The cost of words

The cost of words

 

On the history and economics of the written word.

 

 

by John Steele Gordon

The New Criterion, May 2021 Issue 

 

 

Those of us in the word business think we know the power of words. But most of us don’t know how very costly words used to be and therefore how limited was the impact they could have.

 

Information, of course, is one of the fundamental economic inputs, along with labor, capital, energy, and materials. And no fewer than three times in human history has the cost of storing, transmitting, and retrieving information been radically reduced by new technology, with revolutionary consequences each time.

 

Human beings are a communicative species because we are, profoundly, a social one, and the individuals of all social species communicate with their fellows. Many species, for instance, have a danger call. But only a handful (so far as we know) have the ability to convey information regarding things not in view, in other words, abstractions. Ravens, a few species of ants, and honey bees can communicate the location and distance of newly discovered food sources. But not even animals as clever as ravens (and they are awesomely clever) have anything resembling speech with its infinite ability to precisely and concisely convey information.

 

We will almost certainly never know when and how language evolved—there are dozens of theories, which means none of them is very convincing—but most linguists think that it had evolved by at least fifty thousand years ago, possibly far earlier, deep in the Paleolithic era.

 

Language, however, was long limited in two respects. First, there was no way to preserve it other than in human memory. (Poetry may have developed very early as a mnemonic device to make a text easier to remember.) Speech was as ephemeral as a puff of wind. Second, it could not be conveyed farther than the reach of the human voice and a few rudimentary hand gestures.

 

To be sure, smoke signals were known in ancient times, but usually only to convey that an enemy attack was imminent—in effect, a long-distance danger call—and that use continued into modern times.

 

Queen Elizabeth I, for instance, ordered bonfires to be built along the southern coast of England in 1588, so that news of the arrival of the Spanish Armada could quickly be transmitted to London.

 

In the Old Stone Age, people lived in small hunter-gatherer bands at a very low level of technology and so had little need for the storage of information. But when agriculture began, people settled down in permanent towns, society became more complex, and trading expanded dramatically. With that, the need to record information and transmit it over long distances became ever more urgent.

 

The solution, of course, was writing, a world-changing technology. Indeed, the invention of writing marks the division between prehistory and history. The oldest forms date to the fourth millennium B.C., with Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform. Both systems used logograms, symbols that stand for whole words. These writing systems were very complex, requiring a long apprenticeship to master, so only scribes were literate. (Chinese writing remains to this day largely logographic, and students must learn the meaning of at least 2,500 characters to be considered literate, 6,000 to 7,000 to be regarded as well educated.)

 

It was Canaanites working in Egypt (perhaps as slaves) who began adapting hieroglyphs to produce a sort of shorthand that quickly evolved into something approaching an alphabet, where the written symbols represented individual sounds. The Canaanite Phoenicians, who traded throughout the Mediterranean world, spread this writing system widely. But the symbols used by the Phoenicians represented only consonants, just as some of that system’s descendants, such as the Hebrew and Arabic scripts, still do. Often called alphabets, technically they are “abjads.”

 

When the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician abjad, they found that the Greek language had fewer consonant sounds than Phoenician, so there were some letters left over. The Greeks used these surplus letters to represent vowel sounds, creating the first true alphabet, one of the greatest intellectual inventions in human history. It is much easier to become literate in an alphabetic language than in others, and so literacy spread much more widely. By classical times, all upper-class Greeks and Romans were literate, as was most of the merchant class.

 

But while the alphabet was a tremendous improvement, storing information remained very expensive, for one needed not only writing but something to write on. The Chinese in earliest times used ox shoulder blades and turtle plastrons, known as “oracle bones.” The people of Mesopotamia used clay tablets, which, when baked, made a highly durable, if cumbersome, means of storing information. Hundreds of thousands of these tablets have survived to the present time.

 

From the earliest days of writing, the Egyptians used a plant called papyrus, a wetland sedge then common in the Nile Delta. The pith of the stems was flattened into strips that were then pounded and glued together to form scrolls. This became the standard writing surface all over the Mediterranean world for recording long texts.

 

But these scrolls were inconvenient in that the only way to get to a particular section was to unroll it to that section and then re-roll it. And while papyrus was very durable in the bone-dry air of Egypt, it lasted only decades in wetter Europe.

