May 10, 2022 • 49 mins
It’s easy to take document duplication for granted in our modern age, but our digital ease follows centuries of mechanical innovation and millennia of human specialization in the form of the scribe. In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe explore the history and invention of the facsimile.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Land, and I'm Joe McCormick. And
today is going to be one of our invention episodes,
the first of a series. In fact, we're going to
be doing a couple of episodes on the history and
(00:27):
invention of document duplication. And I think this is a
fantastic subject for our show because one of our favorite
things to do is, uh, look at something that is
so mundane that you don't even notice it's there anymore,
and rediscover what's strange about it. And I think documents
are a wonderful example of that, because documents are kind
(00:47):
of it's the fish asking what is water? Situation? We're
Documents are such a fundamental part of our our culture
and our our economic and legal lives that we we
don't even stop to thing in what life would be
like without them. Yeah, just for many of us in
a given day, Just think how many documents we create
(01:08):
or we abandon or delete. Uh, you know, we create
them for matters that are serious, but also matters that
are trivial, work related, personal. Um. You know, we'll just
we'll just create a new document at the drop of
a hat. But but just even considering like the basic
idea of document duplication, which we're going to be covering. Uh,
just you think about like sending an email, I send
(01:30):
you an email of a document, and uh, a copy
of that document is saved for my purposes, and then
if you respond to me, uh, that probably also has
another copy of the original document at the bottom. Um.
So all of this it just occurs without us putting
any effort into it at all. You know, It's funny
how much that in particular connects to something we'll talk
(01:51):
about later in this episode, which is that early mechanical
processes for document duplication, we're often very focused on replicating
outing correspondence. This is a thing that was incredibly important
for for business and legal and personal purposes all throughout
the years. You wanted to have a copy of a
letter that you were going to send to somebody else
(02:11):
so you could remember what you said. Uh, And that
just happens automatically now because of course we're we're sending
most of our messages digitally. Yeah. Absolutely, So first of all,
let's just back up and just think about the document itself. Um,
and we've touched on some of this before, just talking
about the history of of writing and language. But a
document is essentially human thoughts committed to a medium via
(02:35):
writing and or drawings, And in this way such thoughts
can be recorded, clarified, preserved, and passed onto others across
space and time, in many ways, transcending what is possible
via merely spoken language. Right, and there's there's actually a
great little description that I I'd like to borrow from
(02:55):
Arthur C. Clark's two tho one of Space Odyssey. In it,
uh Clark is describing the music of Mozart playing on
the spaceship Discovery and refers to them as quote, the
frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for
twice a hundred years. One of the interesting things about
Mozart is Mozart goes back to a time where we
don't even have original recordings, so we we don't have
(03:19):
audio recordings of anything that Mozart would have been present
for the playing of in his own lifetime. All that
we can get is Mozart's music through documents written as
sheet music and translated to people who would reproduce it
years later. Yeah, So the the amazing thing about documents
in general is that, you know, while translation is often required,
(03:40):
we can still essentially take documents from centuries or millenniago
and kind of you know, resuscitate them, rehydrate them so
that these desiccated thoughts can come to life again and
resonate once more inside of living human brains. The document
is a code that allows you to briefly hatch the
(04:00):
virus of someone else's thoughts from a different time and place. Yeah. Yeah,
So documents have been with us for a very long time,
dating back to the late fourth millennium BC and Mesopotamia
at least. While some scholars believe writing may have spread
from culture to culture, the majority see it as a
situation of independent invention in the various major civilizations of
(04:21):
the ancient world, as it becomes increasingly important to record
trade data, laws, histories, and more so. In other words,
the advancement of these civilizations requires the use of documents now,
as humans possessed neither perfect document recall or unlimited memorization
storage space. One of the things about official documents like
(04:42):
this is that their use often necessitated duplication. Now, to
illustrate this, I thought we might go back a good
years for an example from the Neo Babylonian period. Um.
The source I was looking at here was Neo bab
Bolognian record Keeping Practices by Heather D. Baker, published in
(05:03):
two thousand threes Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions. In this
the author discusses the importance of duplication in these ancient
documents systems, um and and and to be clear once more,
the Neo Babylonian period here we're talking about b C
through b C, so we're not going back super far
in the written record, but we're still going back quite
(05:25):
a ways. What did they do? How did they make
copies of their important documents? They did not have photocopy
of machines yet, right, So she points out that first,
you know, there's there's linguistic evidence for the use of
copies various words that concern um the duplication of documents.
And then we of course have examples of surviving copies
(05:46):
from ancient times as well. Though she contends that the
use of copies is probably underrepresented in the archaeological record,
and specifically with this example, with these examples from this
time period, we're talking about private contracts a lot of
the time inscribed on pillow shaped tablets, pieces of clay,
complete with info, signatures and dates. Okay, so you'd have
(06:08):
like a clay tablet and you'd make inscriptions in it,
indentations or markings in it. That would be a record
of some kind of transaction usually right, and she writes
quote whatever form they took, private archival documents were written
and kept primarily as proof that an obligation existed or
have been discharged, or as evidence of title to property.
(06:29):
And of course this is uh, this is not that
far removed from our current use of documents. Um. She
points out some extremely relatable reasons for duplication of such documents,
though um and and again these are reasons for dul
duplication that are largely still with us today. She brings
up the division of inheritance between three parties, in which
(06:49):
each party would require a valid document to demonstrate their
entitlement to an estate portion. She um. Also, she mentions
the idea of a person, say, inheriting three different pieces
of property and then selling one of them off. This
individual would need a copy of the original agreement to
pass on to the buyer, but would need to keep
the original document pertaining to the items they didn't sell off. Okay,
(07:13):
so the tablet, the physical document, uh, provides a sort
of authorization of how things are, how things should be.
They give you legitimate claim to something beyond just saying
this is mine, right right, you know, And and it
creates a paper trailer, I guess in this case, a
tablet trail. Um. But another interesting thing that that she
(07:35):
brings up that I didn't even think about, because on
one hand, okay, let's say talking about an agreement between
two parties. Obviously both parties need to have a copy
of the agreement so they can look at it and like, oh,
what did we say about that property line or whatever? Well,
let's look at the document. But another factor here is
that and this is something explicitly stated in the records.
(07:55):
According to Baker, two copies of an agreement are made
because then neither party can alter the writing of the agreement,
or rather you can alter it, or the other person
can alter it. But each side has a copy of
the original. So you know, you're not gonna be able
to change things in your favor on both documents because
you do not have possession of both copies. Two copies
(08:17):
I guess keep both parties honest. I see, so if
only one party had a contract, they could go get
ascribed to make a new one that said something different
and then say this was always the way it was,
and all all you could do is say no, it wasn't.
But you wouldn't have anything physical to point to write,
she writes. Quote. As far as record keeping practices are concerned,
it is impossible to determine whether a duplicate was prepared
(08:40):
at the time of the original transaction or later, except
when the particular phrase and she shares this phrase, uh
is present, indicating a copy made from an older, damaged original.
Now that this is I thought this was interesting because
if you have points out that, okay, obviously some of
the time you might be creating that duplicate copy the
(09:00):
time that the original is authored. Like we're entering into
this agreement, we need two copies, we need three copies,
what have you. But then there are gonna be other
cases where oh, well, we need to make a copy
of this document for some purpose, or this document is
broken or is decaying, or is something damaged about it,
and we need to make sure that the information of
(09:22):
on on that tablet survives, uh, the decay of the medium.
And so sometimes we can't tell which type of copy
something would be when looking at it. But it's not
always necessarily clear whether something is the original or a
copy made concurrent with the original, or a copy made later, right,
except in some circumstances where there's some sort of linguistic
(09:43):
clue and uh, and yeah, this this idea too, of
the need for document duplication, because the media upon which
documents are inscribed, they just inherently deteriorate. And and that
is the case throughout most of human history, whether you're
dealing with clay, tablet or um you know, some sort
of oracle bones or certainly parchment um. You know, these
(10:07):
are not things that can last forever. But in many
cases we want the information to last beyond the lifestyle
time of that particular physical medium. She also points out
the documents were also copied in the course of scribal training,
and the resulting duplications may have found their way into
private archives. Oh that's interesting. It makes me wonder, if
(10:28):
you know, because of course many texts that existed in
the ancient world no longer survived that we don't know
of any copies that exist, maybe they're buried out in
the desert somewhere, but we don't have any that are
available to us. And I wonder if some of the
texts that came through from the ancient world and plentiful
supply actually came through, maybe not because they were important
(10:48):
in themselves, but because they were, like example, texts that
people practiced copying text on. Now, in that same book
that Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions from two thousand three,
there's another author who touches briefly on duplication, and this
is closs our Vinhof discussing documents kept by old Assyrian traders.
(11:10):
And this is interesting because we we've talked I think
we've talked about this on the show before in the past,
where you have your dealing with with with with clay
tablets here, but you also have you have envelopes around
some of those tablets, stamped clay envelopes. Uh. So obviously
there's only one way to get You're not gonna be
able to get the original out of that, uh that
(11:32):
that envelope. That envelope is sealed for a reason. You know,
It's it's about sort of like binding the information inside it.
