28/07/2016 by Scheong

The Sound of History: Antique Whistles

For hundreds of years, noisemakers of all kinds have been used for all kinds of purposes. In this posting, I’m looking at the history and the impact of antique whistles, specifically those made from the 1700s and 1800s, up to the mid-1900s.

Whistles have been made out of innumerable materials for hundreds of years. Bone, ivory, wood, silver, steel, brass, and plastic, but it wasn’t until the 1700s that the first industrially-produced whistles started being manufactured.

For much of history, whistles had been made by hand – usually out of natural materials like wood, bone, or ivory. Except for in a few specialised industries and professions, whistles were generally regarded as toys or musical instruments, their practicality as a noisemaker unrealised, or at least unappreciated, for much of history.

Boatswain’s Pipes

One of the first industries to see a practical use for whistles beyond being playthings was the navy. Long, thin pipes with spherical bowls or balls at the end were carried by boatswains (or ‘bosuns’), and these were used by the boatswain and his assistants (boatswain’s mates) to pass orders on the crowded, noisy decks of early sailing ships. As it was impossible to hear shouted commands from one end of a ship to the other, and over the noise of the wind, waves and creaking timbers, boatswain’s pipes were used instead.

The extremely high-pitched sound of the pipes could easily be heard over even the most intense of storms, and over time, short tunes and series of pitches were used to signal various commands such as All Hands on Deck – Weigh Anchor – Boats Away, and so-on. Boatswain’s pipes are still used in the navy today, although they’re more for ceremonial use, rather than for passing orders.

Police Whistles

Organised, official, state-run police-forces started becoming a reality in the early 1800s, starting in Scotland, then spreading to London, then the rest of Britain, and eventually around the world.

Early police constables and patrolmen manned their beats and called for help using heavy, wooden rattles. Rattles were easily broken, were uncomfortable to use, were heavy, and could be taken from the officer and used as a weapon. They were also not very loud, and in a busy street, a rattle was indistinguishable from the clatter of horseshoes – rendering it virtually useless.

Metropolitan Police Whistle from the 1930s. Made by J. Hudson & Co.

Whistles had been used on and off throughout the history of policing, but it wasn’t until the 1870s and 1880s that rattles were finally phased out entirely, and replaced with whistles. Whistles were louder, smaller, lighter and easier to use. They started replacing rattles on the London Metropolitan Police force (Scotland Yard) in 1883-1884, where they were famously supplied by Joseph Hudson & Co.

Joseph Hudson made his fortune when his dual-chamber pipe whistle was presented to Scotland Yard. He won the coveted contract to supply whistles to the London police force and his company, J. Hudson & Co (today, the Acme Whistle Company) grew by leaps and bounds, to become one of the largest, and most famous whistle-companies in the world!

What Were Whistles Used For?

Once it was found out how to manufacture large amounts of whistles, people suddenly realised that they needed whistles for a lot of different reasons! Joseph Hudson & Co alone, sold whistles to the police, to the army, to the fire-department, to sporting referees, to train guards, to naval officers and sailors, to railway conductors, cyclists, the boy scouts, the girl guides, and to the general public, as well!

The Acme BOY SCOUT whistle, from about 1920.

Over time, specific shapes and styles of whistles were used for different organisations, and today, whistles with markings on them which link them to specific institutions or organisations, such as hospitals, prisons, specific police-forces, fire-departments or army units are highly collectible.

Whistles on a whole, started dying out as a practical form of communication in the last quarter of the 20th century. Walkie-talkies, portable radios and mobile-phones meant that it was no longer necessary for so many people to carry whistles anymore. Organisations that had once carried whistles for decades, such as the police, fire services, the army and the navy started giving them up.

J. Hudson & Co. General-Service Whistle issued to the British Army during WWI. Dated to 1915.

Today, whistles are still used for sporting matches, or for safety and survival, but beyond this market, their use has dropped significantly. Some people still buy them for personal safety, for training dogs, for cycling and for emergency situations, but apart from exceptional circumstances, most other organisations or people don’t use them.

My Whistles Video

To close off this posting, here’s a video I uploaded a few days ago, displaying my own whistle collection:

21/02/2014 by Scheong

The Silk Road – The Information Super-Highway

Spices. Metals. Jewels and gems. Cloth. Silk. Ideas. Stories. New technologies. New foods. New peoples. Different cultures and customs.

Today, if we wanted to find out about any of these things, we would go to the internet, the so-called “information super-highway”. We’d bring up Google, and type in whatever we wanted to know, and hit ‘Search‘. And we’d be bombarded with millions and billions of pages of everything from photographs to blogs, videos, flash-player games, webpages and porno-sites advertising midget donkey orgies.

The Ancient World had its own ‘information super-highway’. Not an electronic one, but a physical one. A network of land and sea-routes which made up the vast trading network of the Old World. It has come to be known, rather misleadingly, as “The Silk Road”.

Let’s find out more about it!

What is the ‘Old World’?