 

Also used was parchment, made from animal skins. This was a better writing surface than papyrus and much more durable in wet climates, but also much more expensive to manufacture. The prepared skins were folded, cut, and bound together on one side, forming a codex, or what we would call a book, the pages of which can be easily flipped through. As papyrus plants became over-exploited and disappeared from Egypt, parchment, or its higher-quality cousin vellum, became the standard way to preserve language and the information it conveyed.

 

Books remained prohibitively expensive, and therefore very rare, as they had to be hand-copied, which could take months for a single volume and inevitably introduced errors. It wasn’t until three new inventions were combined together that the world changed a second time.

 

Paper was invented in China during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–220 A.D.). Its manufacture involved macerating vegetable fibers in water until only cellulose fibers remained. This sludge was then spread and drained on a fine screen and pressed until the paper was dry.

 

It was far cheaper than parchment, and its use spread westward until it reached Europe in the eleventh century. In the West, paper at first was usually made from linen rags, but the supply of rags was very limited. Few people could afford linen, which was used for shirts, underwear, and sheets. Peasants wore clothes made of wool, the fabric usually only a step or two up from burlap.

 

Then the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century increased the standard of living of the survivors. Consequently the use of linen greatly increased over the next century, and paper was in common use by 1400.

 

Wood-block printing had been invented in China towards the end of the Han Dynasty and was used for printing illustrations and text on cloth and later paper. Creating a wood block, however, was a skill-intensive and time-consuming labor, as it was the areas that were not to be inked that had to be cut away, with the text being cut in mirror-image.

 

A few hundred years later, moveable type appeared in China, often made of porcelain, but it never became widespread because of the cumbersome Chinese writing system, which made typesetting very slow.

 

Moveable type and the alphabet, however, were made for each other. In the mid-fifteenth century, Johannes Gutenberg brought paper, moveable type (made of type metal, a combination of lead, tin, and antimony), and the printing press together to produce the most world-changing invention since writing itself.

 

By 1500, thanks to printing, there were ten million books in Europe.

 

In 1450 there were only about fifty thousand books in all of Western Europe, almost all of them found in the libraries of universities and monasteries and thus under the control of the Church. By 1500, thanks to printing, there were ten million books in Europe, almost all of them in private hands, on myriad subjects, many of them technical and practical, such as mining, agriculture, and accounting. And not only books, but pamphlets and posters were printed by the million as well.

 

The Protestant Reformation that began in 1517—with a veritable blizzard of posters and pamphlets—was by no means the least of the intellectual movements set off by the radical reduction in the cost of storing and transmitting information. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century would not have been possible without printing.

 

The number of books printed continued to increase dramatically. By the time of Erasmus’s death in 1536, 700,000 copies of his works had been printed. Over the course of the eighteenth century alone, the Western world produced nearly a billion volumes. That is an astonishing number considering that printing presses remained virtually unchanged for centuries. The press used by Benjamin Franklin would have been perfectly familiar to Gutenberg. At best, flatbed presses were able to make 3,600 impressions in a work day.

 

Newspapers had developed in the seventeenth century, but they were expensive because of the limited press runs possible. In the early nineteenth century, a newspaper might cost five cents, a sum that would have bought a good lunch. So most people read them in coffee houses and inns when they read them at all. Most were limited to a single subject, such as maritime news.

 

In the early nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution—still another child of the printing press—increased the speed of printing and, again, lowered the cost of storing and transmitting information by at least an order of magnitude. In 1811, the steam engine was wedded to the printing press, and in 1843 the rotary press was invented. Now thousands of copies an hour could be run off using the new, much cheaper paper made of wood pulp, which was manufactured in rolls rather than sheets.

 

The price of a newspaper dropped to a penny, and boys started hawking them on the streets. In the 1830s and ’40s, Benjamin Day of TheSun and James Gordon Bennett of TheNew York Herald created the general-interest newspaper, with political and social news, scandals, crimes, stock and weather reports, sports news, and more.

 

In the 1860s, the North American Review wrote that

 

The daily newspaper is one of those things which are rooted in the necessities of modern civilization. The steam engine is not more essential to us. The newspaper is that which connects each individual with the general life of mankind.

 

To newspapers could be added magazines and books, which also exploded in popularity at that time, thanks to the great drop in printing costs. Books aimed at the young and people lower down the social scale, such as dime novels and the British “penny dreadfuls,” proliferated. And by this time too, the speed with which information could be disseminated had greatly increased.

