proposes a reconstruction of the Bibliotheque du Roi that will contain in one gigantic reading room the entire "memory of the world." |
1788 |
James Watt invents the centrifugal governor and creates interest in other feedback devices. |
1789 |
The French Revolution begins. |
1791 |
Claude Chappe demonstrates his optical telegraph system. The first line from Paris to Lille will be constructed in 1794. (See Reading 5.1.) Chappe's system is the first to enable the transmission of messages overland faster than a messanger or horseback can carry a message over a good road system. That speed had remained essentially fixed since Roman times. |
|
Wolfgang von Kempelen publishes a monograph in which he describes the first successful speech synthesizer. Unlike von Kempelen’s fraudulent chess-playing Turk (1769), this speech synthesizer actually works. |
| January 24 | Jeremy Belknap founds the Massachusetts Historical Society, the first historical society in the United States. " As he[Belknap] envisioned it, the MHS would become a repository and a publisher collecting, preserving, and disseminating resources for the study of American history. Through their pledges of family papers, books, and artifacts the founding members made the Society the nation's most important historical repository by the end of their initial meeting. With the appearance of their first title at the start of 1792, they also made the MHS the nation's first institution of any description to publish in its field." |
| February 18 | In a letter to Ebenezer Hazard, Thomas Jefferson writes concerning the preservation of information: "...let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident." |
1798-99 |
Louis-Nicolas Robert invents the first paper-making machine. It makes a continuous, unbroken sheet of paper that must later be cut. Because of disagreements between Robert and his partners, St. Leger and Francois Didot, and also because of financial disruptions caused by the French Revolution, it will be difficult for Robert to make the necessary improvements to the paper machine, and Francois Didot will attempt to have it developed in England. |
1798 |
William Stanhope builds the first printing press entirely out of iron. This further improves its efficiency. |
| Printing presses are suppressed in Russia by the order of the Tsar, Paul I. | |
1798 |
Alois Senefelder invents lithography--the first radically new method of printing since Gutenberg’s invention of printing by moveable type. |
| 1798-1799 | During his Egyptian Campaign Napoleon Bonaparte establishes printing presses (Imprimerie Nationale) at Alexandria, Cairo, and Gizeh. These are the first presses on the continent of Africa. When the French are driven out of Egypt in 1801 the presses cease operation. |
| 1799 July 15 | Captain Pierre-François Bouchard with Napoleon in Egypt discovers a dark granite stone near the city of Rosetta on which are carved a decree from the Ptolemaic period 196 B.C. written in Egyptian demotic script, Greek, and Egyptian hieroglyphs. The stone, known as the Rosetta Stone, will be forfeited to the English in 1801 under the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria. In 1802 it will be placed in the British Museum. |
|
| 1920194019501960 |
(This page was last revised on
July 4, 2008. Please report errors
and broken links to jnorman@jnorman.com.) |
Home | About this Book | Timeline ©2005-2006
| historyofscience.com
| normanpublishing.com Site design and development by tikibobpublishing.com |
