Nova: A To Z Part 2 - How Writing Changed the World

It may have been the spark that launched the scientific age:

a machine to make books.

Never before had it been possible to spread knowledge

so fast and to so many people.

That's really an information revolution.

But first came the page.

And this is the first paper in the world.

Made from plants.

JIANG XUN (speaking Chinese):

Made from animals.

I am the only traditional master parchment maker

left in the world, which is quite unique.

Medieval books were not made by vegetarians.

And the final ingredient,

a bit of luck,

hidden in the shape of a letter.

This is a modular way of writing, and in fact,

if I want to make little blocks of metal with them, no problem,

because I'm already there, basically.

The design has already happened.

This text here is legible Arabic.

It shows a remarkable advance in Arabic printing technology.

"A to Z: How Writing Changed the World,"

right now, on "NOVA."

In the year 1448 in Mainz, Germany,

a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg

was experimenting with a lead alloy and a hand-held mold.

His aim was to speed up the process of putting ink on paper.

But what he did was speed up history.

Gutenberg's invention spelled the end of the Middle Ages

and ushered in the modern world of science and industry.

Every innovation of today

is built on this foundation.

Yet, behind Gutenberg's press lay centuries of development

and change in the way words were written,

without which he could never have succeeded.

This is the story of history's most important technology,

the technology of putting words on a page.

I'm making a pen out of a drinks can,

and it's one of my favorite pens

because it can do so many different things,

and also because it means,

no matter where in the world I am, I always have a pen.

There's trash everywhere...

Brody Neuenschwander is a calligrapher and modern artist

who has studied the writing practices of different cultures

throughout history.

Now, a pen is a simple tool in any case.

All it is is a... point with a reservoir,

and the reservoir holds the ink and brings it to the point,

and you write with it.

I'm going to use my drinks-can pen to write a short phrase

from a poem by Hopkins, "As Kingfishers Catch Fire."

The first stroke is going to make quite a noise,

so watch out... the A...

And flow into an S made with a nice movement of the arm.

I can also make a very

fat and juicy stroke for the K.

This is calligraphy as art,

where legibility takes second place to expression

and the letters can be hard to make out.

But for most of history,

making out the letters has been essential.

Writing is one of the most fundamental things

that human beings do,

one of the great motors of civilization,

and to understand how people wrote in previous societies

helps us to understand

many of the other aspects of the society.

But is it possible to know how people wrote

thousands of years ago?

Brody believes that calligraphy can help.

The one thing that's amazing about calligraphy is,

we can go right back

to the materials and tools of earlier times

and reproduce nearly exactly the conditions of writing.

So, it's a sort of experimental approach to historical research

using the real tools and materials

that were used in earlier times.

Running a nation has always required

some form of written communication.

And the world's first nation-state was Ancient Egypt,

a state which employed one of the earliest writing systems.

Egyptian hieroglyphs can still be read

in monumental inscriptions carved in stone.

But the Egyptians also had

a portable, everyday medium on which to write.

Brody has come to Egypt

to learn about this pioneering information technology.

My name is Sam.

I'm Brody.

Welcome, I'll give you a brief idea

about this plant, the papyrus plant,

and how the Ancient Egyptians

were using this plant to make a paper.

Papyrus is a type of sedge

which grows all along the banks of the Nile.

Readily available and easily harvested,

this unassuming plant was turned by the Egyptians

into one of the foundations of civilization.

We remove the green parts.

All of the green cover.

We divide it into long and thin slices like this.

But that part once was breakable, as you can see.

Or easy to break.

To make the slices

more flexible, we use this.

The slices now will be more strong and more flexible

than that part, it was break.

Then we soft the slices in fresh water.

After two weeks, we take the slices from the water.

We arrange them between

two pieces of cotton.

This is the slices that we have here, the slices.

In vertical and horizontal lines like this.

One vertical, another horizontal, without any space.

One by one and two by two till we complete the whole sheet.

We cover them.

We put them under a press machine for one week.

One week under the press,

we get this paper.

And this is the first paper in the world.

Well, it feels like a wonderful surface.

I think I would really enjoy writing on it, actually.

As civilization spread from Egypt across the Mediterranean,

so did papyrus.

It became an important export,

and when Egypt was finally conquered,

by the Roman Empire in 30 BC,

one of the biggest prizes of conquest

was domination of the Mediterranean papyrus trade.

The Romans had a large and complex empire

that ran on the written word,

and papyrus, being their form of paper, was imported from Egypt

and it's shipped over here in enormous quantities.

And papyrus rolled up into scrolls

was for centuries the Roman book.

If there was a fresco of a householder

wanting to show they were literate,

they would be holding a scroll.

Very deeply ingrained.

Literacy was surprisingly widespread in Rome.

It even extended to the large enslaved population in the city,

which provided most of the scribes

who wrote those high-status scrolls.

But what was the technology they used

to put ink to papyrus?

Romans used a reed pen to write with on papyrus.

It's cut to a very fine point.

It's a fairly soft material,

and the pithy side will absorb ink quite a bit,

so instead of having a natural reservoir like a quill has,

it's actually the wood itself

absorbing a certain charge of ink.

Brody sets out to copy a letter sent from Rome to Egypt,

preserved in the desert sand for nearly 2,000 years.

It's written in a very simple, casual daily script.

So, I'm going to see what it's like to...

write those letters with this, this reed pen.

You always learn a lot at the very first moment

that you touch the pen to the, to the writing surface.

And what I'm seeing is that

the horizontal fibers of the papyrus are guiding my pen.

And you wouldn't really need to draw lines

because they're already there.

That saves you a lot of time.

And it's slippery... that's, that is very noticeable,

just how slippery this surface is,

so it's almost like skating, and I find it...

I'm naturally encouraged

to write a very quick hand here.

The reed is very light in my hands

and there's no resistance from the, from the papyrus at all,

so I think you could have a nice, long working day

as a Roman scribe... as long as the light held,

you'd be able to keep churning out your Ovids for your master.

Yes, it's amazingly fast, really.

It's a, it's a surface made for speed.

So, copies could be churned out relatively quickly

by the inexpensive labor of the enslaved.

The materials were cheap, too.

That meant that a Roman bookshop

would have something for almost every pocket.

Spaces like this are fairly typical for Roman shops,

a single room opening straight onto the street.

And here's this lovely Travertine lintel,

and you can see in it, there's a groove here

for wooden shutters that might close it off at night

to keep the stock secure.

For the ordinary man and woman in the street,

booksellers were a great place to get hold of literature

at a not exorbitant price.

So ranging from a few coins for the cheapest book,