The age of printing

by Indu umanga Dissanayake

Long before people developed proper speech our early human ancestors communicated with one another by grunts and signs. At this time in our remote past people all most certainly had not invented any form of written language.

After human beings had learned to speak, they did sometimes draw and paint signs and pictures on rocks, to show how something had happened. These drawings are called pictographs.

Out of such picture-messages, more modern methods of writing have developed. But between the pictograph and the written word and sentence, there have been many different stages.

The first proper writing was invented about 3200 BC by a people called the Sumerians, in ancient Mesopotamia.

The Sumerians, who lived in the world's first cities in ancient Mesopotamia. This was long before Paper was invented, and the Sumerians used instead a very easily obtained local material, clay. To write on hundred clay tablets, they needed to press down much more firmly than we do with pen on paper, so used a sharp market or stylus to make thin wedge sharped marks.

"Cuneiform Writing", a Latin word meaning wedges sharped, is the special name of this writing.

4000 years ago early Egyptians used a local material called papyrus leaves for writing. These papers are made from reeds of the river Nile.

Ancient Chinese writing, which is done with brush on paper, looks very different from cuneiform and papyrus paper writing, but also arose in the same manner. Some of its marks, such as that for "Man", still look like pictures of what they represent.

The word alphabet comes from "Alpha" and "Beta" the words for the first two letters of the Greek alphabet in their turn, the ancient Greeks got their alphabet from earlier peoples, the Semites.

The first two letters of her brew, a Semitic language, are "aleph" and "Beth." As in English and most other modern languages, alphabetic letters are no longer pictures of anything, but stand purely for sounds.

Single at alphabetic letters are divided in to vowels, or open sounds, and consonants or closed sounds combinations of these are called syllables. Some times, as in "To" and "Pi" syllables are also simple words.

The ancient Chinese, nearly always first in practical invention, began printing books using wooden printing blocks in the eight century AD. Six hundred years later, printing was reinvented in the west.

Johannes Gutenberg (1400-1468) printed the first Western Book, his famous Bible, using a greatly improved method, with alphabetic letters of type metal.

Metal letters (and numbers) were inked and used over and over, in different combinations, to print out different words and sentences. Each sentence was set up by the printer as a number of metal letters and blanks or spaces, called a type sticks many type sticks were then set up together to make a whole page worth of printing material, called a frame. Books hundred of pages long could be set up and printed in hundreds or thousands of copies.

Modern Printing

Printing with type metal continued until modern times, using various kinds of type setting machines cast letters from molten type metal, as instructed by a human operator working at a keyboard, then mechanically set up the type ready for printing.

Even more recently, computers have been used to control large-scale colour printing processes such as those of Newspapers and Magazines.