From Cave Paintings to the Internet An Annotated Interactive Timeline on the History of Information and Media 1875 to 1900 Timeline

Frank S. Baldwin (United States) and W. T. Odhner (Russia) invent calculators using a true variable-toothed gear, the first real advance in mechanical calculating technology since Leibnitz's stepped drum (1673). These calculators are called "pinwheel calculators." The greater ease of use of this technology, its general reliability, and the compact size of the equipment incorporating it cause an explosion of sales in the calculator industry.

JGA Eickhoff builds a four-cylinder perfecting press, capable of printing two sides of paper simultaneously.

Melvil Dewey publishes the Dewey Decimal Classification in his anonymous Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library.

The earliest international exposition exclusively of scientific instruments is held at the South Kensington Museum, London. A small section is devoted to arithmetic and calculating instruments.

Martin Wiberg uses his difference engine to produce Tables de Logarithms Calculées et Imprimées au Moyen de la Machine à Calculer du M. Wiberg. This set of tables of seven-place logarithms from 1 to 100,000 is the first logarithmic table produced by a calculating machine.

Thomas Edison invents the Electric Pen, the forerunner of the mimeograph.

Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone . Speaking through the instrument to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, in the next room, Bell says "Mr. Watson--come here--I want to see you." (See Reading 5.3.)

The New York Tribune publishes a series of 36 relief blocks on its front page showing the targets at an International Rifle Match in Dublin, Ireland. The blocks are produced in New York from target coordinates transmitted over the Atlantic telegraph. These are the first significant series of illustrations published in a daily newspaper.

Thomas Alva Edison invents the phonograph. In the first test of the machine he recites the nursury rhyme, "Mary had a little lamb." The machine records on a metal cylinder wrapped with metal foil. Edison will apply for the patent on December 24. An aspect of this invention that has been observed is that before Edison invented the phonograph few people ever imagined a need for such a device.

The American Library Association (ALA) is founded in Philadelphia.

Construction of the first regular telephone line is completed. It runs from Boston to Somerville, Massachusetts.

It takes three hundred clerks working at The Prudential six months to review its 2,500,000 policies with the assistance of twenty-four Thomas de Colmar arithmometers.

The first telephone switchboard is set up in Boston.

Emile Berliner invents the microphone. It is used as a telephone speech transmitter.

David Edward Hughes invents the loose-contact carbon microphone. It will be vital to telephony and later to broadcasting and sound recording.

The Remington Model 2 typewriter introduces a shift key, allowing the typing of both upper and lower case letters.

Bruno Abdank-Abakanowicz, a mathematician, inventor and electrical engineer, invents the integraph, a form of integrator.

"The integraph is an elaboration and extension of the planimeter, an earlier, simpler instrument used to measure area. It is a mechanical instrument capable of deriving the integral curve corresponding to a given curve. Hence, it is capable of solving graphically a simple differential equation.

"Sets of partial differential equations are commonly encountered in mathematical physics. Most branches of physics such as aerodynamics, electricity, acoustics, plasma physics, electron-physics and nuclear energy involve complex flows, motions and rates of change which may be described mathematically by partial differential equations. A well-established example from electromagnetics is the set of partial differential equations known as Maxwell's equations.

"In practice, differential equations can be difficult to integrate, that is to solve. The integraph is capable of solving only simple differential equations. The need to handle sets of more complex non-linear differential equations, led Vannevar Bush to develop the Differential Analyzer at MIT in the early 1930s. In turn, limitations in speed, capacity and accuracy of the Bush Differential Analyzer provided the impetus for the development of the ENIAC during World War II.

"Abdank-Abakanowicz’s instrument could produce solutions to a commonly encountered class of simple differential equations of the form dy/dx = F(x) so that y = ò F(x)dx. The basic approach was to draw a graph of the function F and then use the pointer on the device to trace the contour of the function. The value of the integral could then be read from the dials. The concept of the instrument was taken up and soon put into production by such well known instrument makers as the Swiss firm of Coradi in Zurich." From Gordon Bell's website.

The first regular telephone exchange is set up in New Haven, Connecticut.

