COP LECTURE 4 - The History of Type - Production and Distribution

For any language to work, whether it is auditory or visual, it must be agreed amongst a group of people that one thing will stand for another otherwise it will not work.

The number of spoken languages that there have been in history is unknown as there is no record of them. However the number of written languages that there has been is known as there has been recordings found dating back as far as 7000BC such as Egyptian hieroglyphs. However, this does not mean that language did not exist before this date it was just never documented.

The rosetta stone, created in 196BC and found in 1799 represents 2 different languages in 3 different scripts (Hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek) this is because these were the three main scripts being used in Egypt at that time.
Hieroglyphs were used for important/ religious documents
Demotic was a common script in Egypt
Greek was the language of the rules of Egypt
Therefore the rosetta stone could be read by anyone in Egypt at the time such as priests, government officials and rulers of Egypt.

1450 Gutenberg produced the first moveable printing press which came to Europe a whole 600 years after it was discovered in China. It wasn't until increase in trade and thing such as wars that we were introduced to this new method of creating text. Letters were carved and crafted in order to be printed and for the first time ever multiple pages could be printed to look the same.

Nothing of great significance happened after this until 1870 when William Foster introduced the Elementary Education Act which made is compulsory for people learn how to read. Before this came into place only the upperclass,  privileged and religious could read. Due to the increase in demand of things to read, production methods needed to change as hand written news papers and such would not be able to be produced quick enough for such high demand. Therefore printing presses and typewriters were developed and written information became informal and for most was just a hobby.

In 1919 Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus which brought together art and industry. Just after the first world war Germany saw a need to rebuild and industrialise design. Bauhaus brought about an institution where furniture makers, engineers, architects etc worked together.