It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland again.We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since. But such things as these were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now. But it seems that the Government had a true account of it, and several councils were held about ways to prevent its coming over; but all was kept very private. Hence it was that this rumour died off again, and people began to forget it as a thing we were very little concerned in, and that we hoped was not true; till the latter end of November or the beginning of December 1664 when two men, said to be Frenchmen, died of the plague in Long Acre, or rather at the upper end of Drury Lane. The family they were in endeavoured to conceal it as much as possible, but as it had gotten some vent in the discourse of the neighbourhood, the Secretaries of State got knowledge of it; and concerning themselves to inquire about it, in order to be certain of the truth, two physicians and a surgeon were ordered to go to the house and make inspection. This they did; and finding evident tokens of the sickness upon both the bodies that were dead, they gave their opinions publicly that they died of the plague.
Daniel Defoe writing in 1664. The boldface is mine, it is in the first paragraph of chapter one.
It was newsprint that defeated the plague. The newsprint spread the word before the plague arrived and people could self -quarantine, be prepared. But this is part fiction, he was only four years old during this plague. That is roughly 350 years that newsprint dominated mass communications. The period includes two or three industrial revolutions.
By the 1700s news reading was a requirement of life, for the poor and wealthy. That implied a period of grammar consolidation and mass education. Narrowing down the code book once more and getting the kids up to speed. It becomes a lifesaver.
The arrival of news print would cause a disruption in the etymology graph going backwards. Information delivery was put in the hands of semi-free press and served commercial needs making life a whole lot easier for all. The ten day wait for European news in America was excruciating, it is hard to work with news that is two weeks old. Waiting for news print drove the development of the telegraph.
The common denominator seems to be trade and information about trade, especially prices. Looking back I suspect the most urgent need for information tech, starting with mud slates, has been prices and inventory management.
Two sandbox terms are useful, code book and bandwidth. hen the technology suddenly offer greater bandwidth, the tendency is to simplify the set of stems and add richness to the rules of grammar. We did not want thousand page dictionaries needed to newspapers i 1630. Rather we wants a smaller dictionary and better ways to build complex grammars. This rule hods from mud slates to optical communications. Morse code is an example, the message set is tinier, but metods of addressing messages and routing them was a grammar, adding richness of delivery, enabled by higher serial bandwidth. Papyrus and Phoenicia enabled business managers to be engage in foreign trade. Larin allowed super power rule. The messages became much more complex with Latin grammar, but the stem words got narrowed down quite a bit. Huffman coding. It something is very rare, like wanting to have done something in the past to protect my future actions? Hey, that rarely happens, Huffman coding says use a bunch of helper words and leave bandwidth to the more frequent, repeated
messages.
There is a tension, a permanent arbitrage if one can sneak dictionaries around faster that expected, like price lists. That tension has driven information tech since the dawn.
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