In an article published in the North American Review Thomas Edison describes future uses for his phonograph:

1. Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.
2. Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their part.
3. The teaching of elocution.
4. Reproduction of music.
5. The "Family Record"--a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons.
6. Music-boxes and toys.
7. Clocks that should announce in articulate speech the time for going home, going to meals, etc.
8. The preservation of languages by exact reproduction of the manner of pronouncing.
9. Educational purposes; such as preserving the explanations made by a teacher, so that the pupil can refer to them at any moment, and spelling or other lessons placed upon the phonograph for convenience in committing to memory.
10. Connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication. "

Eleven months after its foundation, The Connecticut District Telephone Company issues the world's first telephone book. It contains the names and addresses of 391 subscribers who pay $22 per year for service. There are no phone numbers, but there are advertisements and listings of businesses in the back of the book--the first, embryonic "yellow pages." The advertisers include physicians and carriage companies. Customers are limited to three minutes per call and no more than two calls an hour without permission from the central office.

"Besides rules, the embryonic phone book also featured pages of tips on placing calls — pick up the receiver and tell the operator whom you want — and how to talk on this gadget. Having a real conversation, for example, required rapidly transferring the telephone between mouth and ear.“When you are not speaking, you should be listening,” it says at one point. You should begin by saying, “Hulloa,” and when done talking, the book says, you should say, “That is all.” The other person should respond, “O.K.” Because anybody could be on the line at any time, customers should not pick up the telephone unless they want to make a call, and they should be careful about what others might hear. “Any person using profane or otherwise improper language should be reported at this office immediately.”

James and John Ritty patent a cash register. It has a large display to record money received and a locked drawer to hold cash receipts.

Thomas Alva Edison produces the first incandescent light bulb capable of burning for a substantial period of time.

Alphonse Bertillon first publishes a description of his method of anthropometry. He develops this system, which uses five measurements-- head length, head breadth, length of middle finger, length of left foot, and length of forearm from elbow to extremeity of middle finger--as a means for identifying people. It is the first scientific method for the identification of criminals. "Until this time, criminals could only be identified based on eyewitness accounts, which are known to be unreliable." Bertillon will first employ his method, which will eventually be called "Bertillonage" in the successful identification of a criminal in 1883. It will become the first extensively used scientific method of criminal identification.

Under the direction of John Shaw Billings, the Library of the Surgeon General's Office (to be redesignated in 1956 the National Library of Medicine) begins publication of the Index Medicus -- an effort to index all of medical periodical literature. It will finally cease publication in print in 2004.

Gottlob Frege publishes in Halle, Germany his Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens. 

“. . . although a mere booklet of eighty-eight pages, it is perhaps the most important single work ever written in logic. Its fundamental contributions, among lesser points, are the truth-functional propositional calculus, the analysis of the proposition into function and argument(s) instead of subject and predicate, the theory of quantification, a system of logic in which derivations are carried out exclusively according to the form of the expressions, and a logical definition of the notion of mathematical sequence. Any single one of these achievements would suffice to secure the book a permanent place in the logician’s library” (Van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel (1967) 1).

“In his attempt to give a satisfactory definition of number and a rigorous foundation to arithmetic, Frege found ordinary language insufficient. To overcome the difficulties involved, he devised his Begriffschrift as a tool for analyzing and representing mathematical proofs completely and adequately. This tool has gradually developed into modern mathematical logic, of which Frege may justly be considered the creator“ (Dictionary of Scientific Biography article on Frege).

George R. Carey proposes one of the earliest systems of television transmission. (See Reading 5.5.)

John Shaw Billings begins publication of the The Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General’s Office. It will become a landmark in the history of efforts to organize information and to make it searchable, and a primary general reference for the history of medicine and science. The fifith and final series will be issued in 1961. The finished set of printed books will contain "over 4.5 million. . . references to over 3.7 million bibliographic items.* 2.5 million items are primarily journal articles; 250,000 items are monographs (books, pamphlets, and reports); approximately 300,000 items are dissertations (theses); and 16,000 are journal titles. Series 1 and Series 2 include portraits as separate citations but Series 3, 4, and 5 indicate portraits in descriptive notes for monographs and dissertations."

Adriano de Paiva, a professor of chemistry and physics at the Polytechnic Academy at Porto (Portugal) issues the first separate publication on television: La telescopie electrique basee sur l'emploi du selenium. It is a 48-page pamphlet published in Porto. Paiva became interseted in the possibility of transmitting images by wire after the demonstration of Alexander Gaham Bell's telephone in Lisbon in November 1877. Paiva's paper represents the first theoretical formulation of the possibility of using selenium to transmit images at a distance.

In a letter published in the journal Nature, Henry Faulds, a physician and missionary working in Japan, is the first to propose the use of fingerprints as a system of identification, including the scientific identification of criminals: "On the Skin-Furrows of the Hand."

