From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media 1750 to 1800 Timeline

Printing by hand on wooden printing presses remained a very laborious process that did not improve dramatically since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press circa 1450. In the mid-18th century a competent printer could expect to print about 100 sheets per hour.

French philosopher, art critic, and writer Denis Diderot and French mathematician, mechanician, physicist and philosopher Jean le Rond d'Alembert write and edit the Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société‚ de gens de lettres in 17 folio volumes of text plus 11 folio volumes (i.e., 10 volumes in 11) of plates. The first 7 volumes were published in Paris, but volumes 8 to 17 had to be published under a false Neuchâtel imprint. The main work appeared between 1751 and 1772. A supplement of 4 volumes plus one plate volume was published in Paris and Amsterdam from 1776 to 1777. The Table analytique et raisonnée for the set was published in 2 folio volumes in Paris and Amsterdam in 1780. Altogether there were 35 volumes, with 71,818 articles, and 3,129 plates.

The central enterprise of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie embodied that movement's liberal, anti-clerical and scientific spirit, its preoccupation with man as a creature of nature, and its conception of culture and society as mutable products of the evolutionary processes of history. As such, the work challenged the twin authorities of the French monarchy and the Catholic Church, both of which derived their power from the traditional belief in a divinely ordained, unchanging order. Well aware of the dangers of affronting such powerful authorities, the philosophes who contributed to the Encyclopédie relied heavily on irony and subterfuge in their attacks on the established order, but the epistemological basis of these attacks was clearly stated in the Encyclopédie's "Discourse préliminaire," written by d'Alembert, who, "although he formally acknowledged the authority of the church, . . . made it clear that knowledge came from the senses and not from Rome or Revelation" (Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775-1800 [1979] 7).

"The Encyclopédie was an innovative encyclopedia in several respects. Among other things, it was the first encyclopedia to include contributions from many named contributors, and it was the first general encyclopedia to lavish attention on the mechanical arts. Still, the Encyclopédie is famous above all for representing the thought of the Enlightenment. According to Denis Diderot in the article 'Encyclopédie,' the Encyclopédie's aim was 'to change the way people think.' "(Wikipedia article on Encyclopédie, accessed 01-26-2010).

The first seven volumes of the Encyclopédie were produced in relative safety, due in part to the support of powerful protectors, notably Madame de Pompadour, but official tolerance came to an end in 1759, when the Encyclopédie was condemned by the Parlement of Paris and placed on the Index librorum prohibitorum by Pope Clement XIII. Diderot was forced to complete the remaining ten volumes in secret and to publish them under a false Neuchâtel imprint.  "In truth, secular authorities did not want to disrupt the commercial enterprise, which employed hundreds of people. To appease the church and other enemies of the project, the authorities had officially banned the enterprise, but they turned a blind eye to its continued existence" (Wikipedia).

A high percentage of the Encyclopédie's 71,818 articles were written by Diderot and d'Alembert themselves, with another large portion, about 400 articles, written by the Baron d'Holbach. Other famous contributors included Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire. The most prolific contributor was the French scholar Louis de Jaucourt who wrote 17,266 articles, or about 8 per day between 1759 and 1765.   

The Encyclopédie was a considerable commercial success, resulting in a print run of 4250 copies (Wikipedia), much larger than the typical print run of most publications at the time.

Lough, Essays on the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert (1968) provides an authoritative bibliographical study and identifies the authors of a significant percentage of the unsigned articles. 

Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 200.  Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 637.

♦ There are numerous versions of the Encyclopédie online. The ARTFL Encyclopédie Database from the University of Chicago contains "20.8 million words, 400,000 unique forms, 18,000 pages of text, 17 volumes of articles, and 11 volumes of plate legends." There is also the Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project at the University of Michigan. The entire searchable French text and all the illustrations are available at http://diderot.alembert.free.fr/ (accessed 04-21-2010).

Catalogue raisonné de toutes les pieces qui forment l'oeuvre de Rembrandt by Edmé-François Gersaint, P.-C.-A. Helle, and Jean-Baptiste Glomy is published in Paris.

This was the "first catalogue raisonné in Western art history" (Sylvia Hochfield, "Rembrandt: Myth, Legend, Truth", ARTnews, accessed 01-04-2008). Gersaint (d. 1750) was the leading auctioneer of the time in Paris of art objects and natural history specimens, and a scholar and connoisseur. He compiled his catalogue from the collection of Arnold Houbraken, of Amsterdam, which had previously been the property of Mayor Jan Six, an intimate firend of Rembrandt and the subject of more than one portrait. Gersaint's widow turned over the manuscript of the unfinished catalogue to Helle and Glomy who augmented this compilation by examination of a number of collections in France, and published the catalogue in duodecimo format one year after Gersaint's death. A supplement by Pieter Yver based on the collection of M. van Leyden, which had been culled from those of Houbraken, Halling, Maas, Moewater and De Burgy, and which was the largest known collection at the time, appeared in 1756.

Swedish physician and naturalist Carl Linnaeus publishes Species plantarum ("The Species of Plants").

Species plantarum introduced binary or binomial nomenclature (genus and species) for plants. Using this system, Linnaeus named, and therefore classified, all plants known to European naturalists at the time.

The will of English physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane bequeathes his collection of 70,000 objects, including a library, and an herbarium to Britain as the basis for the British Museum.

"When Sloane retired in 1741, his library and cabinet of curiosities . . . had grown to be of unique value. He had acquired the extensive natural history collections of William Courten, Cardinal Filippo Antonio Gualterio, James Petiver, Nehemiah Grew, Leonard Plukenet, the Duchess of Beaufort, the rev. Adam Buddle, Paul Hermann, Franz Kiggelaer and Herman Boerhaave. On his death on 11 January 1753 he bequeathed his books, manuscripts, prints, drawings, flora, fauna, medals, coins, seals, cameos and other curiosities to the nation, on condition that parliament should pay to his executors £20,000, which was a good deal less than the value of the collection. The bequest was accepted on those terms by an act passed the same year, and the collection, together with George II's royal library, etc., was opened to the public at Bloomsbury as the British Museum in 1759. A significant proportion of this collection was later to become the foundation for the Natural History Museum" (Wikipedia article on Sir Hans Sloane).

English mathematician Thomas Simpson publishes "On the Advantage of Taking the Mean of a Number of Observations, in Practical Astronomy" in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 49, part 1, 82-93.

This paper is "a milestone in statistical inference, as well as the earliest formal treatment of any data-processing practice" (Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace [2002] no. 16).

Irish businessman and economist, Richard Cantillon's Essai sur la nature du commerce en général, written in French circa 1732, is published anonymously in England, in the French language, some twenty-two years after Cantillon died in a fire in his London home, allegedly set by his discharged cook.

"Cantillon was perhaps the first to define long-run equilibrium as the balance of flows of income, thus setting the foundations both for Physiocracy as well as Classical Political Economy. Cantillon's system was clear and simple and absolutely path-breaking. He developed a two-sector general equilibrium system from which he obtained a theory of price (determined by costs of production) and a theory of output (determined by factor inputs and technology). His work is quoted by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations.

"Although his work was well-known to the Physiocrats and the French school, Cantillon fell into obscurity in the English-speaking world until resurrected and popularized by William Stanley Jevons in the 1880s." (Wikipedia article on Richard Cantillon, accessed 01-14-2009).

"The Essai is far more than a mere essay or even collection of disconnected essays like those of Hume. It is a systematic and connected treatise, going over in a concise manner nearly the whole field of economics, with the exception of taxation. It is thus, more than any other book I know, the first treatise on economics. Sir William Petty's Political Arithmetic and his Treatise of Taxes and Contributions are wonderful books in their way, and at their time, but, compared with Cantillon's Essai, they are merely collections of casual hints. There were earlier English works of great merit, such as those of Vaughan, Locke, Child, Mun, etc., but these were either occasional essays and pamphlets, or else fragmentary treatises. Cantillon's essay is, more emphatically than any other single work, 'the Cradle of Political Economy' " (Jevons, Principles of Economics, 164, quoted by Friedrich Hayek, "Richard Cantillon",  Journal of Libertarian Studies VII [1985] 221).

You can download Cantillon's text, both in French or English translation, at the McMaster University Archive for Economic Thought.

French writer and philosopher Denis Diderot publishes in the Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société‚ de gens de lettres an article entitled Encyclopédie. In that he explained that a primary reason for undertaking this enormous writing and publishing project was to manage information overload by providing a rational and comprehensible order to what was already an almost impossibly large and disorganized body of information. 

I preface my remarks About the Database with a brief quotation from Diderot's article. Equally relevant is this somewhat longer quotation, which places Diderot's partially self-deprecating thoughts in better context:

"As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes. When that time comes, a project, until then neglected because the need for it was not felt, will have to be undertaken.