The ‘Old World‘ is defined as all landmasses occupied by European and Asian peoples before the Ages of Exploration. So, Britain, Europe, Scandinavia, Africa, the Middle East, Russia, the Indian Subcontinent, China and Asia are considered the “Old World”. The ‘New World‘ by comparison, are the lands which were discovered by Europeans during the Ages of Exploration, starting in the 1400s. Lands like New Zealand, Australia, Canada, South America and North America.

The Silk Road doesn’t concern them. So forget about them. We’re talking about the Old World today.

What is the ‘Silk Road’?

We’ve all heard of the Silk Road. We’ve studied it in history class. We’ve read about it in books. We’ve heard it mentioned in movies and documentaries.

But what the hell is it?

First, it’s not just a road, and it’s not all about silk.

The term ‘Silk Road‘ was coined by Baron Ferdinand Von Richthofen (the uncle of the famous ‘Red Baron’) in the 1870s. It’s the literal translation of the German term: “Seidenstrasse“, but it’s a misleading title at best.

The ‘Silk Road’ was not just ONE ROAD. If you have this idea in your head about this grand boulevard stretching across the world from Constantinpole to Xi’an…forget it. It never existed.

The Silk Road was the name given to a SERIES OF TRADE-ROUTES which ran from Europe, to Asia, and back. They were both land-routes, going from Europe, through the Middle East, across (or past) India, towards China, and also water-routes, sailing from the Mediterranean Sea to Egypt, and then down the Red Sea, into the Indian Ocean, through the Pacific, to China.

Neither was the Silk Road exclusively about silk. Silk was just ONE of the reasons why this collection of trade-routes existed. Just ONE of several commodities traded along its length. The Silk Road wasn’t just some fancy Middle-Eastern bazaar where you went to buy a nice robe. It traded everything – metals like tin and copper, spices like pepper, nutmeg and cinnamon, it traded ideas and religions, technologies, languages, and foods which Europeans had not heard of before. Like lemons, limes and dates.

The Origins of the Silk Road

The Silk Road is believed to have started in about 206 B.C. In the West, the Roman Empire is on the rise. In the East, it is the era of the Chinese Han Dynasty. Two great and powerful civilisations separated from each other by thousands of miles of mountains, deserts, rivers, seas and oceans.

In the East, a mythical land. A country known only as ‘Cathay‘. And a city called ‘Chang’an‘, in Shaanxi Province, in the country’s inner-east. Today, ‘Cathay‘ is called ‘China’. And ‘Chang’an‘ has been renamed. Today, you know it as ‘Xi’an’. Xi’an is more than the location of the famous Terracotta Army.

For centuries, Xi’an was the Eastern Terminus of the famous Silk Road. And from Xi’an, trade-routes and road spread south and west, across the great Eurasian landmass, towards great cities and countries, such as Arabia, Turkey and its capital of Constantinople, and Italy, to ports like Naples.

The Silk Road was started by the Chinese in the Han Dynasty, as a way to trade silk, a rare and precious commodity, with eager merchants and customers in the West. The Chinese are not banned from selling silk, but by imperial decree, no Chinaman can divulge silk-making methods to the “barbarians” of the West. This means that Western traders such as the Byzantines, the Greeks and the Romans, are forced to purchase Chinese silk on Chinese terms, along the Chinese Silk Road.

Trading on the Silk Road

The Silk Road was not one road. It was a network of roads and sea-routes between the Far East and Europe. But in its most basic form, it was a pair of routes that linked three different places together – there was one route which ran from eastern Europe to the Middle East, and another route which linked the Middle East to China. This basic original route exploded into the network and web of routes which the Road is known for today.

Traders and merchants working the Silk Road rarely traveled along its entire length. A trader in Xi’an would not travel all the way to Constantinople. A wine-merchant in Naples would not travel all the way to Bombay. Most traders and merchants sold their goods to a middle-man. Who traveled to the next major trading-city, and sold it to another middle-man. Who traveled to the next major city, selling it to another middle-man.

All these nameless middle-men made up the links in the chain of the Silk Road. And these men traded everything from wine, to silk, olive-oil to ivory, cotton to pepper, cinnamon and all manner of exotic and rare spices.

From Shaanxi Province, and the city of Chang’an (near the modern city of Xi’an), a trader might travel northwest. Here, he entered Gansu Province, and the famous Hexi (‘Hey-See‘) Corridor. The corridor is the first leg in the northernmost, and earliest incarnation of what would become the Silk Road. This route was one of the few open to the Silk Road, due to mountains in the south, and the harsh Gobi Desert in China’s north. Only by stringing along, from oasis to oasis along the Hexi Corridor could a trader hope to cover any distance with safety.

While it was rare for the majority of the merchants to travel the entire length of the Silk Road, those who operated in the Middle East, India and China made the city of Chang’an their base. An enormous population-center boasting thousands of citizens, the city was the capital of China during this time. If Chang’an was the Eastern Terminus of the Silk Road, then the city’s Western Market was the baggage-claim carousel. It was here that travelers from China’s other provinces, or traders from the West and South gathered to exchange their goods and wares for sale into China, or for export out of the Central Kingdom. And it was from places such as Chang’an that all sorts of wondrous and not-so-wondrous things spread from the East to the West.