At the U.S. Census Bureau John Shaw Billings, founder of the Surgeons General's Library (now the National Library of Medicine), suggests to Herman Hollerith that 'There ought to be a machine for doing the purely mechanical work of tabulating population and similar statistics.  Hollerith will credit Billings for inspiring him to develop electric punched card tabulating for the census of 1890.

James Murray, working in a corrugated out-building called "The Scriptorium,"  lined with book shelves, and 1,029 pigeon-holes for the quotation slips, is receiving 1000 quotation slips each day from contributors to the A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. By this year he has accumulated 3,500,000 quotations sent in by contributors, each on an individual slip of paper.

Charles Ammi Cutter, Librarian of the Boston Atheneum, and author of Cutter Expansive Classification, publishes The Buffalo Public Library in 1983. In it he predicts how a library will operate one hundred years into the future.

Thomas Edison, who had invented in the electric pen in 1876, agrees to sell his patents for this device to Albert Blake Dick, who had invented the mimeograph stencil. Edison also agrees to help Dick market the mimeograph under the name, Edison Mimeograph. Marketed by the AB Dick company, the mimeograph will become the first widely used electric office duplicating machine.

John H. Patterson and his associates acquire the Ritty patents and establish the National Cash Register Company (NCR).

The American Historical Association is founded "for the promotion of historical studies, the collection and preservation of historical documents and artifacts, and the dissemination of historical research."

Press manufacturer and book collector, Robert Hoe, and eight of his book collector friends found The Grolier Club in New York. It will become the leading society of bibliophiles in the United States, and a leading venue for exhibitions relating to book history. The library of The Grolier Club will become a leading research center for book history, for the history of libraries, the history of book collecting and the book trade.

Twenty-three years after the project began, the first fascicule of  A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society is published, under the editorship of James Murray.  The 352-page volume, covering words from A to Ant, costs 12s.6d or U.S.$3.25. The total sales of this fascicule will be 4000 copies.The dictionary will be complete in 125 fascicules, the last of which will be published on April 19, 1928. The name Oxford English Dictionary will be first used for the work in 1895.

Gottlieb Daimler invents the internal combustion engine and Karl Benz builds a single-cylinder engine for a motor car.

Melvyl Dewey publishes the second edition of his Dewey Decimal Classification under his own name. It will become the world's most widely used library classification system.

American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (A T & T) is established to run the United States long-distance telephone network.

Mergenthaler Linotype is used by the New York Tribune newspaper. In 1887 they publish The Tribune Book of Open-Air Sports, the first book typeset by machine.

The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, an international agreement governing copyright, is ratified in Berne, Switzerland.

"The Berne Convention was developed at the instigation of Victor Hugo of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale. Thus it was influenced by the French "right of the author" (droit d'auteur), which contrasts with the Anglo-Saxon concept of "copyright" which only dealt with economic concerns. Under the Convention, copyrights for creative works are automatically in force upon their creation without being asserted or declared. An author need not "register" or "apply for" a copyright in countries adhering to the Convention. As soon as a work is "fixed", that is, written or recorded on some physical medium, its author is automatically entitled to all copyrights in the work and to any derivative works, unless and until the author explicitly disclaims them or until the copyright expires. Foreign authors are given the same rights and privileges to copyrighted material as domestic authors in any country that signed the Convention."

Tolbert Lanston demonstrates his prototype of the Monotype machine, which casts letters in the form of individual pieces of lead type. It reads punched paper tape like a player piano.

Emile Berliner invents the flat disc Gramophone. This will eventually replace the Edison wax cylinder as a recording and playback device, and enable the birth of the recording industry.

Heinrich Hertz proves the existence of electromagnetic waves, the theoretical basis for wireless communication.

George Eastman uses Cellulose Nitrate as a base for photographic roll film. It will be used for photographic and professional 35mm motion picture film until the 1950s, eventually creating one of the most dramatic problems in the preservation of media. "It is highly inflammable and also decomposes to a dangerous condition with age. When new, nitrate film could be ignited with the heat of a cigarette; partially decomposed, it can ignite spontaneously at temperatures as low as 120 F (49C). Nitrate film burns rapidly, fuelled by its own oxygen, and releases toxic fumes.

Decomposition: There are five stages in the decomposition of nitrate film:

(i) Amber discolouration with fading of picture.
(ii) The emulsion becomes adhesive and films stick together; film becomes brittle.
(iii) The film contains gas bubbles and gives off a noxious odour
(iv) The film is soft, welded to adjacent film and frequently covered with a viscous froth
(v) The film mass degenerates into a brownish acrid powder.