"If you will reflect on the state of literary production in those ages before the introduction of printing, you will form a mental picture of a small number of gifted men who are occupied with composing manuscripts and a very numerous body of workmen who are busy transcribing them. If you look ahead to a future age, and consider the state of literature after the printing press, which never rests, has filled huge buildings with books, you will find again a twofold division of labor. Some will not do very much reading, but will instead devote themselves to investigations which will be new, or which they will believe to be new (for if we are even now ignorant of a part of what is contained in so many volumes published in all sorts of languages, they will know still less of what is contained in those same books, augmented as they will be by a hundred—a thousand—times as many more). The others, day laborers incapable of producing anything of their own, will be busy night and day leafing through these books, taking out of them fragments they consider worthy of being collected and preserved. Has not this prediction already begun to be fulfilled? And are not several of our literary men already engaged in reducing all big books to little ones, among which there are still to be found many that are superfluous. Let us assume that their extracts have been competently made, and that these have been arranged in alphabetical order and published in an orderly series of volumes by men of intelligence—you have an encyclopedia!

"Thus we have now undertaken, in the interests of learning and for the sake of the human race, a task to which our grandsons would have had to devote themselves; but we have done so under more favorable circumstances, before a superabundance of books should have accumulated to make its execution extremely laborious" (translation in Baker (ed) The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1987) 85-86).

King George II donates the 'Old Royal Library' of the sovereigns of England to the British Museum. With that gift the British Museum obtained the privilege of acquiring books by copyright receipt.

Carl Linnaeus publishes the tenth edition of his Systema naturae, in which he introduces binomial nomenclature for animal species.

Using this system, Linnaeus named, and therefore classified, virtually all animal species known at this time.

Having been founded in 1753 by the bequest of English physician Sir Hans Sloane, the British Museum is opened to the public.

Sloane's library of about 40,000 volumes, especially significant for scientific and medical material, was among the largest formed in the eighteenth century. The British Museum retained all the Sloane manuscripts, but during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they dispersed certain printed books from the collection as "duplicates." 

♦ The Sloane Printed Books Catalogue on the British Library website is a project to publish bibliographical descriptions of each volume in Sloane's original library from institutional holdings around the world.

Two years after his death English clergyman and mathematician Thomas Bayes's "An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances" is published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 53 (1763) 370-418.

Bayes's paper enunciated Bayes's Theorem for calculating "inverse probabilities”—the basis for methods of extracting patterns from data in decision analysis, data mining, statistical learning machines, Bayesian networks, Bayesian inference.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 1.

Jean-Vincent Capronnier Gauffecourt privately issues from La Motte, near Lyons, Traité de la relieur des livres.

This was the first separately-printed treatise on bookbinding in French. The author, Gauffecourt (1692-1766) was, according to Pollard, a talented amateur and a friend of J.-J. Rousseau and Mme d'Epinay. He installed a printing press in his house and printed several books in small editions.

Of this manual on bookbinding Gauffecourt is thought to have printed  either 12 or 25 copies, of which Pollard could locate only a single extant copy in a private collection. He located manuscript copies at Cambridge University Library and in the Grolier Club, New York.  The French text was reprinted with an English translation by Claude Benaiteau, and issued in an edition of 300 copies (Austin, Texas, 1987).

Pollard, Early Bookbinding Manuals (1984) no. 43.

James Hargreaves invents the spinning jenny, which spins eight threads simultaneously.

This was a major step toward the Industrial Revolution.

Printer and type founder Pierre-Simon Fournier le Jeune issues his Manuel typographique in 2 volumes.

The first volume concerned type-founding and contained plates showing instruments used by the type-founder. The second volume displayed a vast range of type specimens.

British theologian, dissenting clergyman, natural philosopher, educator, and political theorist Joseph Priestley publishes A Chart of Biography in London with A Description of a Chart of Biography. 

These were the first timeline charts, in which individual bars were used to visualize the life span of a person, allowing the comparison of the lifespans of many people.

"The Chart of Biography covers a vast timespan, from 1200 BC to 1800 AD, and includes two thousand names. Priestley organized his list into six categories: Statesman and Warriors; Divines and Metaphysicians; Mathematicians and Physicians (natural philosophers were placed here); Poets and Artists; Orators and Critics (prose fiction authors were placed here); and Historians and Antiquarians (lawyers were placed here). Priestley's 'principle of selection' was fame, not merit; therefore, as he mentions, the chart is a reflection of current opinion. He also wanted to ensure that his readers would recognize the entires on the chart. Priestley had difficulty assigning all of the people listed to individual categories; he attempted to list them in the category under which their most important work had been done. Machiavelli is therefore listed as a historian rather than a statesman and Cicero is listed as a statesman instead of an orator. The chart was also arranged in order of importance; 'statesmen are placed on the lower margin, where they are easier to see, because they are the names most familiar to readers' " (Wikipedia article on A Chart of Biography, accessed 03-16-2010).

The British Government sanctions Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, to produce each year a set of navigational tables, to be called the Nautical Almanac.

This was the first permanent table-making project in the world.

Known as the "Seaman's Bible," the Nautical Almanacs greatly improved the accuracy of navigation. However, the accuracy of the tables in the Nautical Almanacs was dependent upon the accuracy of the human computers producing them—human computers who worked by hand, and were separated geographically. During the time of Charles Babbage these tables became notorious for their errors, providing Babbage the incentive to develop mechanical systems, which he called calculating engines, to improve their accuracy.

"A Society of Gentlemen in Scotland" based in Edinburgh publishes, in 100 fascicules issued weekly, the Encyclopaedia Britannica; or a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon a New Plan in which the different Sciences and Arts and digest into distinct Treatsies or Systems; and the various Technical Terms etc. are explained as they occur in the order of the Alphabets. Illustrated with One Hundred and Sixty Copperplates.

The complete first edition issued in 1771 was bound in three volumes. The Edinburgh 'society' mentioned on the title page may have consisted only of the editor, the antiquarian William Smellie, the engraver, Andrew Bell, and the printer, Colin Macfarquhar.

"It was a masterful composition although, by his own admission, Smellie borrowed liberally from many authors of his day, such as Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. Nevertheless, the first edition of the Britannica contained gross inaccuracies and fanciful speculations; for example, it states that excess use of tobacco could cause neurodegeneration, 'drying up the brain to a little black lump consisting of mere membranes'. Smellie strove to make Britannica as usable as possible, saying that 'utility ought to be the principal intention of every publication. Wherever this intention does not plainly appear, neither the books nor their authors have the smallest claim to the approbation of mankind'. Smellie entertained strong opinions; for example, he defines farriery as 'the art of curing the diseases of horses. The practice of this useful art has been hitherto almost entirely confined to a set of men who are totally ignorant of anatomy, and the general principles of medicine.' Although possessed of wide knowledge, Smellie was not an e'pert in all matters; for example, his article on 'Woman' has but four words: "the female of man.' Despite its incompleteness and inaccuracies, Smellie's vivid prose and the easy navigation of the first edition led to strong demand for a second; some prurient engravings by Andrew Bell (later censored by King George III) may also have contributed to the success of the first edition. Smellie did not participate in the second edition of the Britannica, because he objected to the inclusion of biographical articles in an encyclopedia dedicated to the arts and sciences." (Wikipedia article on William Smellie, accessed 12-04-2008).

". . .the eleventh edition, 1910-11, is noteworthy for its index which has justly been described as the best index of any work of reference"(Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man [1967] no. 218.)

Richard Arkwright patents his hydraulic spinning machine.

Wolfgang von Kempelen builds his chess-playing Turk, an automaton that purports to play chess.

Although the machine displayed an elaborate gear mechanism, its cabinet actually concealed a small human controlling the moves of the machine. Von Kempelen's Turk became a commercial sensation, deceiving a very large number of people. It became the most famous, or the most notorious, automaton in history.

According to to a magazine article by Edgar Allan Poe, the original Turk was exhibited in Richmond, Virginia as late as 1836.

Even though the machine intelligence exhibited by the Turk was an illusion, von Kempelen's automaton was much later viewed as an analog to efforts in computer chess and artificial intelligence.

The first banker’s clearing house, the earliest large-scale data-processing organization, is founded in London.

Joseph Priestley describes a vegetable gum which has the ability to rub out pencil marks: "I have seen a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the mark of black lead pencil." He called the substance "rubber."

Also in 1770 Edward Nairne, an English engineer, is credited with developing the first widely-marketed rubber eraser for an inventions competition. He reportedly sold natural rubber erasers for the high price of 3 shillings per half-inch cube.  This was the first practical application of rubber in Europe.

Wilhelm Haas of Basel builds a new type of printing press in which all parts subject to stress during the printing process are made of iron, including both the bed and the platen.

Building key parts of the handpress out of iron greatly improved the efficiency of the press.