H So In cases like this, you would need a
duplicate of a copy that is sealed inside the envelope. Ah, Okay,
that makes sense. I mean it would be much the
same I guess as if you had a you know,
it's like if your your grandmother gave you a gift
(11:54):
wrapped for Christmas, and it was important to you to
to to keep that gift wrapped within at within that package,
but you also wanted to know what she gave you
for Christmas, so you also had a copy of the
toy that wasn't contained within that package, and you just
kept the actual gift, uh wrapped the entire time. Doubles
(12:15):
is better or triples is best? Actually yes, So these
are just some brief examples, but I think they helped
illustrate the fact that document duplication has been with us
a very long time, and it was just necessary to
ensure that documents documents could do what they needed to
do within a given culture. Though. I think it's interesting,
so while document copying has been with us since the
(12:37):
ancient world, for all these reasons we've been talking about,
I think it's also important to appreciate ways in which
our thinking about documents has changed due in part probably
two changes in technology that that make it easier to
copy documents, and two changes in the say literacy rates
within a culture, which also changed the way people think
(12:58):
about documents. But I was reading a section from a
book that I found really interesting. So it was a
book called um Oral Tradition and the Written Record in
Classical Athens by a scholar of classics at Oxford University
named Rosalind Thomas. This was published Cambridge University Press in
nineteen eighty nine, and so this is a section talking
(13:20):
about how documents and copies of documents were used in
classical Athens. This would have been in in Greece around
the fourth to fifth centuries b C. And so this
would have been a time when documents were available. There
was some literacy in the culture, and documents were used
and referred to, saying court cases and things like that,
and for business. But it wasn't a document culture to
(13:44):
the same extent that we might consider ourselves part of
a document culture. It was a sort of halfway document culture.
It was a proto document culture. And so the ways
they thought about documents and copies were very different than
the way we think about them. And so I wanted
to mention a few things she he talks about that
struck me as interesting. And so, during the fourth and
fifth centuries BC, the use of written documents was increasing
(14:07):
in various spheres of life. In Athens. You could argue
this was a time of transition from a primarily oral
culture to an increasingly document conscious culture. Uh. And then
there were more books circulating during the late fifth century Athens,
and this led to critiques by figures like Plato and
other philosophers who believed that the spoken word had virtues
that were lost in a literary culture. Actually, like Plato stress,
(14:31):
for example, that a document used in court must be
verified by the oral testimony of eye witnesses to its drafting,
among other critiques not as much related to the legal system,
having to do with memory and so forth. But from
here Thomas goes on to say that we can actually
tell from many clues that the ancient Greeks did not
think about written documents and copying exactly the same way
(14:54):
we do. And she points out that it's it's obvious
that the significance of a doc hument often lay within
its non written aspects, and that documents were sometimes treated
not only original documents, but copies of those documents were
treated as quote, iconic or material symbols more so than
(15:14):
as a reference tool. And a great example here is
comparing stone inscriptions versus originals written on what we might
think of as paper or papyrus. Like the question is
which is more authoritative. So you might have an original
record of a statement that could be a treaty between
two nations, or it could be a law issued, or
(15:37):
it could be decree by a ruler, and you would
have an original record of that statement that we could
think of as a paper record, and then you would
have copies of that statement made on stone that would
be considered more the public version. Like you could have
a steely that would have a copy of the original
decree or treaty or something. And so we would assume,
(16:00):
based on our type of document consciousness, that the original
paper document is the more authoritative one and the stone
inscription that's a copy of that document is the less
authoritative one. But people in classical Athens did not necessarily
agree with that. Of course, the process of copying from
an original document to a stone inscription is a a
(16:22):
lossy process. This is not fidelity or lossless copying that
we count on today. This is copying done by hand
and often with just blatant disregard for the actual wording
of the original. There'll be all kinds of changes and
mistakes and stuff introduced in fact at this time a
lot of times, like spelling and punctuation and stuff might
(16:43):
not even be standardized. But as evidence of this different
kind of consciousness, Thomas cites orators from the period who
quote documents and they will refer to the stone inscription
copies of those documents, maybe as as the document might
have year on a publicly visible steely rather than the
(17:03):
archived originals of those documents. And also some political documents
would like demand obedience specifically to the steely. It might
say something like, it is this steely which will bind
you to your oaths. So this you know, this stone inscription,
even though it's a copy that might introduce changes from
(17:23):
the original. Uh And Thomas also argues that our concepts
of original and copy don't necessarily apply to thinking in
classical Athens, like the Greek word for copy anti graphon
appears to be used to describe both the archived original
document and the publicly visible steely. So you might in
(17:45):
this context just as well say that the earlier paper
version is a copy of the Steely even though it
was made before, and so the idea of a copy
has no derogatory implications about the fidelity or authority of
the document. And so from all this, Thomas argues that
that an emphasis on verbatim accurate copying the kind of
(18:05):
copying that we would depend on, Like if you know,
if you're making copies of something in an office setting
and the copies of that document make all kinds of
changes to the document, we would consider that a problem.
Like that's not even necessarily a poor copy. That is
uh that I mean, it's it's a fraudulent copy. Yeah. Yeah.
But Thomas argues that an assumption that a later copy
(18:28):
is less authoritative that is something that tends to come
with a more highly literate culture, and fourth or fifth
century Athens had not really reached this point. Another thing,
I wonder this is not a point that Thomas makes,
but I was just thinking, so a lot of these
documents in ancient Greece would have been attempts to record
spoken decrees or agreements. So to take an agreement that
(18:50):
had been made between two leaders in spoken form, or
to record the spoken decree of a ruler or something
and write that down, which I doubt would be a
process of perfect fidelity even when first recorded. You know,
so even the first writing down of this probably introduces
some changes, and so does an emphasis on perfect copying
(19:13):
also arise more when documents are uh, when their first
instantiation is in written form, you know, when they leave
the pin of the original author rather than the mouth.
If that makes any sense, Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah,
so basically we could, we could. The question might be
if you have UM written documents arising in response or
(19:35):
as a way to support oral agreements, Uh, then yeah,
you can. There may be this looseness in UM in
the authority of of of copies. But then when you
are depending primarily on the documents, then we see uh,
you know, the the the idea of the original document
being key and the fidelity of the document being of
(19:57):
of of prime importance. But there's another thing that Thomas
mentions that struck me as really interesting about this different
document consciousness. Uh. She points out that there was an
assumption common to many people in classical Athens that, in
order to show that a document was no longer enforced.
The document was supposed to be destroyed or obliterated. And
(20:19):
I think, wow, that is so interesting. That's in most
context today that would not strike us as something to do, like, oh, okay,
there's a new system for logging into our timekeeping website
at work. Better destroy the old instruction document. You know,
you just don't use it anymore, right, But there was
something about document consciousness at this time and place that
(20:40):
suggested almost a kind of magical authority to say that
the stone on which an inscription is made, or the
sheet on which in an archive original of a of
a document is is kept that like, in order to
indicate that whatever is written on this document no longer
holds true, you need to like smash or or in
(21:02):
some way annihilate this document itself, rather than just say
keeping it for your records but knowing that it is
no longer in force. Yeah, this is interesting to think about. Um.
I mean, I guess it's not without its parallels in
in the modern world. I mean, obviously you can think
of top secret documents that are burned after reading and
(21:22):
so forth, sensitive documents that should be shredded or disposed of.
I'm also that's more of a security question, then a
question of like whether the content still hold true or not. Right. Well,
one example that came to mind too was that of
an invalid passport. Um the passports generally not destroyed, but
at least with with US passports. I don't know if
(21:43):
there's a different practice in other parts of the world,
but you get that big hole punch through it, yeah,
which is isn't quite destruction, but you know, it's sort
of to say, like we have phil physically altered the documents,
these documents are no longer valid. Well, that gives a
hint to something that actually I think we'll come back
to more in the sec End episode of the series.
But the idea of documents security that say, when you
(22:04):
live in a world like us, you know, this is
a world in which copies of documents are scarce. They're
laborious to produce because they have to be produced by hand,
and so uh so there's gonna be naturally very few
copies of most documents except maybe very widely circulated books,
and even those they're expensive and they're costly to produce,
their laborious they made, they're made by hand and all that.
(22:26):
So the ancient world was a was a situation of
global documents scarcity in a world of the exact opposite
to just proliferation of uh infinite lossless copying of documents
their digital means in which we live today, the main
problems facing us are totally different ones. It's like, how
do you keep either yeah, useless or unimportant documents from
(22:50):
cluttering up your world, or keep sensitive documents from being
distributed in ways that they shouldn't be now, um, Heather D.
Baker in that Neo Babylonian paper reference earlier, Uh, they
did mention, uh, some examples of document destruction. In this case,
we'd be talking about the physical breaking of tablets. And
if I'm understanding or correctly, um and it, it does
(23:12):
get a little complicated when you're talking about breaking of
obligations and also the breaking the physical breaking of tablets.
But apparently the physical breaking of tablets sometimes aligned with
the breaking of agreements. Um And by that it could
also just mean like a debt is paid, and that
there were sometimes stipulations that after a sale, for instance,
of property, any copies of ownership documents that were not
(23:37):
handed over to the new owner were to be broken
were to be destroyed. So It lines up a little
bit of what we're talking about here, like the physical
document as being just sort of like this embodiment of
of of of a contract. And then yeah, if the
contract is broken or the debt is paid, etcetera, Well
(23:58):
what do you do You need to destroy that? Otherwise
someone might read that and think that somebody still owes
somebody money. Well, you know, I guess we can still
see echo even though this is not broadly what we
do with the documents in our lives, you can see
echoes of it in like I don't know, movie scenes
or plays or something. In a story, when there is
a significant invalidation of a contract, say a character will
(24:20):
tear it up, if you know, or they'll or they'll
burn an iou notice when the debt is paid or
when it's forgiven or something. But that seems to be
for kind of story purposes, all right. Well, generally, in
these episodes, these invention episodes, we talked about what came before,
(24:43):
and in talking about documentation um duplication technology. Uh, it's
pretty obvious what came before. We've already referenced it, and
that is uh that copies were made by hand. Uh,
this was the way it was for a very long time.