The Silk Road and the Black Death

Not everything traded on the silk road was as benign as silk, spices and tea. The Silk Road is also famous for spreading the Black Death, the infamous Bubonic Plague, that ravaged Europe, killing untold hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of just a few years.

Coming from an unknown source, somewhere in China, the Black Death spread westwards, carried by traders on the Silk Road. The rats and fleas which carried the plague bacteria hitched rides on camel-caravans, hiding inside tents, baskets, rolls of cloth, and pots and barrels of food. Civilisations once safeguarded from foreign diseases by the barrier of distance were now susceptible to all kinds of illnesses which they had never heard of, had no immunity against, and for which no cures or treatments existed.

How Long did the Road Last?

Originally an overland route started in the Pre-Christian era, the Silk Road expanded over the centuries, eventually incorporating maritime routes as well, sailing the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. In the 1100s, relatively safer maritime trading-routes begin to pop up alongside the overland routes. Free from the dangers of bandits, sandstorms, taxes and raids, and able to carry much more cargo, it’s fairly obvious why the Silk Road’s seagoing trade began to rise.

With the rise of seagoing trade, and the smuggling of silk-spinning knowledge out of China, the importance of China as the silk capital of the world began to diminish greatly as the world approached the Middle Ages. By the early Middle Ages, silk was being produced in Italy and France, and travelling such great distances to China was no-longer necessary.

The Decline of the Silk Road

The Silk Road’s decline started in the Early Modern Period, after the 1300s. Silkworms, and the technology and knowledge for silk-production had been smuggled out of China over the years, and by the 1200s, it was no-longer a Chinese state secret. It was now possible for Europeans to produce silk and to cut off the need for long trips to China. The ‘Silk Road’ still existed, but it was now smaller, shorter and less important. At any rate, changes in the political landscape of Europe and the Middle East and Asia in this time meant that it was safer to transport luxury goods by sea, rather than across potentially hostile land.

Trade by sea was potentially, longer and more dangerous, but the trade-off was being able to carry much larger loads of cargo, and thereby, earn larger profits. Furthermore, changes in Chinese foreign policy, set up by dynasties such as the Ming, meant that the whole concept of Chinese ‘Foreign Policy’ basically ceased to exist. They shut off communications with the West, and western traders, merchants and travelers were no-longer welcome within the bounds of the “Central Kingdom”.

For centuries the Silk Road was vitally important. But not always for the reasons you might suppose. While it transported everything from gold to ivory to silk, spices, tea, cotton and other rare or otherwise sought-after commodities, it also transported religions, ideas, technologies and social customs around the then-known world. And they’ll probably last a lot longer than your best silk boxer-shorts.

The Road to Knowledge?

“The Silk Road” (12pt documentary series).

A Timeline of the Silk Road

The Silk Road – Article from the University of California, Irvine

The Silk Road – The Ancient History Encyclopedia

22/07/2013 by scheong

Famous Books Which Changed the World – And Why They Did

What are among mankind’s greatest achievements? Greatest inventions? Greatest triumphs of intelligence, science, technology and innovation? The telegraph, telephone, radio, television, the moving picture, the camera and photograph, the typewriter, the internet, the sewing-machine, automobile, steam-engine, the Industrial Revolution, the cotton gin, lightbulb, flashlight, fleshlight, dynamo-torches and microwave dinners…?

Mankind has had as many high-points in the history of the world as it has had depressingly low points. But of all the things that man has created, probably one of the most important is the book.

The Book??

This whole posting is gonna be about…books?

Yes.

Books.

First, a general history, but then, a deeper look at some of the most famous books in the history of books, and how they have shaped, influenced or otherwise affected the world and modern culture today.

Before Books

It’s hard to imagine that there was a time when books were unknown. But in a dim and distant past, before Justin Bieber ever existed, there was a time before books.

Slates and Tablets

When writing was first created in the Middle East and Mediterranean during the time of the ancients, writing was first produced on clay or stone tablets. This was due to the form of writing, known as cuneiform, which was made up of wedge-shapes, arranged and pressed or chipped into damp clay, or sheets of stone.

Obviously, just a few of these tablets or slates would be extremely heavy, and carrying around a whole heap of them would be a serious pain in the ass. So the idea of binding them together never occurred due to sheer impracticality. Nevertheless, in the 21st century, we’ve come full-circle, and people still carry around tablets today, albeit, ones supplemented with electricity.

Scrolls

Oooh, scrolls! Fancy!

Scrolls, made of vellum, parchment or papyrus (the ancestor of modern paper) had certain advantages over tablets. Scrolls could be rolled up and were relatively portable. They were lighter and could hold much more information than tablets. But scrolls were not without faults.

Imagine going to the famous ancient Library of Alexandria, in Egypt. This famous institution, the Ancient Roman equivalent of Google, housed innumerable thousands of scrolls, tablets and books on almost every subject imaginable – Science, mathematics, medicine, engineering, great inventions, and the works and researchers of countless great ancients. Great men such as Euclid and Archimedes (who honoured us with the first streak in history) studied, wrote and worked here.

But imagine what a huge pain in the ass it would be, to go to the library and try to find a particular scroll.

