analog text timeline
Timeline for The Future of Text Book. Please send additions and comments to frode@liquid.info
the digital timeline is on a separate page for now
NOTE: I would greatly appreciate it if you keep the format the same for any additions:
Year – Item/Event, by person at company
4000 BC
3000 BC
2000 BC
1000 BC
AD
1400s – Guttenberg’s Movable Type
1470 – Roman Type, inspired by the text on ancient Roman buildings by Nicolas Jenson
1500s – Garamond. Claude Garamont, a French type designer, publisher and punch-cutter lived in Paris. Many old-style serif typefaces are collectively known as Garamond, named after him
1501 – Italic Fonts by Aldus Manutius
1593 – Index to content in a book, by Christopher Marlowe in Hero and Leander
1665 – Lead Pencils made from graphite mined in Seathwaite in Borrowdale parish, Cumbria, England
1677 – Artificial Versifying by John Peter
1780 – Didot, and Bodoni by Firmin Didot and Giambattista Bodoni, the first ‘modern’ Modern Roman typefaces
1801 – Blackboard by James Pillans
1816 – First Typeface Without Serifs by William Caslon IV
1836 – Chorded Keyboard by Wheatstone and Cooke
1837 – Morse Code by Samuel F. B. Morse, Joseph Henry, and Alfred Vail
1846 – Print Output envisioned by Charles Babbage from his Difference Engine 2
1864 – Analog SPAM. Unsolicited group telegram advertisement
1868 – Kineograph / flip-book by John Barnes Linnett
1870s– QWERTY layout by Christopher Latham Sholes
1884 – Linotype by Ottmar Mergenthaler
1895 – Universal Bibliography, or Répertoire Bibliographique Universel proposed by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine
1904 – Patent for a “type wheel printing telegraph machine” filed by Charles Krum which would go on to be come Teletype in 1929
1913 – Plantin typeface by Frank Hinman Pierpont and draughtsman Fritz Stelzer. the British Monotype Corporation, based on a Gros Cicero face cut in the 16th century by Robert Granjon
1920s – First full time type designer Frederic Goudy
1925 – Corkboard by George Brooks
1927 – Futura typeface family by Paul Renner
1930s– Hellschreiber by Rudolf Hell, precursor to dot matrix printing
1930 – The Readies concept by Bob Brown
1931 – Knowledge Machine by Emanuel Goldberg
1932 – Times New Roman typeface by Victor Lardent under the direction of Stanley Morison, on a commission of the Times newspaper, based on the Plantin typeface
1935– Monde book By Paul Otlet
1936 – World Brain by H. G. Wells
1936 – Dvorak keyboard layout by August Dvorak
1945 – Memex proposed by Vannevar Bush in ‘As We May Think’
1946 – ‘A Logic Named Joe’ by Murray Leinster
1946 – Electric Printing Telegraph by Alexander Bain, precursor to the fax
1949 – El libro mecánico by Ángela Ruiz Robles
1949 – Phototypesetting by the Photon Corporation