Film in the first and second stages can be copied, as may parts of films at the third stage of decomposition. Film at the fourth or fifth stages is useless and should be immediately destroyed by your local fire brigade because of the dangers of spontaneous combustion and chemical attack on other films. Contact your local environmental health officer about this.

It has been estimated that the majority of nitrate film will have decomposed to an uncopiable state by the year 2000, though archives are now deep-freezing film."

Charles Babbage’s son Henry Prevost Babbage completes and publishes his father’s unfinished edition of writings on the Difference Engine No. 1 and the Analytical Engine, together with a listing of his father’s unpublished plans and notebooks. These appear under the title of Babbage’s Calculating Engines.

Herman Hollerith patents an electromechanical machine for tabulating information stored on punched cards. This is used in the 1890 United States census--the first major data-processing project to use electrical machinery. Data-processing time is reduced by 80 percent over manual methods. (See Reading 4.3.)

William S. Burroughs begins commercial production of his dependable key-driven printing adding machine.

Dorr E. Felt introduces the Comptometer, a nonprinting key-driven calculating machine whose chief advantages are speed, versatility, and ease of use.

The logarithmic and trigonometric tables of Gaspard Riche de Prony, compiled in 19 volumes of manuscript, mostly by hairdressers unemployed after the French Revolution, are finally published in an abbreviated form in one volume. They are the most monumental work of calculation ever carried out by human computers.

The AT&T long-distance telephone network extends from New York to Chicago.

Heinrich Hertz publishes his collected papers on electromagnetic waves. In this form Marconi will learn about Hertz’s work and begin work on the development of radio.

Francis Galton publishes a detailed statistical model of fingerprint analysis and identification, and encourages their use in forensic science in his book, Finger Prints.

Karl Benz invents a four-wheel automobile. Charles and Frank Duryea produce the first automobile built in America during this year.

The " Millionaire" mechanical calculator is introduced in Switzerland. It allows direct multiplication by any digit and is used by government agencies and scientists, especially astronomers, well into the twentieth century.

The recently established Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung holds an exhibition in Munich of Mathematical and Mathematical-Physical Models, Apparatus, and Instruments. This is the first international exhibition limited to mathematical devices, including calculating instruments; it reflects the huge growth in the field since the London exposition of 1876. The exhibition had been planned for the previous year but was canceled because of an outbreak of cholera in northern Germany.

Philibert Maurice d'Ocagne publishes Le Calcul Simplifiée par Procèdes Mécaniques et Graphiques. This contains the first systematic classification of calculating machines.

Thomas Edison introduces the Kinetograph, "the first practical moving picture camera, and the Kinetoscope, a hand-cranked, single-viewer, lighted box to display the resulting films. Kinetescope parlors were supplied with fifty-foot film snippets shot by Edison employee W.K. Dickson, the device's chief inventor, in their 'Black Maria' studio. The invention was a widely imitated, international success."

Guglielmo Marconi invents wireless telegraphy (radio). (See Reading 5.4.)

Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine found the Institut International de Bibliographie. In 1931 this will be renamed the International Federation for Information and Documentation.

The first mainline railway is electrified.

About 240,000 telephones are in use in the United States.

Louis Jean and Auguste Marie Louis Nicholas Lumiere patent the cinematographe, a three-in-one motion picture camera, developer and projector. "The first footage ever to be shot on the device was shot on 19 March 1895; the film was La sortie des usines Lumière. . . . The first paying show was on 28 December in Paris at the Grand Café in the Boulevard des Capucines." The Lumiere brothers are credited with the invention of cinematography. Prior to inventing the cinematographe they invented sprocket holes in the film strip as a means of getting the film through the camera and projector.

Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen discovers X-rays. They become the first system of medical imaging.

Herman Hollerith founds the Tabulating Machine Company. This will eventually evolve into IBM.

Lord Northcliffe founds the Daily Mail. It will soon achieve a daily circulation of 1,000,000.

Solomon Schechter, reader in Talmudic Studies at Cambridge, hears of discoveries of important early Hebrew manuscripts, and travels to Egypt where, with the financial assistance of Charles Taylor, he purchases what he considers the most significant portion of the contents of the genizah, a store room in the loft of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, presently Old Cairo. He sends back to Cambridge about 140,000 manuscripts from the genizah. These become the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection at Cambridge University.