British theologian, dissenting clergyman, natural philosopher, educator, and political theorist Joseph Priestley publishes "Observations on different kinds of air" in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

This was Priestley's first paper on the subject, reporting the results of his pneumatic researches since 1770. These included the isolation and identification of nitric oxide and anhydrous hydrochloric acid gases, the discovery that growing plants restored air vitiated by combustion or animal respiration, and the discovery of "nitrous air" (nitrous oxide).

Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 217. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1749.

The Siku Quanshu, variously translated as the Imperial Collection of Four, Emperor's Four Treasuries, Complete Library in Four Branches of Literature, or Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, is the largest collection of books in Chinese history and, before the Wikipedia, probably the most ambitious editorial enterprise in the history of the world.

"During the height of the Qing Dynasty, the Qianlong Emperor commissioned the Siku quanshu, to demonstrate that the Qing could surpass the Ming Dynasty's 1403 Yongle Encyclopedia, which was the world's largest encyclopedia at the time.

"The editorial board included 361 scholars, with Ji Yun (紀昀) and Lu Xixiong (陸錫熊) as chief editors. They began compilation in 1773 and completed it in 1782. The editors collected and annotated over 10,000 manuscripts from the imperial collections and other libraries, destroyed some 3,000 titles, or works, that were considered to be anti-Manchu, and selected 3,461 titles, or works, for inclusion into the Siku quanshu. They were bound in 36,381 volumes (册) with more than 79,000 chapters (卷), comprising about 2.3 million pages, and approximately 800 million Chinese characters.

"Scribes copied every word by hand. 'The copyists (of whom there were 3,826) were not paid in cash but rewarded with official posts after they had transcribed a given number of words within a set time.' Four copies for the emperor were placed in specially constructed libraries in the Forbidden City, Old Summer Palace, Shenyang, and Wenjin Chamber, Chengde. Three additional copies for the public were deposited in Siku quanshu libraries in Hangzhou, Zhenjiang, and Yangzhou. All seven libraries also received copies of the 1725 imperial encyclopedia Gujin tushu jicheng.

"The Siku quanshu copies kept in Zhenjiang and Yangzhou were destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion. In 1860 during the Second Opium War an Anglo-French expedition force burned most of the copy kept at the Old Summer Palace. The four remaining copies suffered some damage during World War II. Today, the four remaining copies are kept at the National Library of China in Beijing, the National Palace Museum in Taipei, the Gansu Library in Lanzhou, and the Zhejiang Library in Hangzhou.  On the first month of the 37th year of Qianlong, the emperor issued an Imperial decree for Qing Empire, demanding the people to hand in their private book collections, in order for the compilation of Siku Quanshu. Due to the Manchu Empire's previous notorious record of Literary Inquisition such as in the case of Treason by the Book, the Chinese were too scared to hand in books, in the fear of subsequent persecution.

On October of that year, seeing that hardly any Chinese handed in books, Qianlong issued more Imperial Decrees, stressing the points (1) Books will be returned to owners once the compilation is finished. (2) Book owners would not be persecuted even if their books do contain Bad words. In less than three months after the issue of the decree, four to five thousands of different types of books were handed in.

"Apart from reassuring the book owners that they will be free from persecution, Qianlong made false promises and rewards to Chinese book owners, such as he would perform personal calligraphy on their books. By this time 10,000 types of books were handed in.

"Using the emperor initiated movement as a form of elite political contention among themselves, the Han Chinese literati of the society gave the emperor full cooperation and participation, thus helping Qianlong to fullfill his dream of establishing cultural superiority over all past emperors.

Qianlong's intention was very clear, he wanted his Siku Quanshu compilers to create a library of classical culture that contained no anti-Manchu elements, resulting in an empire-wide movement of house-to-house searches for "evil books, tracts, poetry, and plays". The movement was directed and led by Qianlong himself; the "evil texts" that were discovered were to be sent to Peking and burned, and the respective books owners, sometimes the whole families, were either sentenced to death, or exiled to remote land " (Wikipedia article on Siku Quanshu, accessed 10-26-2009).

♦ In 2004 300 sets of an edition of the Siku Quanshu were printed on handmade paper and hand-bound in 1,184 volumes.

♦ A digital version of the Siku Quanshu is available online from Eastview Information Services.

Sugita Genpaku and colleagues publish Kaitai Shinsho (Anatomical Tables) in Tokyo.

This translation into Japanese of Johann Adam Kulmus's Dutch text on anatomy was the first work on Western medicine and science published in Japanese.

As the first translation into Japanese of a Western medical text, "Kaitai Shinsho represented the beginning of two epoch-making developments. First and most directly Gempaku's work set in motion the modern transformation of Japanese medicine, revealing not only many anatomical structures hitherto unknown in traditional medicine, but also and more fundamentally introducing the very notion of an anatomical approach to the body--the idea of visual inspection in dissection as the primary and most essential way of understanding the nature of the human body. Second and more generally, Kaitai Shinsho inspired the rise of Dutch studies (Rangaku) in Japan, thus giving birth to one of the most decisive influences shaping modern Japanese history, namely the study of Western languages and science" (S. Kuriyama, " Between Mind and Eye: Japanese Anatomy in the Eighteenth Century," IN: Leslie & Young (eds.) Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge [1992] 21.

Kaitai Shinsho was drawn largely from Gerard Dieten's 1773 Dutch translation of Johann Adam Kulmus's Anatomische Tabellen (1731) although its Western-style title-age was copied from Valverde's Vivae imagines partium porporis (1566), and the last four anatomical woodcuts were taken from the 1690 Dutch edition of Bidloo's anatomy. According to Genpaku, the instigator and primary editor of the book, the inspiration for Kaitai Shinsho came in 1771 when he and two other students of Dutch medicine bribed an executioner to let them see the dismembered body of a criminal. The three compared what they saw to the anatomical illustrations in Kulmus's book, and, struck by the accuracy of the European representations, determined to prepare a Japanese edition of Kulmus's anatomy. Completed in just two years, the book was a sensation on publication, selling out almost immediately and going through numerous editions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

After publication of Kaitai Shinsho Genpaku continued to help advance Western knowledge in Japan. In 1815 he published a chronicle of these advances entitled Rangaku Kotohajime (The Dawn of Western Science in Japan).

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1196.

J. Norman, Anatomy as Art: The Dean Edell Collection, NY: Christie's, 5 October 2007, no. 106.

François-Ambroise Didot revises the point system for typographic units introduced by Pierre-Simon Fournier in 1737.

Didot related 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 resulted in an augmentation of Fournier's point by a twelfth. Didot's point system became the standard unit of type measurement in France. It was adopted in Germany in the mid-19th century.

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.

Scottish Economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith publishes An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Smith argued "that the free market, while appearing chaotic and unrestrained, is actually guided to produce the right amount and variety of goods by a so-called "invisible hand". . . . Smith believed that while human motives were often driven by selfishness and greed, the competition in the free market would tend to benefit society as a whole by keeping prices low, while still building in an incentive for a wide variety of goods and services. Nevertheless, he was wary of businessmen and argued against the formation of monopolies.

An often-quoted passage from The Wealth of Nations is:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

"Value theory was important in classical theory. Smith wrote that the "real price of every thing ... is the toil and trouble of acquiring it" as influenced by its scarcity. Smith maintained that, with rent and profit, other costs besides wages also enter the price of a commodity.Other classical economists presented variations on Smith, termed the 'labour theory of value'. Classical economics focused on the tendency of markets to move to long-run equilibrium.

"Smith also believed that a division of labour would effect a great increase in production. One example he used was the making of pins. One worker could probably make only twenty pins per day. However, if ten people divided up the eighteen steps required to make a pin, they could make a combined amount of 48,000 pins in one day" (quotations from Wikipedia article on Adam Smith, accessed 01-14-2009).

While I have not seen edition size information for the first edition of Smith's Wealth of Nations, the edition must have been comparatively large—well over 1000 copies. According to American Book Prices Current, since 1975 there have been about 100 copies of the first edition sold at auction.

Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 221.

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, of which 25 copies survived in 2008, 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. A fair copy of the Declaration of Independence, which Thomas Jefferson wrote out in the week after July 4, 1776, is preserved in the New York Public Library. This is one of two surviving fair copies in Jefferson's hand.

German Geographer and Zoologist Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmerman publishes Specimen zoologiae geographicae, quadrupedem domicilia et migrationes sistens.

This was the first textbook of zoogeography, containing the first world map showing the distribution of mammals.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 2280.

German scientist, satirist and Anglophile Georg Christoph Lichtenberg discovers Lichtenberg figures, and describes them in his memoir "Super nova methodo motum ac naturam fluidi electrici" investigandi," Göttinger Novi Commentarii, Göttingen, 1777.