As organised as everything might be, in pigeonholes, shelves, cases and on tables, one issue now becomes apparent – With all the documents rolled up, it’s not easy to find exactly which document you want, without unrolling it, first. There’s nowhere to put a title or author’s name on the outside of a scroll. Frustrating, huh?

But on top of that, scrolls could have many, many pages. Could you imagine having to unroll scroll after scroll, page after page, to find one particular document, and having to roll them all up again…IN ORDER…when you were done?

Clearly, something more efficient had to be found.

The First Books

The first books ever created, or more properly called, ‘Codices‘, (sing. ‘Codex‘) were invented by those smart Italians – The Ancient Romans! Originally, books were made out of wooden tablets onto which information had been written. To keep things neat and tidy, holes were hammered or drilled down one side of each tablet, and they were then threaded and tied together with string, to form…a book! It was much easier to read something simply by turning a page, instead of having to unroll, roll, unroll, re-roll, separate, twist and turn scrolls all day long.

The problem was that with so much writing around, if everything was compiled into a scroll, it would be so large and cumbersome and fiddly to use, most people would give up!

A book is a collection of writing split into pages, which are bound along one side, with a front cover, a back cover, and a spine to hold everything together. Strictly speaking, while all codices are books, not all books are codices. As to be defined as a codex, a book must have hardback covers! Ooh, fancy.

The book had other advantages over the scroll. Apart from compactness and ease of access, a book was also much more efficient. A scroll is only ever written on one side of the paper or parchment. The result is that yards and yards of parchment is wasted on the other side, which is left blank. This could make scrolls expensive! A book, on the other hand, used both sides of the paper or parchment for writing, making everything more efficient and compact.

Books, ca. 700.A.D.

Soon, everything was written in book-form. It was just so much more convenient. But there were other issues – until the mid-1400s, all books, save a very slim minority, were handwritten. Every single letter, stroke, page, paragraph and sentence. This made books phenomenally expensive! When a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg showed up and created the first movable-type printing-press, suddenly, books became cheaper and faster to produce! And this is where things really started to change.

The Impact of the Press

With the printing-press, more books could be produced faster and cheaper. This meant that more people could buy them, own them and read them. This meant that literacy improved, and that learned people with ideas and information could write and produce even more books!

…What books?

Famous Books Throughout History

Let’s have a look at some of the most famous, important or influential books ever to be written, or to come off the press, and how and/or why they have impacted the world. These are not presented in any chronological order, or order of importance.

Book: The Gutenberg Bible
Author: Numerous
When Published: Ca. 1455
Where Published: Mainz, Germany.

The Gutenberg Bible is the first book of significance ever to be mass-produced. Ever to be printed!…But NOT the first book which Gutenberg produced.

Contrary to what you might think, Gutenberg, the famous inventor of the printing-press, did not start out printing the bible. The poor fellow only just got his new toy working! He wasn’t about to risk it printing something as ambitious as the BIBLE!

Instead, he tested his machine first, printing smaller, less-ambitious books, leaflets and other documents. The printing-press was finished by the 1440s. It wasn’t until at least a decade later that Johannes Gutenberg attempted something as ambitious as printing the Bible!

But printing such a famous book as the Bible proved to the doubters that printing-presses were the way of the future. The written word was out, the printed word was in! And every book which came thereafter, has been a child of that great moment in history.

Book: De Mirabilibus Mundi (“The Wonders of the World”). AKA: “The Travels of Marco Polo
Author: Rustichello da Pisa, Marco Polo
When Published: 1300
Where Published: The Republic of Venice (modern Venice, Italy).

De Mirabilibus Mundi. Copy as owned by Christopher Columbus; annotations in his own hand

In an age when travelling anywhere at all was extremely slow, dangerous and uncertain, legendary Italian explorer, Marco Polo, traveled to the far and distant Orient. While in prison, Marco Polo related his adventures to fellow prisoner and Italian, Rustichello Da Pisa (“Rustichello of Pisa”). Rustichello wrote down Marco’s tales, and when they returned to the city-state of Venice, they had the book published.

A printed copy of the book, owned by Christopher Columbus, was one of his driving forces which encouraged him to sail westwards across the Atlantic Ocean in search of Asia, but finding the Americas, instead.

Book: Inventarium sive Chirurgia Magna (“The Great Inventory of Surgery”)
Author: Guy De Chauliac
When Published: 1363
Where Published: Avignon, France.

Chirurgia Magna, by Guidonis De Cauliaco (Guy De Chauliac)

Guy De Chauliac, physician and surgeon to Pope Clement VI during the late 1340s, was the author of a great medical textbook which would become little less than the Surgical bible for the next three centuries.

In the 1340s, Europe was ravaged by the Great Plague. Countless thousands of people died each day, from as far afield as London to Rome to Constantinople.

At the time, the Catholic papacy was centered in the French city of Avignon (“Avinyon“), and Clement VI was the pope. Clement was one of the lucky survivors of the Black Death of the 1340s, possibly aided by his personal physician, Guy de Chauliac. De Chauliac advised the pope to remain in isolation, to see as few people as possible, and to have raging fires burning around him day and night, to cleanse the air and drive away pestilence.