It's previously no. With the Neo Babylonian example, copies of
a given document might be made at the point of
(25:05):
generation of said document um or they might be made later,
either as required for some purpose or simply to replace
a damaged copy. Uh. And in that example as well,
you know, we mentioned the fact that that scribes and
training would also make copies as well. It is difficult
to overstate the importance of this scribal labor throughout history.
(25:26):
I mean, from the invention of writing up until the
takeover by by mechanical means of producing copies. Making copies
of documents was a major human labor endeavor, right, and
the scribe was key to all of this because that's
what a scribe historically did, or at least that was
the core responsibility making copies. They were professional copymakers. And
(25:51):
if we were today to destroy all copy making machines
in some manner of but Lerry and Jahad out of
Frank Herbert's done, then the scribe would be our ment
at a human machine for the creation of copies and duplications.
And so scribes were vastly important in numerous ancient cultures.
You know, we we It makes sense, right, because documents,
(26:12):
like we say, they become so important for all of
the various functions that are going on within a given culture,
within a given empire, uh in some of these cases,
and so it becomes increasingly important to have scribes to
handle these documents. And we have some some excellent examples
of scribes at work, say in ancient Egypt, and we
(26:34):
know many of them by name, uh, such as ms
or Almos who work during the seventeenth century b C.
E uh Amenotep, son of Hapu, who were during the
fourteenth century BC and was later deified um, which I
think underscores the importance here. Uh. The scribes such as
this weren't essential for accounting for government functions and also
(26:58):
the preservation and dissemination of wisdom. Uh. So you know,
I think the Egyptian example here is a great one because, Yeah,
it underlines that this was a specialized skill um in
a given society, and scribes were in these case scribes
were not made to serve in the army. The sons
of scribes enter the profession as well. So it was
it was very important that you like maintained the supply
(27:20):
of scribes. Yeah, And I think it's also important to
understand the pervasiveness of the influence of the scribe throughout
all levels of a culture, because it's not just say
the business world, like we've been talking about business contracts,
business letters and and and those kind of financial and
business arrangement documents, and also you know, political decrees and
(27:40):
things like that. But scribes were equally important for copying
religious texts. Probably one of the most copied texts by
scribes in the history of the world has been the Bible,
you know, copying and just other texts that people might
want copies of, scribes made them all. Yeah, and there's
a there's a wonderful level of this too in ancient
each because you have the god thought. Thought was considered
(28:04):
the god of scribes, but he was also the scribe
of the gods. As Geraldine Pinch points out, in Egyptian mythology,
he was the lord of wisdom and secret knowledge. He
was the inventor of written language and of languages in general.
He was quote the excellent of understanding, and he observed
and wrote down everything that happened in the world and
(28:25):
then reported it to the god Ray or raw each morning. Um.
So he was paired with the library goddess Sesshat and
together these two knew the future as well as the past. Uh,
which is interesting. Here we have the you know, the
roles of the librarian and also you know, the historian
(28:46):
and the scribe here kind of mixing together and and
becoming like all knowing, Like this is the center of knowledge.
This is how we understand where we've been and where
we're going. Wrote down everything that happened in the world. Well,
he's a god, he can he can do that. He
was also said to have written forty three books that
contained all wisdom needed by humanity and uh, and he
(29:10):
was also essential in enforcing matt the concept of law,
order and balance. So, uh, you know, I think all
of this helps just to drive home just how important
the scribe is to a given civilization. I mean, it
helps it function, It helps it know what it is
as it moves through time. All the wisdom, if it's
(29:31):
in forty three books, maybe, but they could be. We
don't know how long the books are, right, I guess it.
Like you know, you could think of these as magical books, right, Yeah,
I might wait for him to come out and paperback. No. Um,
So I think you know, in this we get the
fact that the scribe was also sometimes but not always,
(29:53):
something of an administrator as well. Um, there's a certain
amount of power creep that seems to occur with scribes
at times. For the ancient Israelites, for example, scribes acted
in positions that we would now associate with lawyers and
judges and even journalists. Oh yeah, because I mean, I
guess literacy and and power over documents in many ways
(30:13):
becomes sort of like power over the culture in general. Yeah,
and and this is we'll come back to this, but
it's worth reminding ourselves that the role of the scribe
was was not only skilled, but it also had an
impact on on the body, particularly on the eyes. I
was looking back at a history of the mirror by
Mark Pendergrast from two thousand nine. We looked at when
(30:36):
we were talking about the invention of the mirror, and
he had a tidbit about Jewish scribes. He writes, quote,
Jewish scribes believe that they could improve weak eyes by
taking a break from the scrolls and staring into a mirror.
Oh that kind of echoes the what the messages you
get from hr saying remember to take a break every
so and so minutes of staring at a computer and
(30:58):
staring to a mirror instead. Now another example that I
thought was was interesting about the importance of the scribe. Um.
I was looking at um a PhD. Dissertation from one
Seng Wing ma Um. He's a scholar of ancient China.
Uh from It's from two thousand seventeen titles Scribes in
(31:19):
Early Imperial China, and U notes that, first of all,
scribal history in ancient China is less studied and understood
because quote a group of highly educated intellectuals dominated the
transmitted textual traditions in ancient China, and they portrayed scribes
as corrupt officials manipulating the laws and documents to their
own benefit. Now that the specific example that that this
(31:42):
author brings up, though his concerns um the rule of
the first Emperor Quin chi Huang from the work has
covered in the work the Historical Records. This is a
Han text also known as the Records of the Grand Historian,
composed by Uh Simata. Quote. Things in the world, great
(32:03):
or small are all decided by his Highness. His Highness
even measures the weight of his paperwork by the she.
One she equals thirty point thirty six ms Ma mentions
um continues every day and night he has an allotment
of work. He does not rest until he meets this allotment.
(32:23):
So Ma summarizes this as follows quote. The passage tells
us that the first emperor would never entrust his power
to others. In order to achieve that, he ruled over
the world of documents, which allowed him to extend his
power without the restriction of time and space. His ambition
is reflected in the quantity of his daily paperwork. So
(32:46):
documentation is power. But Ma also stresses that no single man,
even a great man, could have read all of the
paperwork generated by an empire every day. He had to
depend on scribes who accumulated this information and condensed it
for his use. Uh. So this is also where I
think the accusation of scribal manipulation and misused could potentially
(33:07):
come into play. You have individuals with great power, They
rule over a world of documents. They depend on scribes
to handle these documents and also uh condense information for them. Okay,
so here we're talking about a profession where on one
hand you could think about them as faithful duplicators of
existing documents. There's a record of documents somewhere, and they
(33:29):
will make copies of it so that more people can
have access to the information, or more people can keep
copies or whatever. But that those literacy skills might skew
into editing documents and summarizing documents and as sort of
creating sense out of a out of a mess of documents,
and that of course is a different kind of power altogether. Yeah,
(33:54):
you know, and you know, obviously we live in a
world today that is that is run by documents and
depends le on on data and documentation. But at times,
like we we sort of we acknowledge it without actually
acknowledging it. Like I just think, for instance, any police
show you've ever watched, you know, there's always that scene
where they're like, oh, I'm gonna go do a lot
of paperwork on this, and you know there's some mention
(34:16):
of all the paperwork that has to take place as well. Um,
but but but sometimes it's with an air of like, uh,
you know, it's the system's bureaucracy, but but you know,
it's it's still inherently part of the whole power system.
And the you know, like the the physical process doesn't
work without the data process. But of course that's crucial
(34:36):
to any kind of work. Really, you gotta have a
record of what you did. Yes. Now, before we get
into mechanical duplication devices, I want to come back to
eyes for a second. Here I mentioned, you know, the
the the idea that the Jewish scry uh might have
(35:01):
stared into mirrors to help relieve the straining on their eyes. Um.
This reminds me of a point that I think we've
mentioned on the show before, but it's one that science
historian James Burke brought up in his book Connections, discussing
the link between invention and social need. The basic here,
of course, is that just because a new invention or
(35:22):
innovation is technologically possible, it doesn't mean there's a high
enough demand for it, etcetera sure, or that it's cost effective. Right. So,
and in this he ends up talking about um, the
use of spectacles uh, and also the importance of scribes
in Europe. Writing quote. As the European economy picked up
after centuries of invasion the Dark Ages, any device that
(35:46):
would prolong the working life of aging scribes was to
be welcomed. And he also points out that as Europe
rebounded from the plague, there is a greatly increased demand
for reproduced manuscripts, but the word for subscribes in Europe
had been reduced by the plague as well, So paper
prices were going down, but the cost of skilled scribes
(36:08):
to copy books was expensive. Situation that arguably hastens the
advancement of the printing press, which of course is pretty
much like the technical technological advancement of the duplication of
documents at the point of initial production, though with some
important unique features. I mean, for example, you wouldn't the
(36:29):
printing press was a revolutionary invention, so you know, in
the fifteenth century, suddenly you could mass produce books and
pamphlets and and things we might think of like newspapers today.