"In 1777, Lichtenberg built a large electrophorus to generate high voltage static electricity through induction. After discharging a high voltage point to the surface of an insulator, he recorded the resulting radial patterns in fixed dust. By then pressing blank sheets of paper onto these patterns, Lichtenberg was able to transfer and record these images, thereby discovering the basic principle of modern Xerography. This discovery was also the forerunner of modern day plasma physics. Although Lichtenberg only studied 2-dimensional (2D) figures, modern high voltage researchers study 2D and 3D figures (electrical trees) on, and within, insulating materials. Lichtenberg figures are now known to be examples of fractals" (Wikipedia article on Lichtenberg figures, accessed 06-11-2010).

Lorenz von Crell (1744–1816), professor of theoretical medicine and materia medica at the University of Helmstedt, Germany, begin's publication of  the first periodical specifically devoted to chemistry: Chemische Annalen für die Freunde der Naturlehre, Arzneygelahrtheit, Haushaltungskunst und Manufacturen. 

The journal continued publication under this name until 1781. It resumed publication in 1784 with the title of Chemische Annalen, discontinuing publication in 1803. The journal is often called referred to as Crell's Annalen. 

Physician Jan Ingen-Housz publishes Experiments upon Vegetables, Discovering their Great Power of Purifying the Common Air in the Sunshine, and of Injuring it in the Shade and at Night. 

While investigating Joseph Priestley's discovery made in 1771 that plants could "restore" air made unfit for respiration through combusion or putrefaction, Ingen-Housz became the first to observe and elucidate the processes of photosynthesis and plant respiration. In his Experiments upon Vegetables, Ingen-Housz established that only the green parts of a plant give off the "restoring" gas (oxygen), and only when exposed to visible sunlight. He also found that plants, "like animals, exhibit respiration, that respiration continues day and night, and that all parts of the plant—green as well as nongreen, flowers and fruit as well as roots—take part in the process.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1141.

French painter Jacques Gamelin issues from Toulouse Nouveau recueil d'ostéologie et de myologie, dessin‚ d'après nature. . . pour l'utilit‚ des sciences et des arts. The folio volume, made up of 128 unfolded single sheets, includes 90 engraved plates, and text vignettes engraved in a variety of techniques by Gamelin and his pupils Lavallée and Martin after Gamelin's original drawings.

Gamelin is known for his paintings and engravings of battle scenes. The plates for his anatomical atlas, issued in an edition of only 200 copies, were prepared from drawings made at his own dissection facility; they are distinct from the plates of other works of its type, being larger, more artistically varied, and more expressive and fantastic in their conceptions. "The work is known for its display of both talent and imagination, with striking scenes of the Resurrection, the Crucifixion, and skeletons at play. Aside from the full-page copperplate illustrations by Gamelin and the engraver Lavalée, the work contains a number of intriguing vignettes on the title pages and elsewhere, which show battle scenes, visitations by death on unsuspecting revelers, and the anatomical artist's studio" (Wikipedia article on Jacques Gamelin, accessed 02-08-2009).

Gamelin's plates show a constant interplay between the artistic and the anatomic: emblematic images in the seventeenth-century tradition, vignettes in the coquettish eighteenth-century manner, and classic studies of figures in repose and movement vie with straightforward "medical" depictions of bones and muscles. Gamelin's technical perfection, coupled with the emotional and fantastical elements in his images, have led him to be seen as a precursor of Goya; it is possible that the young Goya may have known or studied with Gamelin, who taught in Rome during the time Goya was there. 

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 872.

Richard Arkwright builds a factory for his hydraulic spinning machine.

This was one of the first developments of mass production, which eventually caused disruptive economic and social changes characteristic of the Industrial Revolution.

For a portrait of Arkwright by Joseph Wright of Derby follow this link.

The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Grenoble recently acquired a fourth, and previously unknown panel painting of the printing shop of the Liège printer Clément Plomteux by the Franco-Flemish genre painter Léonard Defrance.

This painting, and the three other paintings by Defrance that depict Plomteux's shop, are illustrated in color in the online article linked to above by Daniel Droixhe, du Groupe d'étude du XVIIIe siècle de l'Université de Liège. Defrance's paintings are among the best painted records of the printing/publishing process in the late eighteenth century.

Publisher and writer Charles-Joseph Panckoucke issues Encyclopédie méthodique, ou par ordre de matières, . . .

This 80 -page work was the separate edition of the complete prospectus to Panckoucke’s monumental Encyclopédie méthodique (1782-1832). Panckoucke intended this Encyclopédie to eclipse that of Diderot and d’Alembert; it represents “the grandest gamble in the competition for the Encyclopédie market of the Old Regime” (Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment,p. 395). Panckoucke made the shortcomings of the original Encyclopédie the central theme of his campaign to promote the Méthodique. He opened his first [i.e., this] prospectus with a quotation from Voltaire’s Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, which damned Diderot’s work with faint praise as a “succès, malgré ses défauts” (Panckoucke’s italics).“M. de Voltaire désirait ardemment une nouvelle édition de l’Encycloplédie, où les fautes de la première fussent corrigées,” the prospectus explained. . . . If Voltaire’s endorsement were not persuasive enough—and who would not be impressed by a pronouncement of the great man, whose prestige was then at a peak?—those who hesitated to subscribe could consider the advice of Diderot himself, whose memoir about the faults of his Encyclopédie could be read as propaganda for Panckoucke’s. . . . The prospectus of the Méthodique quoted Diderot’s criticisms at length and showed how Panckoucke’s Encyclopédie would meet them, point by point (Darnton, pp. 417-18).

The prospectus for Panckoucke’s Encyclopédie was issued in pamphlet form as above, in an abridged version in the Mercure de France (Dec. 8, 1781), and as part of the first volume of the dictionary Beaux-Arts in the Encyclopédie méthodique. When we checked OCLC located four copies of this pamphlet.

L'Encyclopédie méthodique ou par ordre de matières par une société de gens de lettres, de savants et d'artistes; précédée d'un Vocabulaire universel, servant de Table pour tout l'Ouvrage, ornée des Portraits de MM. Diderot et d'Alembert, premiers Éditeurs de l'Encyclopédie is published in 206 volumes by French publisher and writer Charles-Joseph Panckoucke and his daughter Therese-Charlotte Agasse.

The Encyclopédie méthodique was a revised and expanded version, arranged by subject matter, of the alphabetically-arranged Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences. . . . compiled by Diderot et d'Alembert.

"Two sets of Diderot's Encyclopédie, and its supplements, were cut up into articles. Each subject category was entrusted to an exclusive editor, whose job was to collect all articles relating to his subject, and exclude those belonging to others. Great care was to be taken of those articles that were of a doubtful nature, which were not to be omitted. For certain topics, such as air, which belonged equally to chemistry, physics and medicine), the methodical arrangement had the unexpected effect of breaking up a single article into several parts. Each volume was to have its own introduction, a table of contents, and a history of the Encyclopédie. The whole work was to be linked together by a Vocabulaire Universel (Vol. 1 - 4), with references to all locations where each word appears.

"The prospectus, issued early in 1782, proposed three editions, each with seven volumes of 250 to 300 plates:

84 volumes;

43 volumes, with 3 columns per page; and

53 volumes of about 100 sheets, with 2 columns per page. . . .

"The livraisons (home-deliveries) was to be in two volumes each, the first (Jurisprudence, Vol. 1., Literature, Vol. 1,) to appear in July 1782, and the whole to be finished by 1787. The number of subscribers, 4072, was so great that the subscription list of 672 livres was closed on April 30. Twenty-five printing offices were employed, and in November 1782, the first livraison (Jurisprudence, Vol. 1, and half volume each, of arts et métiers and histoire naturelle) was issued (Wikipedia article on Encyclopédie methodique, accessed 01-21-2010).

"The Encyclopédie méthodique was issued in parts piecemeal, each instalment consisting of a number of half-volumes of different dictionaries. Though initial progress was encouraging, it quickly became apparent that more wholesale revision of Diderot’s original was called for than Panckoucke had envisaged. Not only were there inadequacies in the original work; many of the disciplines had moved on since 1751. In some cases the developments occurred while the Encyclopédie was being published: Chémie reflects the new theories of Lavoisier regarding combustion which were being formulated as the early volumes were published, and the publication of Système anatomique was long delayed, in part because of the way in which the discipline was being restructured (by its editor Vicq-d’Azyr and others) in the 1790s. Several new dictionaries were added to the scheme to cover subjects that had originally been overlooked, such as music, architecture and forestry. By 1788, a year after the dictionary was supposed to have been completed, it had reached 53 volumes, the original projected total, and was obviously less than halfway to completion.  