Whether or not the fires helped, by following his doctor’s orders of quarantine, Clement survived the plague. De Chauliac was not so lucky. He was himself struck down by the disease. Without other physicians around to help, De Chauliac was forced to treat himself, and to lance his own buboes, the nasty, bloody boils which gave the “Black Death” its name. De Chauliac knew that the ‘pestilence‘ was contagious, and could be spread from person to person, or so it seemed, but like everyone else, he had no idea how it was spread, other than that it could be.

Ever the careful and methodical doctor, Guy de Chauliac wrote down everything that happened to him and everything that he did. He survived the plague, and afterwards wrote his great medical masterpiece, “Chirurgia Magna“, or “The Great Surgery”.

This enormous work, comprising seven volumes, covers everything, from bandaging, anatomy, drugs, anesthetics, bloodletting, and several diseases, symptoms and treatments – almost everything known, or unknown about medicine during the Middle Ages. It remained one of the preeminent works on medicine until the 1600s.

Book: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Author: Henry Fielding
When Published: February, 1749
Where Published: London

By the 1700s, increasing literacy, and faster turnout of books thanks to the printing-press, allowed for more and more varied types of literature to be produced. Stories which were once impossible, were now possible! Forms which were once impossible, were now possible! Everything was changing.

Previously, stories, works of fiction and fancy, and suchlike, were of necessity, short. Without the ability to write stories down, most people kept stories short and swift. Fairy-tales and such. But even those people who wrote down their stories had to keep them short, since paper and ink was expensive, and copying out stories was even more expensive!

But with the printing-press, it was suddenly possible to crank out copy after copy of a document in relatively quick succession. This meant that even longer works of fiction could be shared with greater audiences. This gave rise to the modern “novel”.

Without the novel, most writers today would probably have starved to death long ago, or moved onto some other profession. And certainly, no novel such as “Tom Jones” would be possible without the printing-press!

Written by Henry Fielding in the 1740s, the book chronicles the childhood and life of the fictional “Tom Jones”, a boy who was found abandoned by a wealthy landowner. The book tells of his upbringing, and of his on-again-off-again romance with neighbour Sophia Western. Tom’s status as a foundling (and therefore, presumably, a bastard) causes all kinds of frictions and tensions throughout the story, as well as affecting Mr. Western’s willingness to let his daughter marry a man of questionable past.

Sounds straightforward enough. Except that the novel is EIGHTEEN BOOKS LONG!

Try copying THAT out by hand. You’d break your wrist before you got halfway.

The advent and spread of the printing-press was what made enormous works such as this possible for the first time in history. And as certainly one of the largest works of its kind, Tom Jones deserves a place on this list.

Book: Anatomy. Descriptive & Surgical
Author: Henry Gray
When Published: 1858
Where Published: England

Written in the 1850s, Henry Gray’s “Anatomy” is one of the most famous medical textbooks in the history of medical textbooks. If you mentioned De Chauliac’s “Chirurgia Magna“, most people would blink. But everyone has heard of “Gray’s Anatomy”.

Yes, most people know the term from the TV show “Grey’s Anatomy“, but it’s a lot more than a medical drama.

In the early 1800s, medical understanding is at a crossroads. People are shaking off the old beliefs and yearning to embrace a new, scientific study of medicine and the human body. But to treat the human body, you first need to understand the human body. And to do that, you need a body.

During the Georgian era, medical students learned about the human body from studying corpses provided by the state, or from body-snatchers. The demand for human bodies was so high that people were digging up freshly-buried corpses to sell them to anatomy schools…and anatomy schools asked no questions at all about where the bodies came from.

This was a serious problem for the British Government. It was a problem because stealing dead bodies is illegal! To try and fix this, in 1832, they passed the Anatomy Act. This allowed for a wider range of dead bodies to be available to the medical community. Previously, only the bodies of executed criminals could be used for dissection. Now, for the first time, you could chose to leave your own body to the medical community when you died!…Something which had not been allowed in the past, even if you put in your will!

Although this was a step forward, it wasn’t a very big one. Because bodies have this thing where they break down and rot and decompose. So they don’t last very long. Something better was required.

Photography in the 1830s and 40s was in its infancy. It was slow, unreliable and tricky. So having a photographic album of the human body was not a practical way of teaching students about their innards. What was needed was some cheap, effective textbook which would gather all the information about the human body into one neat package, along with some lovely, detailed and above all, accurate illustrations!

Enter Henry Gray.

Mr. Henry Gray was born in 1827. As a young, ambitious surgeon in his twenties, Gray studied anatomy in medical school. As a surgeon, having as best an understanding of the human body as possible was absolutely essential. And to ensure that all other budding surgeons had the best chance possible to study and perfect their profession, Gray wrote up an exhaustive text on the human body.

One of the most famous aspects of Gray’s “Anatomy” is not what he wrote, but rather, what was drawn. Gray had the good fortune to be acquainted with Henry Vandyke Carter, a fellow surgeon, but more importantly, an anatomical artist, or a person who drew scientific illustrations.