But because of the sort of the ordeal of setting
the type and everything and making it on a printing press,
(36:49):
that was useful for mass produced items. And you still
had this middle category of documents of things you would
definitely want copies of, but maybe not thousands of piece
of right, if it's a personal document between like two parties,
three parties, etcetera, you're not gonna miss setting up the
printing press to handle that would be would be overkill
(37:11):
but if you are looking to say, take this particular
bit of information, this particular document, and you want, uh,
you know, hundreds of people within a given city to
have access to it, then that's where the printing press
becomes essential. Uh. It is again like you said, mass production,
mass duplication of a single document. Now for that middle
category where you've got say a business or personal document
(37:35):
that you want multiple copies of, but it doesn't rise
to the level of of hiring out a printing press.
There were some other mechanical duplication devices that came before,
say the photo copier that we know of. So turning
to mechanical duplication devices that work in that middle range,
I wanted to mention a couple. One is something I
found very interesting. It's known as the polygraph. And no,
(37:57):
that is not the so called Lie detector test. This
is a totally different polygraph. It was an early duplication
device that was invented by an English engineer named John
Isaac Hawkins who lived seventeen seventy two to eighteen fifty
four or five. And um he also apparently created one
of the first successful designs for an upright piano. UH.
(38:20):
And there were also some very important design improvements to
the polygraph that were contributed later by a guy named
Charles Wilson Peel. Apparently, Thomas Jefferson owned several versions of
the polygraph machine and was famously obsessed with it. Actually,
so how did the polygraph work? Well? First of all,
again we're not at the photo copying stage yet, so
(38:41):
this is not a device that's designed to take an
existing document and automatically produce a copy. Instead, this is
a machine for duplicating copies of handwritten documents at the
point of origin. The idea of the polygraph duplicator is
pretty simple. So you take the normal physical work of
writing a document on paper, and you use that work
(39:05):
to produce two documents instead of one. In practice, this
meant a machine consisting of two pens connected by a
series of levers, springs, and hinges, and you would take
one pin in your hand and write your letter out
with it, and the motion of that pen would be
transferred through the machine to the other pins. So it's
(39:28):
literally a second pin connected to your first pen with
all these little articulated gizmos on it in order to
translate the minute motions of the pin in your hand
to the pin that's writing on the second piece of paper.
So ideally you dip your pen in the ink. Well,
the other pen dips in it's ink. Well, you write
your name, It writes your name on the second sheet
(39:49):
of paper, and so forth. As you might imagine. Uh,
you know, this is a machine that requires very delicate design.
Apparently took a lot of tweaking of the design before
it worked really well. Uh. This guy, ap Peel, while
trying to make the polygraph more usable, apparently complained that
the He said that the problems with the machine are
(40:11):
quote hid in impenetrable darkness. But eventually it was made
into pretty much usable shape. And this was especially useful
for situations that we mentioned earlier in which you need
exactly two copies of a document, one for someone else
in one for yourself. So this could be useful of course,
if you're writing out contracts or something. But and technically
(40:33):
it could be used for anything, but it was apparently
especially popular for letter writing. Say, if you're a law office,
or even if you're just keeping a personal correspondence, why
might you need a copy of a letter that you
were sending to somebody else. Well, obviously, so you can
remember what you said. So imagine you get a letter
from somebody who you wrote, maybe over a year ago,
(40:54):
and it begins in answer to your question. Absolutely not.
But if you didn't have a copy of the letter
you sent and you don't remember what you asked, you're
in trouble there. So it's useful as a personal reference,
but especially useful for a high stakes kind of correspondence,
like in business or in a law office or something
like that. And so this did prove very useful, But
(41:15):
again it was only for producing duplicate copies of handwritten documents.
At the point of origin. The machine would have no
power whatsoever to uh to do anything with a document
that had already been written, because it relies on the
power of your writing hand as you right. Oh and
one funny thing about copies of documents and and so forth.
(41:36):
I found a note from the Monticello Archive website about
the polygraph machine which states that quote the original American
patent document, patent number x four five three, granted May
seventeen to eighteen o three to John Jay Hawkins, apparently
that they got his name kind of wrong, was lost
in a fire in the patent office in eighteen thirty
(41:57):
six and is no longer extent, So I guess they
didn't have a copy. How but how many documents? So
we know about this document that the original was lost,
But how many documents from history were completely lost because
there weren't any surviving copies and the original was destroyed
in a fire or just moldered in a drawer or something.
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean countless. You know that we
(42:17):
we we frequently mentioned ancient texts on the show. Uh,
and we have to state, oh, yeah, well, the actual
writings of this particular philosopher or writer are lost to us.
We only have the the mentions and reverberations of their
thoughts in surviving worcs. Yeah, and sometimes sometimes we even
know they did write something because other writers that we
(42:37):
do have will quote them, but we don't have their originals. Yeah.
Nowadays it you almost have to try and engineer that
kind of scarcity and something. I can't think of something
in terms of like um written document off hand, but
you know there have been projects with say albums that
have come out where you know you're gonna create the
(42:58):
scarcity of saying there is only copy of this um etcetera.
What are you thinking? Wu Tang. Well, I get that
does come to mind, but I think there's there have
also been some some some other attempts and any Yeah,
you also get into because like limited editions of things,
you know, signed limited editions, signed prints, so that even
in an age of of duplication and you know, high
(43:21):
quality duplication, uh, you'll have a certain amount of scarcity
built into there and may and make the individual copies
more meaningful. I guess now there's one other device I
wanted to talk about, because the polygraph was not the
only mechanical method for the limited copying of handwritten letters
at the time. There was another thing that was the
so called letter press or the copy press or the
(43:44):
letter copying press. So the copy press was widely used
by clerks and in law offices in the late eighteen
through all throughout the nineteenth century, especially to do about
the same thing as the polygraph, to make copies about
going correspondence, though technically the copy press was more versatile
(44:04):
than the than the polygraphic could be used to copy
anything written on paper, and the method worked like this,
so you would take a document or page that you
wanted a copy of, and then you would take a
very thin piece of paper. I've seen it referred to
as like tissue paper or onion skin paper, and you
would moisten that tissue paper, probably with a brush or
(44:28):
something like that, and then you would press the moistened
tissue paper along with the handwritten original document in a
gigantic wooden clamp. So imagine a big wooden board with
like a screw or a press lever on top, and
you would press this down on the stack of pages,
and the pressure would cause some small amount of the
(44:49):
ink in the original page to leak out and soak
into the moisten tissue paper, creating a copy of the
original document. And if you want to copy multiple documents
at once, or if you wanted to copy a say,
page out of a book while protecting the other pages,
you could sandwich each document and the piece of what
(45:11):
tissue paper it was being imprinted on between sheets of
oil paper, which would prevent the water and ink from
bleeding out to the other side. So you could actually
make a stack of copies of documents out all at
the same time with these oil oil papers in between them.
This method was actually in use way back into the
eighteenth century. One of the early models was invented by
(45:32):
James Watt, the Scottish engineer who was behind important early
modifications to the idea of the steam engine. Watts copy
press dates back to about seventeen eighty. But I've I've
read some accounts from these these early decades of the
copy press that it often didn't work super well, especially
with the ink available at the time. It's something that
(45:53):
early users of the polygraph actually complained about, saying, oh, yeah,
the copy made by the polygraph is so much more
legible than copies made with the with the letter press.
Because to read a copy made with one of these
early press methods, uh, you know it was it would
depend on all kinds of circumstances, like how much ink
you actually got out of the original onto the copy paper,
(46:16):
and I think you would often have to hold it
up to the light in in order to read it.
You know, the ink did not come through copiously. Obviously,
this method worked better if you made the copy soon
after the document was created, I think, because the ink
had dried less. So you can still think of this
as a method that favored copies produced roughly at the
time of the documents origin. However, it does seem like
(46:38):
you could sometimes use this to try to copy pre
existing documents with varying success. And there were many different
versions of the copy press, using different preparations of ink, copy,
paper pressing method and so forth, and in in all
these different forms, it was a popular method for copying
documents all through the nineteenth century. Now, thing that comes
(47:00):
to mind when you bring up the you know, the
possible copying of older documents, uh, is that you're getting
into situations where if you're removing any ink from that document,
you are in effect damaging the original copy. So you're
you're in this balancing act of how can I how
can I copy that material without destroying or partially eroding
(47:23):
the original. It's kind of like for as a kid,
it's like if you have some silly putty in one hand,
and you have you know, one of your your your
parents newspaper in the other and maybe they haven't read
it yet. You know, you you can make from experience, Yeah,
you can make some fun copies off of that newspaper,
but you may you may render it um uh unusable,
(47:45):
you may destroy the original um um article. And I'm
not sure that your parent is going to accept the
silly putty copy in its place. What did the Wizard
of I'd say, I can't read his text bubble. Now, well,
here you go, here's the copy I made on this
silly Partty, don't hold it just by the top or
it's gonna it's going to uh along gate. All right, Well,
(48:08):
I think we're gonna call it there for part one
of the series. But in the next episode we'll be
back to discuss more devices that came along for document
duplication later on, as well as some of the challenges
and changes we face in a world where we take limitless,
lossless copying by digital means for granted. That's right, So
tune in next time for more. In the meantime, if
(48:30):
you would like to check out other episodes Stuff to
Blow Your Mind that you can find core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind
podcast feed on Mondays, and that feed we do listener mail.
On Wednesday's we do a short form artifact or monster
fact episode, and on Fridays we do Weird How Cinema.