When Schechter assumes the presidency of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York in 1902 he brings an additional collection of manuscripts from the genizah to that library. Currently the Jewish Theological Seminary holds about 40,000 manuscripts or fragments from the Cairo genizah. An additional 11,000 fragments are at the John Rylands University Library at the University of Manchester, purchased from the estate of Dr. Moses Gaster in 1954. Smaller portions are preserved in universities around the world.

"The Cairo Genizah, mostly discovered late in the nineteenth century but still resurfacing in our own day, is a collection of over 200,000 fragmentary Jewish texts (which may well equal three times that number of folios). Many of these were stored in the loft of the ancient Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat medieval Cairo, to the south-west of the modern city) between the 11th and 19th centuries. A genizah is a storage room where copies of respected texts with scribal errors or physical damaged, or unusable documents, are kept until they can be ritually buried. The dark, sealed, room in the arid Egyptian climate contributed to the preservation of the documents, the earliest of which may go back to the eighth and ninth centuries.

"These manuscripts outline a 1,000-year continuum of Middle-Eastern history and comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world. The Genizah can be described as one of the greatest Jewish treasures ever found.

"Early visitors to the Genizah were wary of examining its contents because of the local superstition that foretold disaster for anyone who might remove any of its contents. This, too, contributed to the preservation of the documents.

"In the second half of the 19th century some texts were sold by synagogue officials to dealers, scholars and visitors. Famous libraries in St. Petersburg, Paris, London, Oxford, Cambridge and Philadelphia acquired major collections.

"In the early 1890's Rabbi Shlomo Aharon Wertheimer, a Torah scholar, collector and researcher, living in Jerusalem, began publishing manuscripts that he had purchased from the Cairo Genizah with his identifications and explanations – among them rare and important texts. He also sold some of these manuscripts to collectors in order to finance the purchase of additional ones. To some extent, he was one of the first to recognize the treasure trove that was the Cairo Genizah."

These quotations are from the website of the Friedberg Genizah Project, an effort underway in Jerusalem to digitize and preserve all surviving portions of the Cairo genizah from around the world.

Karl Ferninand Braun builds the first cathode ray tube (CRT).

Before he is appointed Librarian of Congress, Herbert Putnam, with the assistance of Charles Ammi Cutter, develops the Library of Congress Classification (LCC). This and the Dewey Decimal Classification become the most widely used systems of library classification.

In his annual report for this year Librarian of Congress John Russell Young comments on the "questionable quality of the paper upon which so much of the Library material is printed." Referring to the wood pulp paper that is inferior to paper previously made from linen rags, Young warns that many of the works coming into the Library "threaten in a few years to crumble into a waste heap, with no value as record."

Death of the The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman, and photographer, best known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll. In addition to his published writings, which included Alice in Wonderland, Dodgson maintained a meticulous ledger recording his incoming and outgoing correspondence over his lifetime. As a reflection of how many letters an individual could exchange in this era before telephone, Dodgson/Carroll wrote or received approximately 98,000 letters.

Halsey William Wison publishes the first issue of the Cumulative Book Index .

"As a bookseller, Wilson had to constantly search through publishers' catalogs in order to keep track of currently published books that his customers might want. It was tedious and time-consuming work that prompted him to long for a comprehensive, up-to-date index of published works. He eventually decided to create such an index himself. What made the concept work economically was Wilson's idea to keep the publication current by placing each entry on a printer's "slug," which could then be later sorted with slugs from new entries. It may have been an obvious solution to someone who had experience as a job printer, but it was a revolutionary concept in bibliographical publishing. In February 1898 Wilson first published Cumulative Book Index, a comprehensive alphabetic list of currently published books in English, featuring the key elements of future Wilson indexes: the listing of author, title, and subject. The work sold for $1 to 300 subscribers, who would then receive periodically updated versions."

Sigmund Freud issues Die Traumdeutung through the publisher Franz Deuticke in Leipzig and Vienna. This work on The Interpretation of Dreams has been called the last great original work in science or medicine to appear first as a monograph rather than as an article or series of articles published in scientific or medical journals.

The volume is dated 1900 on the title page but Freud's presentation copy to his close friend Wilhelm Fleiss bears the date 24 October 1899 on the title page. "In a letter to Fliess dated 27 October 1899 Freud thanked Fliess for his 'kind words in response to my sending you the dream book,' and noted that 'it has not yet been issued; only our two copies have so far seen the light of day.' Jones (I, p. 395) states that the book 'actually published on November 4, 1899, but the publisher chose to put the date 1900 on the title page." (Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine II [1991] F33.