Together, Carter and Gray put together their masterpiece. With Gray providing the written matter, and Carter providing all the necessary illustrations of the various parts of the body, their book becomes a bestseller. As soon as they published their work in 1858, Gray and Carter started work on a second edition. It comes out in 1860, but Gray doesn’t live to see what a change his book makes the world of medicine. Three years after it’s first published, he dies of smallpox in 1861, at the age of just 34.

But his legacy lives on. And to this day, over a century after its publication, Gray’s “Anatomy” remains one of the most widely respected and widely-read medical textbooks in the world. It’s still published today, and comes in hardback, paperback, e-versions, even condensed copies for medical students. It’s latest run was in 2008, when the 40th edition was published.

Book: Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
Author: Mary Shelley
When Published: 1818
Where Published: London, England

The year is 1816. The famous “Year without Summer”, so-called due to the eruption of Mt. Tambora in the Dutch East Indies the year before.

In a lodge on the shores of Lake Geneva, in Switzerland, the literary greats of the Regency Era are gathered. Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and a teenaged girl: Mary Godwin, with her first child.

The girl, introducing herself as Shelley’s wife (although they were not yet married), entered into a storytelling competition with the other authors. The challenge was for each writer to tell a horror story! Mary Shelley struggled. And thought. And struggled. Wracking her brains. But nothing came. And she had plenty of time to think – the weather was so bad (Shelley herself recalled, it rained almost nonstop) – that they didn’t leave the house for days! But then one night, she had a nightmare about a scientist who created life! And Mary Shelley’s horror story, “Frankenstein” had been born!

“Frankenstein” is widely considered one of the first proper science-fiction novels, influenced by the burgeoning desire of the Georgians to understand their world through rational, reasonable means. The subtitle of ‘the Modern Prometheus’ refers to the Greek titan who created mankind by molding him from clay, just as Dr. Frankenstein created life by reanimating dead bodies through electricity.

Book: A Dictionary of the English Language
Author: Dr. Samuel Johnson
When Published: 1755
Where Published: England

Imagine that you were writing an essay, or an article, or a story, or a report. And you needed to know how to spell a word, or needed to know its meaning, or its correct usage. You have been taught your letters and numbers and penmanship in school, but do not have any reference-texts to learn from; only what your schoolmaster might have taught you.

How would you find out if what you’d written was correct? Who would you ask? How would you know if the answer you received was correct? How would you know if it was incorrect?

Such was life before the dictionary.

With more people able to read and write, and with the spread of newspapers, books, novels, magazines, pamphlets and other reading-material in the 18th century, with the help of the printing-press, the English language was growing. But it was growing in a messy, erratic fashion. There existed no standards of spelling, punctuation, grammar or any other guidelines. If people were to become more literate, and if others were going to understand them, a standard form of written English was required. But this would not be possible without at least one, widely-accepted text, which compiled the entire language into one place, and which could serve as a reference for everyone.

Dictionaries in the 17th and 18th centuries were poor excuses for reference-material. They were often incomplete and poorly written. In the 1740s, a group of London booksellers got so frustrated by this, that they decided to do something about it! They contacted a man named. Dr. Samuel Johnson.

Samuel Johnson was a scholar. The son of a bookseller and from a well-to-do family, he seemed the perfect sort of fellow to do what these booksellers had in mind – a complete compendium of the English Language. They wanted every single known word in the English language to be entered into a dictionary, and for it to be published for the whole world to read.

Starting in the mid-1740s, Dr. Johnson boasted that it could be done in three years. It took him nine! But it was eventually published in 1755, and was, for the next 150 years (until the Oxford English Dictionary of 1884), the preeminent dictionary of the English language. It was considered the first complete book on the English language, and contained all the words known at the time.

So monumental was this feat, in an age before instant communications, online researching and several tomes of reference, that famous biographer James Boswell, a contemporary of Dr. Johnson’s, immortalised him in his volume “The Life of Samuel Johnson“.

Although the dictionary did have issues with it (as any text of the period was bound to have), it was, nonetheless widely received, and Johnson’s formatting and layout of his dictionary set a model for all other lexicographers to follow in the decades and centuries which came after. Lexicographer Simon Winchester, who produced the next most famous dictionary, the Oxford English, said of Johnson’s work, that it became the most important book in the homes of any person of letters, learning or intelligence, rivaling the bible in popularity and importance. By the time Dr. Johnson died in 1784 at the age of 75, there were already five editions printed, with more on the way!

Book: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or preservation of Favoured Races and the Struggle for Life
Author: Charles Darwin
When Published: 1859
Where Published: England

Got your tongue untied yet?

More commonly just called “The Origin of Species”, Charles Darwin’s most famous publication remains one of the most important books ever written on the subject of biology, and even after the passage of over a hundred years, it continues to shape and influence our understanding of the natural world.

Famously controversial, even today, Darwin’s theory of evolution showed how animals adapt and change to suit their environments, in order to survive, and how those species which do not change, or cannot change fast enough, are left behind, and eventually die out. This has become a cornerstone of modern science and natural history, and gave birth to the study of eugenics.

Book: Dracula
Author: Abraham Stoker
When Published: 1897
Where Published: United Kingdom

As far as world-changing books go, a classic of Gothic horror isn’t something that jumps to the top of most people’s lists, but this late-Victorian classic has remained popular for over a hundred years, and its significance in literature is difficult to ignore.