That's our time to set asfide most serious concerns and
(48:50):
just talk about a strange film, huge things. As always
to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for
the future, or just to say hello, you can email
us at contact that Stuff to Blow Your Mind Got
carm Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I
(49:15):
Heart Radio. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Land, and I'm Joe McCormick. And
today is going to be one of our invention episodes,
the first of a series. In fact, we're going to
be doing a couple of episodes on the history and
(00:27):
invention of document duplication. And I think this is a
fantastic subject for our show because one of our favorite
things to do is, uh, look at something that is
so mundane that you don't even notice it's there anymore,
and rediscover what's strange about it. And I think documents
are a wonderful example of that, because documents are kind
(00:47):
of it's the fish asking what is water? Situation? We're
Documents are such a fundamental part of our our culture
and our our economic and legal lives that we we
don't even stop to thing in what life would be
like without them. Yeah, just for many of us in
a given day, Just think how many documents we create
(01:08):
or we abandon or delete. Uh, you know, we create
them for matters that are serious, but also matters that
are trivial, work related, personal. Um. You know, we'll just
we'll just create a new document at the drop of
a hat. But but just even considering like the basic
idea of document duplication, which we're going to be covering. Uh,
just you think about like sending an email, I send
(01:30):
you an email of a document, and uh, a copy
of that document is saved for my purposes, and then
if you respond to me, uh, that probably also has
another copy of the original document at the bottom. Um.
So all of this it just occurs without us putting
any effort into it at all. You know, It's funny
how much that in particular connects to something we'll talk
(01:51):
about later in this episode, which is that early mechanical
processes for document duplication, we're often very focused on replicating
outing correspondence. This is a thing that was incredibly important
for for business and legal and personal purposes all throughout
the years. You wanted to have a copy of a
letter that you were going to send to somebody else
(02:11):
so you could remember what you said. Uh, And that
just happens automatically now because of course we're we're sending
most of our messages digitally. Yeah. Absolutely, So first of all,
let's just back up and just think about the document itself. Um,
and we've touched on some of this before, just talking
about the history of of writing and language. But a
document is essentially human thoughts committed to a medium via
(02:35):
writing and or drawings, And in this way such thoughts
can be recorded, clarified, preserved, and passed onto others across
space and time, in many ways, transcending what is possible
via merely spoken language. Right, and there's there's actually a
great little description that I I'd like to borrow from
(02:55):
Arthur C. Clark's two tho one of Space Odyssey. In it,
uh Clark is describing the music of Mozart playing on
the spaceship Discovery and refers to them as quote, the
frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for
twice a hundred years. One of the interesting things about
Mozart is Mozart goes back to a time where we
don't even have original recordings, so we we don't have
(03:19):
audio recordings of anything that Mozart would have been present
for the playing of in his own lifetime. All that
we can get is Mozart's music through documents written as
sheet music and translated to people who would reproduce it
years later. Yeah, So the the amazing thing about documents
in general is that, you know, while translation is often required,
(03:40):
we can still essentially take documents from centuries or millenniago
and kind of you know, resuscitate them, rehydrate them so
that these desiccated thoughts can come to life again and
resonate once more inside of living human brains. The document
is a code that allows you to briefly hatch the
(04:00):
virus of someone else's thoughts from a different time and place. Yeah. Yeah,
So documents have been with us for a very long time,
dating back to the late fourth millennium BC and Mesopotamia
at least. While some scholars believe writing may have spread
from culture to culture, the majority see it as a
situation of independent invention in the various major civilizations of
(04:21):
the ancient world, as it becomes increasingly important to record
trade data, laws, histories, and more so. In other words,
the advancement of these civilizations requires the use of documents now,
as humans possessed neither perfect document recall or unlimited memorization
storage space. One of the things about official documents like
(04:42):
this is that their use often necessitated duplication. Now, to
illustrate this, I thought we might go back a good
years for an example from the Neo Babylonian period. Um.
The source I was looking at here was Neo bab
Bolognian record Keeping Practices by Heather D. Baker, published in
(05:03):
two thousand threes Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions. In this
the author discusses the importance of duplication in these ancient
documents systems, um and and and to be clear once more,
the Neo Babylonian period here we're talking about b C
through b C, so we're not going back super far
in the written record, but we're still going back quite
(05:25):
a ways. What did they do? How did they make
copies of their important documents? They did not have photocopy
of machines yet, right, So she points out that first,
you know, there's there's linguistic evidence for the use of
copies various words that concern um the duplication of documents.
And then we of course have examples of surviving copies
(05:46):
from ancient times as well. Though she contends that the
use of copies is probably underrepresented in the archaeological record,
and specifically with this example, with these examples from this
time period, we're talking about private contracts a lot of
the time inscribed on pillow shaped tablets, pieces of clay,
complete with info, signatures and dates. Okay, so you'd have
(06:08):
like a clay tablet and you'd make inscriptions in it,
indentations or markings in it. That would be a record
of some kind of transaction usually right, and she writes
quote whatever form they took, private archival documents were written
and kept primarily as proof that an obligation existed or
have been discharged, or as evidence of title to property.
(06:29):
And of course this is uh, this is not that
far removed from our current use of documents. Um. She
points out some extremely relatable reasons for duplication of such documents,
though um and and again these are reasons for dul
duplication that are largely still with us today. She brings
up the division of inheritance between three parties, in which
(06:49):
each party would require a valid document to demonstrate their
entitlement to an estate portion. She um. Also, she mentions
the idea of a person, say, inheriting three different pieces
of property and then selling one of them off. This
individual would need a copy of the original agreement to
pass on to the buyer, but would need to keep
the original document pertaining to the items they didn't sell off. Okay,
(07:13):
so the tablet, the physical document, uh, provides a sort
of authorization of how things are, how things should be.
They give you legitimate claim to something beyond just saying
this is mine, right right, you know, And and it
creates a paper trailer, I guess in this case, a
tablet trail. Um. But another interesting thing that that she
(07:35):
brings up that I didn't even think about, because on
one hand, okay, let's say talking about an agreement between
two parties. Obviously both parties need to have a copy
of the agreement so they can look at it and like, oh,
what did we say about that property line or whatever? Well,
let's look at the document. But another factor here is
that and this is something explicitly stated in the records.
(07:55):
According to Baker, two copies of an agreement are made
because then neither party can alter the writing of the agreement,
or rather you can alter it, or the other person
can alter it. But each side has a copy of
the original. So you know, you're not gonna be able
to change things in your favor on both documents because
you do not have possession of both copies. Two copies
(08:17):
I guess keep both parties honest. I see, so if
only one party had a contract, they could go get
ascribed to make a new one that said something different
and then say this was always the way it was,
and all all you could do is say no, it wasn't.
But you wouldn't have anything physical to point to write,
she writes. Quote. As far as record keeping practices are concerned,
it is impossible to determine whether a duplicate was prepared
(08:40):
at the time of the original transaction or later, except
when the particular phrase and she shares this phrase, uh
is present, indicating a copy made from an older, damaged original.
Now that this is I thought this was interesting because
if you have points out that, okay, obviously some of
the time you might be creating that duplicate copy the
(09:00):
time that the original is authored. Like we're entering into
this agreement, we need two copies, we need three copies,
what have you. But then there are gonna be other
cases where oh, well, we need to make a copy
of this document for some purpose, or this document is
broken or is decaying, or is something damaged about it,
and we need to make sure that the information of
(09:22):
on on that tablet survives, uh, the decay of the medium.
And so sometimes we can't tell which type of copy
something would be when looking at it. But it's not
always necessarily clear whether something is the original or a
copy made concurrent with the original, or a copy made later, right,
except in some circumstances where there's some sort of linguistic
(09:43):
clue and uh, and yeah, this this idea too, of
the need for document duplication, because the media upon which
documents are inscribed, they just inherently deteriorate. And and that
is the case throughout most of human history, whether you're
dealing with clay, tablet or um you know, some sort
of oracle bones or certainly parchment um. You know, these
(10:07):
are not things that can last forever. But in many
cases we want the information to last beyond the lifestyle
time of that particular physical medium. She also points out
the documents were also copied in the course of scribal training,
and the resulting duplications may have found their way into
private archives. Oh that's interesting. It makes me wonder, if
(10:28):
you know, because of course many texts that existed in
the ancient world no longer survived that we don't know
of any copies that exist, maybe they're buried out in
the desert somewhere, but we don't have any that are
available to us. And I wonder if some of the
texts that came through from the ancient world and plentiful
supply actually came through, maybe not because they were important
(10:48):
in themselves, but because they were, like example, texts that
people practiced copying text on. Now, in that same book
that Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions from two thousand three,
there's another author who touches briefly on duplication, and this
is closs our Vinhof discussing documents kept by old Assyrian traders.
(11:10):
And this is interesting because we we've talked I think
we've talked about this on the show before in the past,
where you have your dealing with with with with clay
tablets here, but you also have you have envelopes around
some of those tablets, stamped clay envelopes. Uh. So obviously
there's only one way to get You're not gonna be
able to get the original out of that, uh that
(11:32):
that envelope. That envelope is sealed for a reason. You know,
It's it's about sort of like binding the information inside it.
