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