‘Dracula‘ is the source-material for much of popular culture’s understanding or beliefs regarding the abilities, skills and limitations of the mythical vampire. Everything from turning into bats, wooden stakes, drinking blood, and general immortality, comes from this book.

Inspired by Eastern European folk-tales, Dracula is a strange mix of the modern and the medieval, a Victorian equivalent of a Dan Brown novel. You have the ancient mysteries and folklore, and all the latest technology of the age, with which to combat evil – typewriters, steamships, railroads, telegrams, repeating firearms, audio-recordings, even blood-transfusions. Few other novels have so defined a particular genre or subgenre of fiction.

02/06/2013 by Scheong

Neither Rain, nor Snow, nor Sleet, nor Hail: A Compact History of the Components of Mail

These days, more people send emails than letters. They use the telephone more than they send telegrams. And yet, in this day and age of frantic internet buying, with sites like eBay and Gumtree, and the countless other online businesses offering all kinds of goodies with which to suck the money out of our wallets, mail delivery is just as important now as it has ever been before.

Postal systems have been around since the dawn of writing, and to cover the development of a mail-delivery system would take an entire book…which I’m not going to write. Instead, this posting will look at the history of the various aspects which make up the modern postal system.

Why is it called a “Postal System”?

We all get mail. We all send, deliver and receive mail. But people also tend to call it ‘post’. There’s the Royal Mail in England, Australia Post in Australia, the United States Postal Service in the U.S.A. Why does it switch between ‘mail’ and ‘post’?

‘Mail’ is the cargo which a postal system transports and delivers. Letters, postcards, parcels, packets, boxes, crates and so-forth. The system which delivers this cargo is the ‘postal system’. But why is it called a postal system?

The very word comes from the earliest days of mail delivery. Back in the 1500s, when Henry VIII developed the Royal Mail in England, mail-couriers or despatch-riders literally rode, on horseback, between mail-posts, set into the roadside from town to town. To send something by the postal service was to literally meet the post-rider…at the post, the wooden stake in the road…and give him your letter which you wanted to have delivered. These days, we might be familiar with the position of “Postmaster General“. This came from the original Tudor office of ‘Master of the Posts’, literally the man who was in charge of ensuring that the post-officers remained…at their posts!…and delivered mail in a safe and efficient manner.

Mail Delivery

Ever since the first mail-services were created, delivery was extremely slow for an extremely long time. A letter posted in London could take days to reach Edinburgh, or Paris, or Berlin. A letter posted in New York could take weeks to reach San Francisco. And a letter written on one side of the world to be sent to the other, could take months to get there, often relying on trade or naval ships to transport it in their cargo-holds, if they happened to be going in that particular direction.

One of the first attempts at prioritising the delivery of mail was made in the 1700s. For a roughly seventy-year period between the early 1780s until the late 1850s, the British Royal Mail relied on a fleet of mail coaches to speed deliveries of mail throughout the United Kingdom.

Mail delivery had previously been very slow, and dangerous! Post-riders transported not just mail, but also parcels and packages, which might contain valuable or expensive items. It wasn’t uncommon for lone post-riders to be set upon by highwaymen who would relieve them of their cargoes, steal their valuables and even kill them!

The coordinated system of mail-coaches changed this. Not only was delivering mail by coach relatively faster, but also safer. The mail-coach always had at least four men riding on it: A driver, his assistant, and two armed post-guards, who rode on the back running-board. This way, anyone attempting to rob the coach would have to deal with four armed men, first!

An actual British mail-coach from the early 1800s. This one ran the route between London and York. Note the huge storage-trunks over the axles for carrying mail

The mail coach was also used as a sort of long-haul public transport system. Passengers could pay a fee, and ride along inside the mail-coach during its journeys, to get to their destinations much faster than what they might ordinarily. Also, since the mail-coach was working for the Royal Mail, a government agency, it was illegal for anyone to stop a coach. Toll-men, highwaymen, nobody could halt a mail-coach, and they didn’t stop for anything less than a broken axle!

Steam-Powered mail took over from horse-drawn mail in the 1850s. With the improvement and expansion of railway networks around the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada and America, mail-coach services were eventually phased out when the postal-services realised that these newfangled wood- (later, coal-) fired, steam-powered locomotive engines could speed mail to every part of a given country. Soon, post-offices and railway stations merged, so that post could be transported by rail and steam as far and as fast as was necessary and possible.

Special mail-trains were used in most cases, and their only task was the delivery of mail. To save time, letters and parcels were often sorted en-route by the mail-handlers, so that when the train reached its next drop-off point, or station, the necessary mail-sacks could just be dumped off on the platform, without time wasted in needless waiting and sorting.

To save even MORE time and to further improve the efficiency of mail-delivery, rail-mail was collected and dropped off even when the train was on the move! Specially-designed mail-cranes were built next to major railroad-routes:

Different types of mail-cranes or mail-hooks were used. Some simply held up sacks of outgoing mail for the train to snatch off it as it rocketed past. More complex ones would collect incoming mail, and send off outgoing mail at the same time.