H So In cases like this, you would need a
duplicate of a copy that is sealed inside the envelope. Ah, Okay,
that makes sense. I mean it would be much the
same I guess as if you had a you know,
it's like if your your grandmother gave you a gift
(11:54):
wrapped for Christmas, and it was important to you to
to to keep that gift wrapped within at within that package,
but you also wanted to know what she gave you
for Christmas, so you also had a copy of the
toy that wasn't contained within that package, and you just
kept the actual gift, uh wrapped the entire time. Doubles
(12:15):
is better or triples is best? Actually yes, So these
are just some brief examples, but I think they helped
illustrate the fact that document duplication has been with us
a very long time, and it was just necessary to
ensure that documents documents could do what they needed to
do within a given culture. Though. I think it's interesting,
so while document copying has been with us since the
(12:37):
ancient world, for all these reasons we've been talking about,
I think it's also important to appreciate ways in which
our thinking about documents has changed due in part probably
two changes in technology that that make it easier to
copy documents, and two changes in the say literacy rates
within a culture, which also changed the way people think
(12:58):
about documents. But I was reading a section from a
book that I found really interesting. So it was a
book called um Oral Tradition and the Written Record in
Classical Athens by a scholar of classics at Oxford University
named Rosalind Thomas. This was published Cambridge University Press in
nineteen eighty nine, and so this is a section talking
(13:20):
about how documents and copies of documents were used in
classical Athens. This would have been in in Greece around
the fourth to fifth centuries b C. And so this
would have been a time when documents were available. There
was some literacy in the culture, and documents were used
and referred to, saying court cases and things like that,
and for business. But it wasn't a document culture to
(13:44):
the same extent that we might consider ourselves part of
a document culture. It was a sort of halfway document culture.
It was a proto document culture. And so the ways
they thought about documents and copies were very different than
the way we think about them. And so I wanted
to mention a few things she he talks about that
struck me as interesting. And so, during the fourth and
fifth centuries BC, the use of written documents was increasing
(14:07):
in various spheres of life. In Athens. You could argue
this was a time of transition from a primarily oral
culture to an increasingly document conscious culture. Uh. And then
there were more books circulating during the late fifth century Athens,
and this led to critiques by figures like Plato and
other philosophers who believed that the spoken word had virtues
that were lost in a literary culture. Actually, like Plato stress,
(14:31):
for example, that a document used in court must be
verified by the oral testimony of eye witnesses to its drafting,
among other critiques not as much related to the legal system,
having to do with memory and so forth. But from
here Thomas goes on to say that we can actually
tell from many clues that the ancient Greeks did not
think about written documents and copying exactly the same way
(14:54):
we do. And she points out that it's it's obvious
that the significance of a doc hument often lay within
its non written aspects, and that documents were sometimes treated
not only original documents, but copies of those documents were
treated as quote, iconic or material symbols more so than
(15:14):
as a reference tool. And a great example here is
comparing stone inscriptions versus originals written on what we might
think of as paper or papyrus. Like the question is
which is more authoritative. So you might have an original
record of a statement that could be a treaty between
two nations, or it could be a law issued, or
(15:37):
it could be decree by a ruler, and you would
have an original record of that statement that we could
think of as a paper record, and then you would
have copies of that statement made on stone that would
be considered more the public version. Like you could have
a steely that would have a copy of the original
decree or treaty or something. And so we would assume,
(16:00):
based on our type of document consciousness, that the original
paper document is the more authoritative one and the stone
inscription that's a copy of that document is the less
authoritative one. But people in classical Athens did not necessarily
agree with that. Of course, the process of copying from
an original document to a stone inscription is a a
(16:22):
lossy process. This is not fidelity or lossless copying that
we count on today. This is copying done by hand
and often with just blatant disregard for the actual wording
of the original. There'll be all kinds of changes and
mistakes and stuff introduced in fact at this time a
lot of times, like spelling and punctuation and stuff might
(16:43):
not even be standardized. But as evidence of this different
kind of consciousness, Thomas cites orators from the period who
quote documents and they will refer to the stone inscription
copies of those documents, maybe as as the document might
have year on a publicly visible steely rather than the
(17:03):
archived originals of those documents. And also some political documents
would like demand obedience specifically to the steely. It might
say something like, it is this steely which will bind
you to your oaths. So this you know, this stone inscription,
even though it's a copy that might introduce changes from
(17:23):
the original. Uh And Thomas also argues that our concepts
of original and copy don't necessarily apply to thinking in
classical Athens, like the Greek word for copy anti graphon
appears to be used to describe both the archived original
document and the publicly visible steely. So you might in
(17:45):
this context just as well say that the earlier paper
version is a copy of the Steely even though it
was made before, and so the idea of a copy
has no derogatory implications about the fidelity or authority of
the document. And so from all this, Thomas argues that
that an emphasis on verbatim accurate copying the kind of
(18:05):
copying that we would depend on, Like if you know,
if you're making copies of something in an office setting
and the copies of that document make all kinds of
changes to the document, we would consider that a problem.
Like that's not even necessarily a poor copy. That is
uh that I mean, it's it's a fraudulent copy. Yeah. Yeah.
But Thomas argues that an assumption that a later copy
(18:28):
is less authoritative that is something that tends to come
with a more highly literate culture, and fourth or fifth
century Athens had not really reached this point. Another thing,
I wonder this is not a point that Thomas makes,
but I was just thinking, so a lot of these
documents in ancient Greece would have been attempts to record
spoken decrees or agreements. So to take an agreement that
(18:50):
had been made between two leaders in spoken form, or
to record the spoken decree of a ruler or something
and write that down, which I doubt would be a
process of perfect fidelity even when first recorded. You know,
so even the first writing down of this probably introduces
some changes, and so does an emphasis on perfect copying
(19:13):
also arise more when documents are uh, when their first
instantiation is in written form, you know, when they leave
the pin of the original author rather than the mouth.
If that makes any sense, Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah,
so basically we could, we could. The question might be
if you have UM written documents arising in response or
(19:35):
as a way to support oral agreements, Uh, then yeah,
you can. There may be this looseness in UM in
the authority of of of copies. But then when you
are depending primarily on the documents, then we see uh,
you know, the the the idea of the original document
being key and the fidelity of the document being of
(19:57):
of of prime importance. But there's another thing that Thomas
mentions that struck me as really interesting about this different
document consciousness. Uh. She points out that there was an
assumption common to many people in classical Athens that, in
order to show that a document was no longer enforced.
The document was supposed to be destroyed or obliterated. And
(20:19):
I think, wow, that is so interesting. That's in most
context today that would not strike us as something to do, like, oh, okay,
there's a new system for logging into our timekeeping website
at work. Better destroy the old instruction document. You know,
you just don't use it anymore, right, But there was
something about document consciousness at this time and place that
(20:40):
suggested almost a kind of magical authority to say that
the stone on which an inscription is made, or the
sheet on which in an archive original of a of
a document is is kept that like, in order to
indicate that whatever is written on this document no longer
holds true, you need to like smash or or in
(21:02):
some way annihilate this document itself, rather than just say
keeping it for your records but knowing that it is
no longer in force. Yeah, this is interesting to think about. Um.
I mean, I guess it's not without its parallels in
in the modern world. I mean, obviously you can think
of top secret documents that are burned after reading and
(21:22):
so forth, sensitive documents that should be shredded or disposed of.
I'm also that's more of a security question, then a
question of like whether the content still hold true or not. Right. Well,
one example that came to mind too was that of
an invalid passport. Um the passports generally not destroyed, but
at least with with US passports. I don't know if
(21:43):
there's a different practice in other parts of the world,
but you get that big hole punch through it, yeah,
which is isn't quite destruction, but you know, it's sort
of to say, like we have phil physically altered the documents,
these documents are no longer valid. Well, that gives a
hint to something that actually I think we'll come back
to more in the sec End episode of the series.
But the idea of documents security that say, when you
(22:04):
live in a world like us, you know, this is
a world in which copies of documents are scarce. They're
laborious to produce because they have to be produced by hand,
and so uh so there's gonna be naturally very few
copies of most documents except maybe very widely circulated books,
and even those they're expensive and they're costly to produce,
their laborious they made, they're made by hand and all that.
(22:26):
So the ancient world was a was a situation of
global documents scarcity in a world of the exact opposite
to just proliferation of uh infinite lossless copying of documents
their digital means in which we live today, the main
problems facing us are totally different ones. It's like, how
do you keep either yeah, useless or unimportant documents from
(22:50):
cluttering up your world, or keep sensitive documents from being
distributed in ways that they shouldn't be now, um, Heather D.
Baker in that Neo Babylonian paper reference earlier, Uh, they
did mention, uh, some examples of document destruction. In this case,
we'd be talking about the physical breaking of tablets. And
if I'm understanding or correctly, um and it, it does
(23:12):
get a little complicated when you're talking about breaking of
obligations and also the breaking the physical breaking of tablets.
But apparently the physical breaking of tablets sometimes aligned with
the breaking of agreements. Um And by that it could
also just mean like a debt is paid, and that
there were sometimes stipulations that after a sale, for instance,
of property, any copies of ownership documents that were not
(23:37):
handed over to the new owner were to be broken
were to be destroyed. So It lines up a little
bit of what we're talking about here, like the physical
document as being just sort of like this embodiment of
of of of a contract. And then yeah, if the
contract is broken or the debt is paid, etcetera, Well
(23:58):
what do you do You need to destroy that? Otherwise
someone might read that and think that somebody still owes
somebody money. Well, you know, I guess we can still
see echo even though this is not broadly what we
do with the documents in our lives, you can see
echoes of it in like I don't know, movie scenes
or plays or something. In a story, when there is
a significant invalidation of a contract, say a character will
(24:20):
tear it up, if you know, or they'll or they'll
burn an iou notice when the debt is paid or
when it's forgiven or something. But that seems to be
for kind of story purposes, all right. Well, generally, in
these episodes, these invention episodes, we talked about what came before,
(24:43):
and in talking about documentation um duplication technology. Uh, it's
pretty obvious what came before. We've already referenced it, and
that is uh that copies were made by hand. Uh,
this was the way it was for a very long time.