"As the publication grew more and more unwieldy, Panckoucke resorted to a number of measures to ensure its continued financial viability. He attempted to placate his impatient subscribers with a series of announcements emphasising the unprecedented scale of the undertaking, the great difficulties he was having in bringing it to fruition and the considerable improvements that were being made. He added an Atlas encyclopédique to the original scheme and a series of natural history plates with accompanying text (entitled Tableau encyclopédique et máthodique des trois règnes de la nature) which subscribers could pay for as an optional extra. In 1790 a number of new dictionaries were introduced on lighter subjects with titles such as Amusemens des sciences mathématiques and Dictionnaire des jeux familiers to attract more subscribers. Meanwhile publication of some of the major series was stalled owing to the editors’ other engagements, indispositions or deaths. Subscribers had to stockpile the individual parts of each series in order, sometimes for many years, before having them bound together. The extremely complex publishing history is one reason why sets of the Méthodique are rarely found complete—and why there is widespread disagreement among bibliographers over what a complete set of the Méthodique should actually comprise.

"The outbreak of the Revolution threw more obstacles in Panckoucke’s way. Printing in Paris grew prohibitively expensive as an explosion of new journals and pamphlets took up the printers’ time and bills for wages and paper grew larger. Panckoucke responded by opening a huge print-shop of his own and turning to provincial printers to maintain the momentum of his great project. He started yet another dictionary on the Assemblée nationale constituante, intended as a supplement and successor to the dictionaries of jurisprudence, commerce and economy which had been completed just in time to be rendered obsolete by the fall of the Bastille. This particular series petered out after just one volume. Inevitably the Revolution hit Panckoucke’s customer base; many wealthy subscribers fled into exile or lost their fortune, depriving him of over 2000 subscribers. At the same time his writers, involved in political work or journalism, were finding it harder and harder to produce copy. At least one fell foul of the Revolution: Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, editor of Man ufactures, arts et métiers, committed suicide in 1793 on hearing of the condemnation of his wife. In 1794, stricken by depression, Panckoucke admitted defeat and signed over the Encyclopédie, along with his entire business, to his son-in-law Henri Agasse.  

"Agasse continued to issue numbers of the encyclopedia until his death in 1816, when it was taken over by his widow, Panckoucke’s daughter Pauline. She finally brought “l’entreprise la plus vaste du dix-huitième siècle” to a close in 1832 with the last volume of Histoire naturelle. It is difficult to imagine that many of the original subscribers were still around to see it completed. By this time it extended to (according to the most generally accepted estimate) 166½ volumes of text" (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/rarebooks/encmeth.html, accessed 01-21-2010).

"When 'completed', the encyclopedia suffered one great weakness. Many dictionaries have a classed index of articles; that of economie politique, being a very excellent example, giving the contents of each article, so that any passage can be found easily. As the Vocabulaire Universel, the key and index to the entire work, was not published, it was difficult to carry out any research or to find all the articles on any particular subject. The original parts had often been subdivided, and had been so added on to by other dictionaries, supplements and appendices, such that, without going into great detail, an exact account could not be given of the work, which contained 88 alphabets, 83 indexes, 166 introductions, discourses, prefaces, etc.

"Probably no more an unmanageable body of dictionaries has ever been published, except Jacques Paul Migne's Encyclopédie théologique, Paris, 1844-1875, with 168 volumes, 101 dictionaries, and 119,059 pages. Encyclopédie méthodique par ordre des matières occupied a thousand workers in production, and 2,250 contributors" (Wikipedia article on Encyclopédie methodique).

English natural philosopher and geologist John Michell publishes in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Vol. 74, Pt. 1 "On the Means of discovering the Distance, Magnitude &c. of the Fixed Stars, in consequence of the Diminution of the Velocity of their Light, in case such a Diminution should be found to take place in any of them, and such other Data should be procured from Observations, as would be farther necessary for that Purpose."

"This paper was only generally 'rediscovered' in the 1970s and is now recognised as anticipating several astronomical ideas that had been considered to be 20th century innovations. Michell is now credited with being the first to study the case of a heavenly object massive enough to prevent light from escaping (the concept of escape velocity was well known at the time). Such an object would not be directly visible, but could be identified by the motions of a companion star if it was part of a binary system. Michell also suggested using a prism to measure the gravitational weakening of starlight due to the surface gravity of the source ('gravitational shift'). Michell acknowledged that some of these ideas were not technically practical at the time, but wrote that he hoped they would be useful to future generations. By the time that Michell's paper was 'resurrected' nearly two centuries later, these ideas had been reinvented by others" (Wikipedia article on John Michell, accessed 02-28-2009).

Archivist, paleographer and antiquary Thomas Astle, Keeper of Records in the Tower of London, publishes The Origin and Progress of Writing, as well Hieroglyphic and Elementary, Illustrated by Engravings Taken from Marbles, Manuscripts and Charters, Ancient and Modern: Also, some account of the Origin and Progress of Printing. This work was probably the earliest treatise on paleography in English, and the earliest English work on diplomatics, the "science of diplomas, or of ancient writings, literary and public documents, letters, decrees, charters, codicils, etc., which has for its object to decipher old writings, to ascertain their authenticity, their date, signatures, etc." Astle also provided detailed summaries of the history of writing materials— parchment, vellum, and paper, including Chinese paper— and a well-informed summary of the history of printing and typography in Europe.

By hieroglyphs, Astle meant "picture-writing," and used as examples pictograms by the ancient Maya and the Egyptians.

Astle was well aware that the Romans brought literacy to Britain, and that after the departure of the Romans from Britain in 427 Britain reverted to illiteracy, writing on p. 96:

"After the most diligent inquiry it doth not appear, that the Britons had the use of letters before their intercourse with the Romans. Although alphabets have been produced, which are said to have been used by the Ancient Britons, yet no one MS. ever appeared that was written in them. (I have several of these pretended alphabets in my collection; though they are only Roman letters deformed.) Cunoboline, king of Britain, who lived in the reigns of the emperors Tiberius and Caligula, erected different mints in this island, and coined money in gold, silver and copper, inscribed with Roman characters.(Many of these coins are preserved in the elaborate dissertation of the Rev. Mr. Pegges, on the coins of Cunoboline; and many particulars concerning this prince appear in the hist. of Manchester, by Mr. Whitaker, vol. I p. 284, 372, and in his corrections, chap. ix.). From the coming of Julius Caesar, till the time the Romans left the island in the year 427, the Roman letters were as familiar to the eyes of the inhabitants, as their language to their ears, as the numberless inscriptions, coins, and other monuments of the Romans still remaining amongst us, sufficiently evince. (See several monuments inscribed with Roman British characters in Borlace's Hist. of Cornwall, p. 391, 396. See more in Warburton's Vallum Romanum, London, 1753, 4to). However, we are of opinion, that writing was very little practised by the Britons, till after the coming of St. Augustin, about the year 596.

"The Saxons, who were invited hither by the Britons, and who arrived about the year 449, were unacquainted with letters. The characters which they afterwards used, were adopted by them in the island, and though the writing in England from the fifth to the middle of the eleventh century is called Saxon (The architecture in England, which preceded the Gothic, is usually called Saxon, but it is in fact Roman.) it will presently appear, that the letters used in this island were derived from the Roman, and were really Roman in their origin, and Italian in their structure at first, but were barbarized in their aspect by the British Romans and Roman Britons. A great variety of capital letters were used by the Saxons in their MSS. of which many specimens are given in our plates."

Note that in the quotation from Astle above I have added in his footnotes to the paragraphs in parentheses, to provide a more complete example of Astle's scholarship.

The numerous plates in Astle's volume are beautifully produced through engraving, some printed in a single color, and some colored by hand. The scan provided on the Internet by Google books is not reflective of the fine quality of the printed images or of the overall fine quality of book production shown in Astle's deluxe publication.

French architect Etienne-Louis Boullée proposes a reconstruction of the Bibliothèque du Roi that would contain in one gigantic reading room the entire "memory of the world."

The Daily Universal Register begins publication in London.

This newspaper was eventually renamed the The Times.

William Withering publishes in Birmingham and London An account of the foxglove, and some of its medical uses. . . .

An accomplished botanist as well as a physician, Withering conducted the first clinical trials of the ground-up leaves of the purple foxglove—a traditional folk-remedy, discovering the efficacy of digitalis in heart diseases. Digitalis remains one of the few drugs introduced as early as the eighteenth century that remains widely used today.

Withering's work contains the results of ten years of observations and clinical trials, of the drug which he first learned about from an old woman herbalist in 1775. Of the 158 patients he treated with the foxglove, 101, who suffered from congestive heart failure, experienced relief after treatment with the drug, which is today known as digitalis after the foxglove’s Latin name, Digitalis purpurea. Modern analysis of Withering’s case reports suggests that many of the 57 other cases, such as those with pulmonary tuberculosis, did not involve diseases amenable to treatment with digitalis. Withering himself was aware that these factors might be affecting his results and warned against generalizing on the basis of his cases. Over the ten years of his researches on digitalis, Withering derived what he believed to be the optimum quantity of a single dosage—an amount only slightly less active than the tablet used in contemporary practice. The incidence of side effects of the drug declined as Withering gained clinical experience; Estes and White observed that “it appears that the overall incidence of side effects attributable to digitalis in Withering’s patients approximates the incidence recorded by physicians today. One could learn to use digitalis effectively and safely if one had no other text than Withering’s Account of the Foxglove.” Withering honestly recorded both successes and failures in his trials. He stressed that care must be taken in adjusting the dose, and he accurately described the signs and symptoms of digitalis toxicity and established clear guidelines for its rational use. Despite Withering’s modest but definite claims for the efficacy of the foxglove, the drug became a kind of panacea for nineteenth century clinicians.