As sacks of mail were prepared onboard trains, they were hung on hooks outside the mail-carriage. At the same time, sacks of mail waiting to be picked up were hung onto the arm of the mail-crane. As the train whizzed past the crane, the crane-arm whipped the sorted mail-sack off the side of the train. At the same time, the arm swung around, and a second hook or arm on the railroad carriage yanked the outgoing mail-sack off the crane, throwing it into the mail-carriage! Later on, the local postman would show up and pick up the dropped-off mail, and possibly hang another sack of outgoing mail onto the crane, to be collected by the next train that came hurtling by.

This silent film from 1903 shows a mail-crane in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lVSC4jt2R8

Steam-power also changed the nature of international mail-delivery. With faster, steam-powered ocean-ships, mail delivery was cut from months to weeks, or even days! In the United Kingdom, ships with the prefix “R.M.S.” (“Royal Mail Ship/Steamer”) were officially licensed to transport shipments of British mail. As on trains, mail-clerks onboard ships would sort the mail en-route to their port of destination.

With all these innovations, it’s not surprising that the Victorians were the ones who had among the most efficient postal systems in the world. Up to twelve deliveries a day! No worries about not getting that contest-entry form in on time, huh?

In the interwar period of the 1920s and 30s, the first experiments were made in air-delivered mail. Not having to worry about signals and tracks and waves and oceans, an airplane could fly mail from city to city, dropping it by parachute, and then landing to pick up more mail to speed onto its next destination.

Envelopes

For much of history, whenever you posted a letter, not only did you have to write it by hand, you also had to produce your own envelopes by hand! Most people would fold their letters into envelope-shaped forms, write out their letter onto it, and then simply fold the letter up and sealed it with wax, so that the letter and envelope were one and the same, which saved time.

It wasn’t until the invention of the first purpose-made envelope-folding machine in 1845, that envelopes could be purchased separately from stationer’s shops.

The classic envelope was cut and folded so that when it was assembled, it created a neat rectangular or square shape:

But have you ever wondered why envelopes have four, triangular flaps meeting in the middle?

Although you could glue the flaps down with regular paper adhesive, envelopes were originally folded and set in this manner so that a single wax seal, placed in the center of the envelope, was all that was needed to hold the entire packet neatly closed.

Most of us don’t seal our envelopes anymore, and generally rely on the paper glue that comes with the envelope, to do that for us, or we simply lick the glue to moisten it and then smash the thing shut, but nevertheless, the triangular, X-form on the back of envelopes has remained to the present day.

Stamps

It used to be that when letters were sent by post, it was the duty of the recipient to pay for the letter’s delivery. This was seen as inefficient, difficult to enforce, and frankly – rude. Why should YOU have to pay for a letter which you might not have been expecting, or which you wouldn’t want to receive, anyway?

This widespread dissatisfaction with the payment of mail-delivery charges led to widespread corruption, abuse, frustration and distrust of the postal system. To combat these issues, and to ensure payment for poastage, the introduction of the postage-stamp was made in England in the 1840s. With the new ‘Penny Black’, the first-ever postage-stamp, the sender purchased the stamp along with his envelopes, and pre-paid for the delivery, which cost…one penny!

With payment taken care of before the letter was even picked up by the mailman, there were far fewer complaints from customers about who had to pay for postage, how much and when.

Mail Boxes

With their twelve-a-day system, you can bet that it was the Victorians who invented the concept of the mail-box! There would be no other way to organise the millions of letters, envelopes, cards and parcels that sped around the U.K. at the time!

Mail-slots for incoming mail came about in the 18th century in Paris, but it wasn’t until the 1800s in Britain that the idea of a mail-slot, or a mailbox for each residence or business really took off. As part of the reforms of the postal-service (which also saw the introduction of the penny-post), Britons were encouraged to have a mail-drop point somewhere on their residence for the convenience of themselves, and the postman! In more built-up areas, a simple letter-slot, sometimes with a basket hanging on the side of the door, was sufficient. In more suburban parts of town, actual kerbside mail-boxes were installed.

Pillar-boxes, or public post-boxes for the depositing of outgoing mail came about in the Georgian era. The oldest one thought to exist dates back to 1809 in England.

In the United States, mail-boxes became popular in the 1880s, when the U.S.P.S. encouraged people to have individual mail-boxes outside their houses for the speedy delivery and pick-up of mail. Instead of large, bulky public boxes that might take up space on the street, residential mailboxes in the ‘States were used for both incoming, and outgoing mail. Raising the red flag on the mailbox told the postman that there was outgoing mail which was to be collected.

The Mail Always Gets Through…

Mail has existed for thousands of years. But the icons of mail-delivery such as stamps, envelopes, mailboxes and dedicated postal-delivery men are all relatively recent developments. Where once mail took weeks and months to get anywhere (and sometimes still does!), technological advancements have meant that in the 21st century, mail is delivered faster and with less hassle. All the more important with the heavy reliance that all of us place on the postal-service, even now in the 21st century.

Throughout History

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Category Archives: History of Communications

The Silk Road – The Information Super-Highway

Neither Rain, nor Snow, nor Sleet, nor Hail: A Compact History of the Components of Mail

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