It's previously no. With the Neo Babylonian example, copies of
a given document might be made at the point of
(25:05):
generation of said document um or they might be made later,
either as required for some purpose or simply to replace
a damaged copy. Uh. And in that example as well,
you know, we mentioned the fact that that scribes and
training would also make copies as well. It is difficult
to overstate the importance of this scribal labor throughout history.
(25:26):
I mean, from the invention of writing up until the
takeover by by mechanical means of producing copies. Making copies
of documents was a major human labor endeavor, right, and
the scribe was key to all of this because that's
what a scribe historically did, or at least that was
the core responsibility making copies. They were professional copymakers. And
(25:51):
if we were today to destroy all copy making machines
in some manner of but Lerry and Jahad out of
Frank Herbert's done, then the scribe would be our ment
at a human machine for the creation of copies and duplications.
And so scribes were vastly important in numerous ancient cultures.
You know, we we It makes sense, right, because documents,
(26:12):
like we say, they become so important for all of
the various functions that are going on within a given culture,
within a given empire, uh in some of these cases,
and so it becomes increasingly important to have scribes to
handle these documents. And we have some some excellent examples
of scribes at work, say in ancient Egypt, and we
(26:34):
know many of them by name, uh, such as ms
or Almos who work during the seventeenth century b C.
E uh Amenotep, son of Hapu, who were during the
fourteenth century BC and was later deified um, which I
think underscores the importance here. Uh. The scribes such as
this weren't essential for accounting for government functions and also
(26:58):
the preservation and dissemination of wisdom. Uh. So you know,
I think the Egyptian example here is a great one because, Yeah,
it underlines that this was a specialized skill um in
a given society, and scribes were in these case scribes
were not made to serve in the army. The sons
of scribes enter the profession as well. So it was
it was very important that you like maintained the supply
(27:20):
of scribes. Yeah, And I think it's also important to
understand the pervasiveness of the influence of the scribe throughout
all levels of a culture, because it's not just say
the business world, like we've been talking about business contracts,
business letters and and and those kind of financial and
business arrangement documents, and also you know, political decrees and
(27:40):
things like that. But scribes were equally important for copying
religious texts. Probably one of the most copied texts by
scribes in the history of the world has been the Bible,
you know, copying and just other texts that people might
want copies of, scribes made them all. Yeah, and there's
a there's a wonderful level of this too in ancient
each because you have the god thought. Thought was considered
(28:04):
the god of scribes, but he was also the scribe
of the gods. As Geraldine Pinch points out, in Egyptian mythology,
he was the lord of wisdom and secret knowledge. He
was the inventor of written language and of languages in general.
He was quote the excellent of understanding, and he observed
and wrote down everything that happened in the world and
(28:25):
then reported it to the god Ray or raw each morning. Um.
So he was paired with the library goddess Sesshat and
together these two knew the future as well as the past. Uh,
which is interesting. Here we have the you know, the
roles of the librarian and also you know, the historian
(28:46):
and the scribe here kind of mixing together and and
becoming like all knowing, Like this is the center of knowledge.
This is how we understand where we've been and where
we're going. Wrote down everything that happened in the world. Well,
he's a god, he can he can do that. He
was also said to have written forty three books that
contained all wisdom needed by humanity and uh, and he
(29:10):
was also essential in enforcing matt the concept of law,
order and balance. So, uh, you know, I think all
of this helps just to drive home just how important
the scribe is to a given civilization. I mean, it
helps it function, It helps it know what it is
as it moves through time. All the wisdom, if it's
(29:31):
in forty three books, maybe, but they could be. We
don't know how long the books are, right, I guess it.
Like you know, you could think of these as magical books, right, Yeah,
I might wait for him to come out and paperback. No. Um,
So I think you know, in this we get the
fact that the scribe was also sometimes but not always,
(29:53):
something of an administrator as well. Um, there's a certain
amount of power creep that seems to occur with scribes
at times. For the ancient Israelites, for example, scribes acted
in positions that we would now associate with lawyers and
judges and even journalists. Oh yeah, because I mean, I
guess literacy and and power over documents in many ways
(30:13):
becomes sort of like power over the culture in general. Yeah,
and and this is we'll come back to this, but
it's worth reminding ourselves that the role of the scribe
was was not only skilled, but it also had an
impact on on the body, particularly on the eyes. I
was looking back at a history of the mirror by
Mark Pendergrast from two thousand nine. We looked at when
(30:36):
we were talking about the invention of the mirror, and
he had a tidbit about Jewish scribes. He writes, quote,
Jewish scribes believe that they could improve weak eyes by
taking a break from the scrolls and staring into a mirror.
Oh that kind of echoes the what the messages you
get from hr saying remember to take a break every
so and so minutes of staring at a computer and
(30:58):
staring to a mirror instead. Now another example that I
thought was was interesting about the importance of the scribe. Um.
I was looking at um a PhD. Dissertation from one
Seng Wing ma Um. He's a scholar of ancient China.
Uh from It's from two thousand seventeen titles Scribes in
(31:19):
Early Imperial China, and U notes that, first of all,
scribal history in ancient China is less studied and understood
because quote a group of highly educated intellectuals dominated the
transmitted textual traditions in ancient China, and they portrayed scribes
as corrupt officials manipulating the laws and documents to their
own benefit. Now that the specific example that that this
(31:42):
author brings up, though his concerns um the rule of
the first Emperor Quin chi Huang from the work has
covered in the work the Historical Records. This is a
Han text also known as the Records of the Grand Historian,
composed by Uh Simata. Quote. Things in the world, great
(32:03):
or small are all decided by his Highness. His Highness
even measures the weight of his paperwork by the she.
One she equals thirty point thirty six ms Ma mentions
um continues every day and night he has an allotment
of work. He does not rest until he meets this allotment.
(32:23):
So Ma summarizes this as follows quote. The passage tells
us that the first emperor would never entrust his power
to others. In order to achieve that, he ruled over
the world of documents, which allowed him to extend his
power without the restriction of time and space. His ambition
is reflected in the quantity of his daily paperwork. So
(32:46):
documentation is power. But Ma also stresses that no single man,
even a great man, could have read all of the
paperwork generated by an empire every day. He had to
depend on scribes who accumulated this information and condensed it
for his use. Uh. So this is also where I
think the accusation of scribal manipulation and misused could potentially
(33:07):
come into play. You have individuals with great power, They
rule over a world of documents. They depend on scribes
to handle these documents and also uh condense information for them. Okay,
so here we're talking about a profession where on one
hand you could think about them as faithful duplicators of
existing documents. There's a record of documents somewhere, and they
(33:29):
will make copies of it so that more people can
have access to the information, or more people can keep
copies or whatever. But that those literacy skills might skew
into editing documents and summarizing documents and as sort of
creating sense out of a out of a mess of documents,
and that of course is a different kind of power altogether. Yeah,
(33:54):
you know, and you know, obviously we live in a
world today that is that is run by documents and
depends le on on data and documentation. But at times,
like we we sort of we acknowledge it without actually
acknowledging it. Like I just think, for instance, any police
show you've ever watched, you know, there's always that scene
where they're like, oh, I'm gonna go do a lot
of paperwork on this, and you know there's some mention
(34:16):
of all the paperwork that has to take place as well. Um,
but but but sometimes it's with an air of like, uh,
you know, it's the system's bureaucracy, but but you know,
it's it's still inherently part of the whole power system.
And the you know, like the the physical process doesn't
work without the data process. But of course that's crucial
(34:36):
to any kind of work. Really, you gotta have a
record of what you did. Yes. Now, before we get
into mechanical duplication devices, I want to come back to
eyes for a second. Here I mentioned, you know, the
the the idea that the Jewish scry uh might have
(35:01):
stared into mirrors to help relieve the straining on their eyes. Um.
This reminds me of a point that I think we've
mentioned on the show before, but it's one that science
historian James Burke brought up in his book Connections, discussing
the link between invention and social need. The basic here,
of course, is that just because a new invention or
(35:22):
innovation is technologically possible, it doesn't mean there's a high
enough demand for it, etcetera sure, or that it's cost effective. Right. So,
and in this he ends up talking about um, the
use of spectacles uh, and also the importance of scribes
in Europe. Writing quote. As the European economy picked up
after centuries of invasion the Dark Ages, any device that
(35:46):
would prolong the working life of aging scribes was to
be welcomed. And he also points out that as Europe
rebounded from the plague, there is a greatly increased demand
for reproduced manuscripts, but the word for subscribes in Europe
had been reduced by the plague as well, So paper
prices were going down, but the cost of skilled scribes
(36:08):
to copy books was expensive. Situation that arguably hastens the
advancement of the printing press, which of course is pretty
much like the technical technological advancement of the duplication of
documents at the point of initial production, though with some
important unique features. I mean, for example, you wouldn't the
(36:29):
printing press was a revolutionary invention, so you know, in
the fifteenth century, suddenly you could mass produce books and
pamphlets and and things we might think of like newspapers today.