 

For larger amounts, information could travel no faster than the speed of a horse or a ship

 

 

Transmitting information over long distances had always been slow and remained so until the Industrial Revolution. Homing pigeons have been known since ancient times, and they were very fast by the standards of the day, averaging around seventy-eight miles per hour. But, of course, they could only carry a tiny payload. For larger amounts, information could travel no faster than the speed of a horse or a ship. That was true for Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C. and equally true for George Washington two thousand years later.

 

In the very late eighteenth century, Napoleon ordered the construction of giant semaphores to speed military communications. Consisting of a mast and two crossed arms, these semaphores, spaced five to ten miles apart and worked by four or five men, were able to transmit messages—like giant boy scouts wigwagging across the landscape—at the rate of several hundred miles a day, assuming, of course, that the weather cooperated. But they were operated only for government communications as they were far too expensive for commercial use.

 

Two more technologies, steam and electricity, changed that in the mid-nineteenth century. Railroads and steamboats were able to carry mail and newspapers at rates far faster than the old stagecoaches. It was now possible to get today’s news today, even when one lived far from a big city.

 

The telegraph increased the speed of transmission by another order of magnitude. Several people had been working on telegraph systems—the first practical use of electricity—in the 1830s and ’40s, but the system, and the marvelously efficient code, of Samuel F. B. Morse proved the best. It spread across Europe and America at astonishing speed, often using the rights-of-way of the new railroads.

 

A good example of how fast the rate of transmission of information increased and how far the price fell in the mid-nineteenth century is the Pony Express. Until the service was established in April 1860, all information between the two coasts had to travel by ship, via Panama, a journey of at least several weeks. With the Pony Express, letters could reach California in ten days (assuming the riders didn’t run afoul of Indian raiders and other hazards). The cost was $1 per half ounce or fraction thereof, plus a 10¢ special envelope. At that time a dollar was an unskilled workman’s daily wage.

 

The Pony Express closed down only a year and a half later, two days after a telegraph line running to California was completed that could transmit information instantly and at much lower rates. In 1869, the transcontinental railroad began carrying mail and printed material at ordinary rates and took only seven days to get from New York to San Francisco.

 

In 1866, when the fastest ships took ten days to cross the Atlantic, the first successful ocean-spanning telegraph cable was laid. Expensive at first (one dollar a word with a ten-word minimum), the service did not stay so for long, as newspapers quickly formed syndicates such as United Press International to spread the cost, a feature of the news business ever since. Competition soon brought the cost down dramatically, and by the 1880s a network of cables had united the entire world.

 

In the twentieth century, radio and television broadcasting allowed the human voice to be heard over wide areas, and the instantaneous dissemination of news became possible.

 

In the third quarter of the twentieth century, the third world-changing information technology appeared. True digital computing had reached practicality in 1945, with the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (eniac). But eniac was the size of a bus, and its more than 100,000 vacuum tubes, capacitors, diodes, and other electronic bits required five million hand solders to connect them. It sucked up 150 kilowatts of electricity an hour.

 

The transistor soon radically reduced the size and electricity requirements while increasing the speed of computers. But until the problem of connecting the components was solved, computers remained hugely expensive.

 

The microprocessor, introduced commercially in 1972, is essentially a computer on a silicon chip. Once the machine tools needed to make a microprocessor are built—a very expensive matter to be sure—the chips themselves cost practically nothing. Over the next few decades, the cost of computing fell by several orders of magnitude as microprocessors became ever more capable.

 

Today, one hardly larger than a postage stamp can have more than four billion transistors embedded in it. That’s why now every high school student carries around in his backpack computing power that the Pentagon couldn’t have afforded in the 1950s.

 

To understand just how much the microprocessor has reduced the price of the storage, manipulation, and retrieval of information, consider this: five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, a page of text, written on a clay tablet, would have weighed a few pounds, would have taken several hours to inscribe and bake, and would have taken considerable time to retrieve. Today you can buy—for a fraction of the median weekly wage in this country—a solid-state hard drive with a capacity of two terabytes. That hard drive is about the dimensions of a playing card, less than half an inch thick, and weighs a few ounces. It can be loaded up from another computer in minutes. And it can hold the text of about one million books. In other words, you can carry around in a shirt pocket the contents of a major library and retrieve that information almost instantly.

 

As the price of words has fallen over the last six thousand years, the power of words has only increased, which is why tyrants fear them more than bullets.

 

 

John Steele Gordon is the author of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (Harper Perennial).