Le Fanu, Notable Medical Books in the Lilly Library 139 points out that the folding frontispiece is colored in some copies but not in all. There are two versions of the plate: one, with artist’s name and with lower leaves pointing to the left, was copied from the original which James Sowerby had engraved for William Curtis’s Flora Londinensis; the other is the original version borrowed from Curtis, without artist’s name and with lower leaves pointing to the right.

Estes & White, “William Withering and the purple foxglove,” Scientific American 212 (1965), 110-119.  Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 2255. 

In 1785 Scottish engineer and political economist William Playfair issued in London a privately circulated preliminary edition of his The Commercial and Political Atlas; Representing, by Means of Stained Copper-Plate Charts, the Exports, Imports, and General Trade of England, at a Single View. 

The next year Playfair formally published the work in London with an even longer title as The Commercial and Political Atlas; Representing, by Means of Stained Copper-Plate Charts, the Exports, Imports, and General Trade of England, at a Single View. To which are Added, Charts of the Revenue and Debts of Ireland, Done in the Same Manner by James Correy.  For this work Playfair invented the line chart or line graph, present in the book in 43 variants, and the bar chart of bar graph, represented by a single example. The first 10 plates were engraved by Scottish engraver and cartographer John Ainslie in 1785 for the preliminary edition; the remainder were engraved by Samuel John Neele. It is thought that Playfair, often short of funds, may have hand-colored the charts himself—the coloring process that he curiously designated as "staining" in the titles.

"Playfair had a variety of careers. He was in turn a millwright, engineer, draftsman, accountant, inventor, silversmith, merchant, investment broker, economist, statistician, pamphleteer, translator, publicist, land speculator, convict, banker, ardent royalist, editor, blackmailer and journalist. On leaving Watt's company in 1782, he set up a silversmithing business and shop in London, which failed. In 1787 he moved to Paris, taking part in the storming of the Bastille two years later. He returned to London in 1793, where he opened a "security bank", which also failed. From 1775 he worked as a writer and pamphleteer and did some engineering work" (Wikipedia article on William Playfair, accessed 03-16-2010).

Playfair, The Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary, Edited and Introduced by Howard Wainer and Ian Spence (2005). This reproduces in color the third edition (1801) of the atlas with the first edition (1801) of the breviary.

Classical scholar, collector, connoiseur, and member of the Society of Dilettanti, Richard Payne Knight  privately issues, in an edition supposedly of about eighty copies, and with twelve engravings of phallic objects, An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus, Lately Existing at Isernia, in the Kingdom of Naples. . . to which is Added, a Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, and its Connexion with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients.

The first and most explicit purpose of Knight's treatise was to provide a comparison of ancient (pagan) and modern (Christian) religious rituals, based on the archeological discoveries related in Sir William Hamilton's essay Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus Lately Existing at Isernia, in the Kingdom of Naples, with which Knight's work begins.  Knight's second and less obvious purpose was to use his dissertation to attack the Christian church as bigoted, corrupt, and categorically opposed to the enlightened paganism that Knight wished to revive— a male-centered ethic based on phallic fertility which he believed would liberate modern man from the oppressions of an increasingly industrialized environment. 

Knight's major contribution to history and anthropology was his recognition of the fundamental religious significance of the sexually explicit fertility rites practiced in the ancient world, a recognition that restored Priapus to his rightful place as the symbolic principle of fertility, and opened new pathways for anthropological research.  Unfortunately, the nature of Knight's subject matter caused him to be wrongly condemned as a libertine and pornographer both by his contemporaries (except for an open-minded few) and the strait-laced Victorians who followed; it was not until the late nineteenth century that Knight's work began to lose its pornographic stigma and gain recognition as a valuable source for the student of ancient religions.

The first edition of Knight's Priapus was restricted to approximately eighty copies printed for the Society of Dilettanti, "a group of enthusiasts especially concerned with the study of Grecian antiquity" (Messman, p. 41), of which Knight was a member.  Upon the work's publication, the Society voted "that the copies be lodg'd in the custody of the Secretary & one of them deliverd to each member of the Society, & that except these he do not on any Pretence whatever part with any other copy without an order made at a regular meeting.  [And] that each member be allowd once & no more to move the Society recommending by name a Friend to whom he wishes the Society to present a copy" (3 March 1787 minutes of the Society, quoted in Messmann, p. 43).

Knight was, perhaps ironically, best known as an arbiter of aesthetic taste. In his lifetime An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805) was Knight’s most influential work. "This book sought to explain the experience of ‘taste’ within the mind and to clarify the theorisation of the concept of the picturesque, following from the writings of William Gilpin and Uvedale Price on the subject. Knight's views on the aesthetics of the picturesque are also formed in engagement with Edmund Burke's emphasis on the importance of sensation, which Knight partly rejects in favour of a modified associationism. The philosophical basis of Knight's theories have implications for his account of the relationship between the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘picturesque’" (quoted from Wikipedia article on Richard Payne Knight, accessed 12-20-2008). 

Messmann, Richard Payne Knight: The Twilight of Virtuosity (1974) 41-43.  Rousseau, "The sorrows of Priapus," in Sexual underworlds of the Enlightenment, ed. Rousseau & Porter, 101-153. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1226.

Philologist William Jones delivers The third anniversary discourse . . . [On the Hindus].

This was first published in 1788 in Volume One of Asiatick Researches: Or, Transactions of the Society Instituted in Bengal, for Inquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences and Literature, of Asia. In his paper, printed in India in the English language, Jones announced his discovery of the relationship between the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic and Celtic languages, marking the foundation of comparative philology and historical linguistics. Jones’s “clear understanding of the basic principles of scientific linguistics provided the foundations on which Rask, Bopp and Grimm built the imposing structure of comparative Indo-European studies” (Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man [1967]) no. 235).

The British Museum publishes the first catalogue of its library: Librorum impressorum qui in Museo Britannico adservantur catalogus.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development (1984) no. 109.

James Watt invents the centrifugal governor to regulate the speed of his steam engine.

This created interest in other feedback devices.

The French Revolution begins.

The last article of la Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen, prepared and proposed by the marquis de Lafayette, is adopted by the Assemblée nationale constituante de France as the first step toward writing a constitution for France. 

"The concepts in the declaration come from the philosophical and political principles of the Age of Enlightenment, such as individualism, the social contract as theorized by the English philosopher John Locke and developed by Jean Jacques Rousseau, and the separation of powers espoused by the Baron de Montesquieu. As can be seen in the texts, the French declaration is heavily influenced by the political philosophy of the Enlightenment, and by Enlightenment principles of human rights contained in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (4 July 1776), of which the delegates were fully aware. Thomas Jefferson, primary author of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, was at the time in France as a U.S. diplomat, and was in correspondence with members of the French National Constituent Assembly" (Wikipedia article on Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, acessed 09-19-2009).

The Archives nationales are founded in Paris.

"The Archives nationales were created at the time of the French Revolution in 1790, but it was a state decree of 1794 that made it mandatory to centralize all the pre-French Revolution private and public archives seized by the revolutionaries, completed by a law passed in 1796 which created departmental archives (archives départementales) in the départements of France to alleviate the burden on the Archives nationales in Paris, thus creating the collections of the Archives nationales as we know them today. In 1800 the Archives nationales became an autonomous body of the French state. Today, they contain about 364 km. (226 miles) of documents (the total length of occupied shelves put next to each other), an enormous mass of documents growing every year. The original documents stored by the Archives nationales range from A.D. 625 to today."

"Due to the massive volume of documents and records kept by the Archives nationales, these have been divided among four archives centres complemented by a microform centre serving as a back-up in case original documents are destroyed. The main centre is the CHAN (see below) located in Le Marais in the heart of Paris, but a new centre is being built in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, in the northern suburbs of Paris, and will become the main centre of the Archives nationales from 2010 on, the CHAN keeping only pre-French Revolution records. 

"The Centre historique des Archives nationales (CHAN), French for "Historical Centre of the National Archives", has been located since 1808 in a group of buildings comprising the Hôtel de Soubise and the Hôtel de Rohan in the district of Le Marais in Paris. This centre stores all the documents and records from before 1958 (except the documents and records concerning former French colonies) as well as the archives of the French heads of state. Since 1867 it has also housed the Musée de l'Histoire de France.