But because of the sort of the ordeal of setting
the type and everything and making it on a printing press,
(36:49):
that was useful for mass produced items. And you still
had this middle category of documents of things you would
definitely want copies of, but maybe not thousands of piece
of right, if it's a personal document between like two parties,
three parties, etcetera, you're not gonna miss setting up the
printing press to handle that would be would be overkill
(37:11):
but if you are looking to say, take this particular
bit of information, this particular document, and you want, uh,
you know, hundreds of people within a given city to
have access to it, then that's where the printing press
becomes essential. Uh. It is again like you said, mass production,
mass duplication of a single document. Now for that middle
category where you've got say a business or personal document
(37:35):
that you want multiple copies of, but it doesn't rise
to the level of of hiring out a printing press.
There were some other mechanical duplication devices that came before,
say the photo copier that we know of. So turning
to mechanical duplication devices that work in that middle range,
I wanted to mention a couple. One is something I
found very interesting. It's known as the polygraph. And no,
(37:57):
that is not the so called Lie detector test. This
is a totally different polygraph. It was an early duplication
device that was invented by an English engineer named John
Isaac Hawkins who lived seventeen seventy two to eighteen fifty
four or five. And um he also apparently created one
of the first successful designs for an upright piano. UH.
(38:20):
And there were also some very important design improvements to
the polygraph that were contributed later by a guy named
Charles Wilson Peel. Apparently, Thomas Jefferson owned several versions of
the polygraph machine and was famously obsessed with it. Actually,
so how did the polygraph work? Well? First of all,
again we're not at the photo copying stage yet, so
(38:41):
this is not a device that's designed to take an
existing document and automatically produce a copy. Instead, this is
a machine for duplicating copies of handwritten documents at the
point of origin. The idea of the polygraph duplicator is
pretty simple. So you take the normal physical work of
writing a document on paper, and you use that work
(39:05):
to produce two documents instead of one. In practice, this
meant a machine consisting of two pens connected by a
series of levers, springs, and hinges, and you would take
one pin in your hand and write your letter out
with it, and the motion of that pen would be
transferred through the machine to the other pins. So it's
(39:28):
literally a second pin connected to your first pen with
all these little articulated gizmos on it in order to
translate the minute motions of the pin in your hand
to the pin that's writing on the second piece of paper.
So ideally you dip your pen in the ink. Well,
the other pen dips in it's ink. Well, you write
your name, It writes your name on the second sheet
(39:49):
of paper, and so forth. As you might imagine. Uh,
you know, this is a machine that requires very delicate design.
Apparently took a lot of tweaking of the design before
it worked really well. Uh. This guy, ap Peel, while
trying to make the polygraph more usable, apparently complained that
the He said that the problems with the machine are
(40:11):
quote hid in impenetrable darkness. But eventually it was made
into pretty much usable shape. And this was especially useful
for situations that we mentioned earlier in which you need
exactly two copies of a document, one for someone else
in one for yourself. So this could be useful of course,
if you're writing out contracts or something. But and technically
(40:33):
it could be used for anything, but it was apparently
especially popular for letter writing. Say, if you're a law office,
or even if you're just keeping a personal correspondence, why
might you need a copy of a letter that you
were sending to somebody else. Well, obviously, so you can
remember what you said. So imagine you get a letter
from somebody who you wrote, maybe over a year ago,
(40:54):
and it begins in answer to your question. Absolutely not.
But if you didn't have a copy of the letter
you sent and you don't remember what you asked, you're
in trouble there. So it's useful as a personal reference,
but especially useful for a high stakes kind of correspondence,
like in business or in a law office or something
like that. And so this did prove very useful, But
(41:15):
again it was only for producing duplicate copies of handwritten documents.
At the point of origin. The machine would have no
power whatsoever to uh to do anything with a document
that had already been written, because it relies on the
power of your writing hand as you right. Oh and
one funny thing about copies of documents and and so forth.
(41:36):
I found a note from the Monticello Archive website about
the polygraph machine which states that quote the original American
patent document, patent number x four five three, granted May
seventeen to eighteen o three to John Jay Hawkins, apparently
that they got his name kind of wrong, was lost
in a fire in the patent office in eighteen thirty
(41:57):
six and is no longer extent, So I guess they
didn't have a copy. How but how many documents? So
we know about this document that the original was lost,
But how many documents from history were completely lost because
there weren't any surviving copies and the original was destroyed
in a fire or just moldered in a drawer or something.
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean countless. You know that we
(42:17):
we we frequently mentioned ancient texts on the show. Uh,
and we have to state, oh, yeah, well, the actual
writings of this particular philosopher or writer are lost to us.
We only have the the mentions and reverberations of their
thoughts in surviving worcs. Yeah, and sometimes sometimes we even
know they did write something because other writers that we
(42:37):
do have will quote them, but we don't have their originals. Yeah.
Nowadays it you almost have to try and engineer that
kind of scarcity and something. I can't think of something
in terms of like um written document off hand, but
you know there have been projects with say albums that
have come out where you know you're gonna create the
(42:58):
scarcity of saying there is only copy of this um etcetera.
What are you thinking? Wu Tang. Well, I get that
does come to mind, but I think there's there have
also been some some some other attempts and any Yeah,
you also get into because like limited editions of things,
you know, signed limited editions, signed prints, so that even
in an age of of duplication and you know, high
(43:21):
quality duplication, uh, you'll have a certain amount of scarcity
built into there and may and make the individual copies
more meaningful. I guess now there's one other device I
wanted to talk about, because the polygraph was not the
only mechanical method for the limited copying of handwritten letters
at the time. There was another thing that was the
so called letter press or the copy press or the
(43:44):
letter copying press. So the copy press was widely used
by clerks and in law offices in the late eighteen
through all throughout the nineteenth century, especially to do about
the same thing as the polygraph, to make copies about
going correspondence, though technically the copy press was more versatile
(44:04):
than the than the polygraphic could be used to copy
anything written on paper, and the method worked like this,
so you would take a document or page that you
wanted a copy of, and then you would take a
very thin piece of paper. I've seen it referred to
as like tissue paper or onion skin paper, and you
would moisten that tissue paper, probably with a brush or
(44:28):
something like that, and then you would press the moistened
tissue paper along with the handwritten original document in a
gigantic wooden clamp. So imagine a big wooden board with
like a screw or a press lever on top, and
you would press this down on the stack of pages,
and the pressure would cause some small amount of the
(44:49):
ink in the original page to leak out and soak
into the moisten tissue paper, creating a copy of the
original document. And if you want to copy multiple documents
at once, or if you wanted to copy a say,
page out of a book while protecting the other pages,
you could sandwich each document and the piece of what
(45:11):
tissue paper it was being imprinted on between sheets of
oil paper, which would prevent the water and ink from
bleeding out to the other side. So you could actually
make a stack of copies of documents out all at
the same time with these oil oil papers in between them.
This method was actually in use way back into the
eighteenth century. One of the early models was invented by
(45:32):
James Watt, the Scottish engineer who was behind important early
modifications to the idea of the steam engine. Watts copy
press dates back to about seventeen eighty. But I've I've
read some accounts from these these early decades of the
copy press that it often didn't work super well, especially
with the ink available at the time. It's something that
(45:53):
early users of the polygraph actually complained about, saying, oh, yeah,
the copy made by the polygraph is so much more
legible than copies made with the with the letter press.
Because to read a copy made with one of these
early press methods, uh, you know it was it would
depend on all kinds of circumstances, like how much ink
you actually got out of the original onto the copy paper,
(46:16):
and I think you would often have to hold it
up to the light in in order to read it.
You know, the ink did not come through copiously. Obviously,
this method worked better if you made the copy soon
after the document was created, I think, because the ink
had dried less. So you can still think of this
as a method that favored copies produced roughly at the
time of the documents origin. However, it does seem like
(46:38):
you could sometimes use this to try to copy pre
existing documents with varying success. And there were many different
versions of the copy press, using different preparations of ink, copy,
paper pressing method and so forth, and in in all
these different forms, it was a popular method for copying
documents all through the nineteenth century. Now, thing that comes
(47:00):
to mind when you bring up the you know, the
possible copying of older documents, uh, is that you're getting
into situations where if you're removing any ink from that document,
you are in effect damaging the original copy. So you're
you're in this balancing act of how can I how
can I copy that material without destroying or partially eroding
(47:23):
the original. It's kind of like for as a kid,
it's like if you have some silly putty in one hand,
and you have you know, one of your your your
parents newspaper in the other and maybe they haven't read
it yet. You know, you you can make from experience, Yeah,
you can make some fun copies off of that newspaper,
but you may you may render it um uh unusable,
(47:45):
you may destroy the original um um article. And I'm
not sure that your parent is going to accept the
silly putty copy in its place. What did the Wizard
of I'd say, I can't read his text bubble. Now, well,
here you go, here's the copy I made on this
silly Partty, don't hold it just by the top or
it's gonna it's going to uh along gate. All right, Well,
(48:08):
I think we're gonna call it there for part one
of the series. But in the next episode we'll be
back to discuss more devices that came along for document
duplication later on, as well as some of the challenges
and changes we face in a world where we take limitless,
lossless copying by digital means for granted. That's right, So
tune in next time for more. In the meantime, if
(48:30):
you would like to check out other episodes Stuff to
Blow Your Mind that you can find core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind
podcast feed on Mondays, and that feed we do listener mail.
On Wednesday's we do a short form artifact or monster
fact episode, and on Fridays we do Weird How Cinema.
That's our time to set asfide most serious concerns and
(48:50):
just talk about a strange film, huge things. As always
to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for
the future, or just to say hello, you can email
us at contact that Stuff to Blow Your Mind Got
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(49:15):
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