"The CHAN keeps 98.3 km. (61 miles) of documents (as of 2004): 15 km. are pre-French Revolution archives; 52 km. are archives of the French central state from 1790 to 1958; 20 km. are the so-called Minutier central, i.e. the archives of all the Parisian notaries extending from the 15th century to the beginning of the 20th century; 5.8 km. are private archives, notably the archives of the aristocratic families seized at the time of the French Revolution; 4.5 km. are books; and finally 1 km. are ancient maps and plans.

"It should be noted that due to the events of the French Revolution, the pre-French Revolution archives kept by the Archives nationales are not just the archives of the central state, but also the many local archives of the Paris region, such as all the archives of the abbeys surrounding Paris (e.g. the Abbey of Saint-Denis), the archives of the churches of Paris, and the archives of the medieval Paris city hall. Thus, the Archives nationales serve as the archives of the French central state for records from 1790 onwards, but for records before 1790 they serve as both the archives of the central state and the local archives of Paris and its region. The Archives nationales, however, do not keep the church records of Paris (baptisms, marriages and burials). These were entirely destroyed by fires set by extremists at the end of the Paris Commune in 1871.

"The oldest document kept at the CHAN is a papyrus dated A.D. 625 coming from the archives of the Abbey of Saint-Denis seized at the time of the French Revolution. This papyrus is the confirmation of a grant of land in the city of Paris to the Abbey of Saint-Denis issued by King Chlothar II. This document is the oldest original one kept by the Archives nationales, although the Archives nationales possess medieval copies of earlier records going as far back as A.D. 528 (but not the originals).

"In total the Archives nationales possess 47 original documents from the Merovingian period (ended in 751). They also possess 5 original documents from the reign of Pepin the Short (751-768), 31 from the reign of Charlemagne (768-814), 28 from the reign of Louis the Pious (814-840), 69 from the reign of Charles the Bald (840-877), 1 from the reign of Hugh Capet (987-996), 21 from the reign of Robert the Pious (996-1031), and then a rapidly increasing number of original documents after Robert the Pious, with for example more than 1,000 original documents from the reign of Philip Augustus (1180-1223) and several thousand original documents from the reign of Saint Louis (1226-1270)" (Wikipedia article on Archives nationales [France], accessed 07-11-2009).

The first Census of the United States is conducted.

The results were used to allocate Congressional seats (congressional apportionment), electoral votes, and funding for government programs.

The federal census records for the first census are missing for five states: Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, New Jersey and Virginia. They were destroyed some time between the time of the census-taking and 1830. The census estimated the population of the United States at 3,929,214, ". . . of which 697,681 were slaves, and . . . the largest cities were New York City with 33,000 inhabitants, Philadelphia, with 28,000, Boston, with 18,000, Charleston, South Carolina, with 16,000, and Baltimore, with 13,000."

In 1791 approximately 200 copies of the census were printed by Childs and Swaine of Philadelphia as:

Return of the Whole Number of Persons with the Several Districts of the United States, According to 'An Act Providing for the Enumeration of the Inhabitants of the United States:,' Passed March the First, One Thousand Seven Hundred and Nintety-One.

♦ A copy of the original edition with the autograph signature of Thomas Jefferson sold for $122,500 in the James S. Copley sale at Sotheby's, New York, on April 14, 2010.

Austro-Hungarian author and inventor, Wolfgang von Kempelen, publishes in Vienna Mechanismus der mensclichen Sprache nebst Beschreibung seiner sprechenden Maschine, in which he discusses the origins and development of languages, and describes the first successful speech synthesizer.

Unlike von Kempelen’s fraudulent chess-playing Turk automaton (1769, and noticed in this database), Kempelin's speech synthesizer actually worked.  Kempelen's synthesizer was the first that produced not only some speech sounds, but also whole words and short sentences. He believed that it was possible to acquire skill in using the machine within three weeks, especially if one chose to synthesize sentences in Latin, French, or Italian. German von Kempelen considered much more difficult to synthesize because of its many closed syllables and consonant clusters.

"The machine consisted of a bellows that simulated the lungs and was to be operated with the right forearm (uppermost drawing). A counterweight provided for inhalation. The middle and lower drawings show the 'wind box' that was provided with some levers to be actuated with the fingers of the right hand, the 'mouth', made of rubber, and the 'nose' of the machine. The two nostrils had to be covered with two fingers unless a nasal was to be produced. The whole speech production mechanism was enclosed in a box with holes for the hands and additional holes in its cover.

"The air flow was conducted into the mouth not only by way of an oscillating reed, but also through a narrow shunting tube. This allowed the air pressure in the mouth cavity to increase when its opening was covered tightly in order to produce unvoiced speech sounds. Driven by a spring, a small auxiliary bellows would then deliver an extra puff of air at the release.

"With the left hand, it was also possible to control the resonance properties of the mouth by varied covering of its opening. In this way, some vowels and consonants could be simulated in sufficient approximation. This was not really a simulation of natural articulation, since the shape of the mouth of the machine in itself remained constant. Some vowels and, especially, the consonants [d t g k] could not be simulated in this way, but only feigned, at best. An [l] could be produced by putting the thumb into the mouth.

"The function of the vocal cords was simulated by a slamming reed made of ivory (leftmost drawing). Although the effective length of the reed could be varied, this could not be done during speech production, so that the machine spoke on a monotone.

"Two of the levers to be actuated with the right hand served the production of the fricatives [s] and . . . as well as [z] and . . . by means of separate, hissing whistles (right drawing). A third one effectuated the production of a rattling [R] by dropping a wire on the vibrating reed (middle drawing)." (http://www.ling.su.se/staff/hartmut/kemplne.htm, accessed 12-14-2008).

Kempelin's final version of the machine, which differs slightly from the version shown in the book, is preserved in the Deutsches Museum, in the department of musical instruments.

Because Kempelin's speech synthesizer required a human for its operation it was not literally an automation but may be thought of as a forerunner of robotic or computer speech synthesizers.

According to Mark R. Godburn, 

"the earliest known detachable paper cover issued by a publisher is on a 28-page pamphlet called Time: An Apparition of Eternity, by John William Gerar de Brahm, published in Philadelphia in 1791. The wrapping is a simple rectangular paper printed with a presentation paragraph to the reader and signed by the author. It was folded around all four sides of the pamphlet and sealed with wax.

"Many of these early detachable covers and containers can be considered precursors to dust jackets—at least with a little imagination. But it took a revolution in the way books were bound before publishers began to issue dust jackets on new books."

The French Revolutionary government issues the French Cataloging Code of 1791, for the cataloging of libraries seized from religious houses and brought to literary depots at several locations in Paris. The staff at each depot was to record on cards the basic particulars about each item held. These cards were then bound up in bundles and sent to the Paris Bureau de Bibliographie. Because of wartime shortages, the blank backs of confiscated playing cards were used to record the information. 

The title page was transcribed on the card and the author’s surname underlined for the filing word. If there was no author, a keyword in the title was underlined. A collation was added that was to include number of volumes, size, a statement of illustration, the material of which the book was made, the kind of type, any missing pages, and a description of the binding if it was outstanding in any way. The collation was partly for the purpose of identifying valuable books that the government might offer for sale in order to increase government revenue.

After the cards were filled in and put in order by underlined filing word, they were strung together by running a needle and thread through the lower left hand corners to keep them in order.

♦ This may be the earliest documentation of the use of cards for the production of library catalogs.

Joseph Smally, "The French Cataloging Code of 1791: A Translation," The Library Quarterly, 61 Number 1 (January 1991) 1–14.

American clergyman and historian, 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."

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."

Jefferson's idea was shared by exponents of the new invention of printing by moveable type in the second half of the fifteenth century who believed, and rightly so, that printing an edition of a text that might survive in only one or a handful of manuscript copies was a way of safeguarding the existence of the text.

Claude Chappe his brother send the first transmission over their optical telegraph: “si vous reussissez, vous serez bientôt couvert de gloire” (If you succeed, you will soon bask in glory).

The initial experimental line ran between Brulon and Parce, a distance of ten miles (16 km).

France's Assemblée nationale grants full rights of citzenship to all Jews living in France.

American economist and political philosopher Alexander Hamilton publishes the Report of the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States on the Subject of Manufactures. Presented to the House of Representatives, December 5, 1791.

In this report Hamilton

"revealed. . . the full range of his program for making the United States a prosperous, secure, and happy nation," laying out in detail 'what he regarded as the proper role of government in the econony of a free society" (Forrest MacDonald, Alexander Hamilton, 323, 235). The report was called "the quintessential American statement against the laissez-fair doctrine of free trade and for activist government policies-- including protectionist tariffs-- to promote industrialization" (David A Irwin, "The Aftermath of Hamilton's 'Report on Manufactures', " Journal of Economic History, 64 [2004] no. 3).

By an act of the revolutionary French National Convention, the Bibliothèque nationale de France becomes the first free public library in the world.

Having been appointed Ingénieur-Télégraphiste and charged with establishing a line of stations between Paris and Lille, a distance of 230 kilometres (about 143 miles), Claude Chappe succeeds in completing his first optical telegraph, or semaphore telegraph. 

The Chappe telegraph was used to carry dispatches for the war between France and Austria, and communicated  news of a French capture of Condé-sur-l'Escaut from the Austrians less than an hour after it occurred.

"The first symbol of a message to Lille would pass through 15 stations in only nine minutes. The speed of the line varied with the weather, but the line to Lille typically transferred 36 symbols, a complete message, in about 32 minutes. Paris to Strasbourg with 50 stations was the next line and others followed soon after."

Chappe's system was the first widely adopted system to transmit messages overland faster than a messager or horseback can carry a message over a good road system. That speed had remained essentially fixed since Roman times. (See Reading 5.1.)

The Chappe optical telegraph eventually covered France with "a network of 556 stations stretching a total distance of 4,800 kilometres." It was be used for military and national communications until the 1850s.

"By 1824, the Chappe brothers were promoting the semaphore lines for commercial use, especially to transmit the costs of commodities. Napoleon Bonaparte saw the military advantage in being able to transmit information between locations, and carried a portable semaphore with his headquarters. This allowed him to coordinate forces and logistics over longer distances than any other army of his time. However because stations had to be within sight of each other, and because the efficient operation of the network required well trained and disciplined operators, the costs of administration and wages were a continuous source of financial difficulties."

Anton Maria Vassalli publishes Lettere sopra il Sospetto di un Nuovo Senso nei Pipistrelli . . . Con le Risposte dell’Abate Antonmaria Vassalli in Torino at the Stamperia Reale. The 64-page booklet includes letters to Vassalli by Italian biologist and physiologist Lazaro Spallanzani containing Spallanzani's first description of echolocation, or biosonar.

Spallanzani published his own small edition of the letters in Pavia a few days or weeks later. Also in 1794 the original letters were reprinted in Pisa in the Giornale dei literrati with the addition of  new letters on echolocation between Spallanzani and Pietro Rossi, Professor at University of Pisa.  A few months later the original letters were reprinted in Milano together with other new letters in the Opuscoli scelti sulle scienze e sulle arti.

"The problem of obstacle avoidance by bats flying in the dark is often known to European zoologists as 'Spallanzani's bat problem'. This is because the whole subject owes its place in the thoughts of scientists to the incisive thinking and masterly experimentation of Lazaro Spallanzani. . . . In 1793, when Spallanzani was sixty-four years of age, he had occasion to notice that a captive owl became quite helpless if the candle which lighted his room were blown out as it flew too close to the flame. Impressed by the complete disorientation of the owl, which crashed into the walls and other obstacles, Spallanzani repeated the observations with bats and soon realized that they were not at all inconvenienced by the darkness. This was the beginning of a long series of ingenious experiments by which within a year or two Spallanzani learned almost as much about the orientation of bats as others were able to discover in 140 years after his death. Yet only a regrettably small proportion of his observations and conclusions became widely enough known to win any general acceptance among zoologists, and even today much of his work remains unpublished" (Griffin, Listening in the Dark: The Acoustic Orientation of Bats and Men [1958] 57-58).

Gedeon, Science and Technology in Medicine, 340.

During the Napoleonic wars, France, under naval blockade imposed by Great Britain, was unable to import pure graphite sticks from England. Nor could France import English pencils or the inferior German pencils. To solve this problem, Nicholas Jacques Conté, an officer in Napoleon's army, discovered a method of mixing powdered graphite with clay and forming the mixture into rods that were fired in a kiln. By varying the ratio of graphite to clay, the hardness of the graphite rod could also be varied.

"This method of [pencil lead] manufacture which had been earlier discovered by the Austrian Joseph Hardtmuth of Koh-I-Noor in 1790 remains in use."

German Philologist Friedrich August Wolf publishes Prolegomena ad Homerum.

"In 1788 Villoison published the marginal scholia to the Iliad found in the codex now known as Venetus A (Marc. gr. 454). They contained a vast fund of new information about the Alexandrian critics of Homer, and this information stimulated F.A. Wolf to write Prolegomena ad Homerum, one of the most important books in the whole history of classical scholarship (1795). While Robert Wood, in his Essay on the original genius of Homer, had already seen in 1767 that the usual picture of a literate Homer writing down his poems could not be a complete explanation of the present form of the Homeric poems, it was left to Wolf to demonstrate, with the help of the newly found scholia, that the textual problems in Homer were not of the same type as in other authors, and that an explanation for this state of affairs could be provided on the assumption that the text of Homer was not written down until the time of Solon or Pisistratus. Wolf's book marked the beginning of serious discussion of what is traditionally called the Homeric Question" (Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars 3rd ed [1991] 198).

Though Adrien-Marie Legendre was the first to publish the method of least squares in 1805, Carl Friedrich Gauss is credited with developing the fundamentals of the basis for least-squares analysis in 1795 at the age of eighteen.

"An early demonstration of the strength of Gauss's method came when it was used to predict the future location of the newly discovered asteroid Ceres. On January 1, 1801, the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi discovered Ceres and was able to track its path for 40 days before it was lost in the glare of the sun. Based on this data, it was desired to determine the location of Ceres after it emerged from behind the sun without solving the complicated Kepler's nonlinear equations of planetary motion. The only predictions that successfully allowed Hungarian astronomer Franz Xaver von Zach to relocate Ceres were those performed by the 24-year-old Gauss using least-squares analysis.

"Gauss did not publish the method until 1809, when it appeared in volume two of his work on celestial mechanics, Theoria Motus Corporum Coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientium" (Wikipedia article on Least squares, accessed 08-24-2009).

German actor and playwright Alois Senefelder invents lithography (from Greek λίθος - lithos, 'stone' + γράφω - graphο, 'to write') as a cheaper way of publishing his plays.

Lithography was the first planographic printing process, and the first radically new method of printing since Gutenberg’s invention of printing by moveable type.

Amelia Simmons, who characterizes herself on the title page as “An American Orphan,” publishes in Hartford, Connecticut, American Cooke, or the Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry and Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making Pastes, Puffs, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards and Preserves, and All Kinds of Cakes, from the Imperial Plumb to Plain Cake, Adapted to this Country, and All Grades of Life.

This was the first cookbook written by an American published in the United States. “Numerous recipes that adapt traditional dishes by substituting native American ingredients such as corn meal and squash are printed here for the first time, including "Indian Slapjack," "Johny Cake," and "Squash Pudding." Simmons's "Pompkin Pudding," baked in a crust, is the basis for the classic American pumpkin pie. Although this popular work was published in many editions, only four copies of the original edition are known to have survived” (American Treasures of the Library of Congress, accessed 12-29-2008).

Louis-Nicolas Robert invents the first paper-making machine.

Robert's machine produced a continuous, unbroken sheet of paper that later had to 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 was difficult for Robert to make the necessary improvements to the paper-making machine, and Francois Didot attempted to have it developed in England.

William Stanhope builds the first printing press entirely out of iron.

The greatly increased rigidity enabled by the iron, rather than wood construction, further improved the efficiency of the press.

Private printing presses are suppressed in Russia by the order of the Tsar, Paul I.

During his Egyptian Campaign Napoleon Bonaparte establishes printing presses (Imprimerie Nationale) at Alexandria, Cairo, and Gizeh. These were probably first presses on the continent of Africa since 1519. When the French were driven out of Egypt in 1801 the presses ceased operation.

Economist and demographer Thomas Malthus publishes An essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society.

In this rebuttal of the utopian views of William Godwin, Malthus reasoned that populations inscrease by geometrical proportion but food supply only increases arithmetically. He argued that if both food and "the passion between the sexes" are necessary to man's existence, but populations have a much greater tendency to increase than does the food supply, then a "strong and constantly operating check"—such as famine, disease, or sexual deprivation—must be imposed to keep the population level consistent with the level of subsistence. 

Malthus's suppositions, though reasonable, were largely intuitive. Though the Essay contained no supporting numerical data, it was extremely influential on passage of the Census Act or Population Act of 1800, which led in 1801 to the first Census of England, Scotland and Wales. Using some of the information gathered in the first census, Malthus supplied factual documentation to support his theories in the greatly expanded second edition of his Essay published in 1803.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1431.

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 BCE passed by a council of priests— one of a series that affirm the royal cult of the 13-year-old Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation. The decree is written in Egyptian Demotic script (the native script used for daily purposes), classical Greek (the language of the administration), and Egyptian hieroglyphs (suitable for a priestly decree).

Known as the Rosetta Stone, the stone was forfeited to the English in 1801 under the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria. In 1802 it was placed in the British Museum, where it remains.