Thirtieth Edition

Inventions – An International Affair

As I stared at an empty computer screen and wondered about a topic for the next, I looked around at all these items and modern conveniences in my office that serve to improve our quality of life and help us to work more efficiently. As I do every morning, today I came into the office and turned on the light switch. The fluorescent lights flickered for an instant and then lit up the room. Had I been born at another time in history I might have been lighting a candle, so who came up with all these great ideas, like fluorescent lights for example? The answer was a tap on the keys of my QWERTY keyboard away. With it, I was able to quickly search the world’s largest repository of information and look up a website with lots (http://inventors.about.com) of good information about inventions. There, I found out that Alexandre E. Becquerel, a Frenchman had theorized about fluorescent tubes in the 1850s, but that it was Peter Cooper Hewitt, an American, who had patented the first mercury vapor lamp in 1901. There it was! An idea for the newsletter: How inventors of different nationalities, cultures, and backgrounds have collaborated, directly or indirectly, to improve the way we live, work, and communicate.

Although we are supposed to be living in the paperless society, paper is still very much a part of our lives. It overflows our mailboxes, brings us the news, sports and cartoons, and has been around for ages, literally. The term for paper comes from the word papyrus, a plant found along the lower Nile River in Egypt. The Egyptians peeled and sliced this plant into strips to make sheets of papyrus, but the invention of paper is credited to Ts'ai Lun, from China, circa 104 AD (Although there is archeological evidence that paper had already been used in China two hundred years earlier). The writing surface that Ts’ai Lun’s invention was lighter, of higher quality and relatively easy to make. Word of Ts’ai Lun’s invention reached other areas of the world - to Korea, Samarkand, Baghdad, Damascus – and, by the 10th century, Arabians were already using linen fibers to create an even finer grade of paper.

Unfortunately, the only way to reproduce written works was still, painstakingly, by hand, although the Chinese are said to have had movable type as far back as 104 AD, and the earliest known printed book, the Diamond Sutra, appeared in China already in 868 AD. However, it was not until the 1400s, when Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith from Germany, invented his press of replaceable wooden, and later metal, letters in the 1400s, that reading materials became less costly and thus more available to the masses. Gutenberg’s press had a great impact on the Western world, more than the invention of movable type in China had had on the East. A logical explanation is that, while it takes 26 letters to print an English newspaper, 3000 to 5000 characters are required to print the average Chinese newspaper.

Four centuries later, German-born Ottmar Mergenthaler, invented the linotype, a machine that produces a line of type. The linotype has been used to print newspapers, and for general printing, for generations. The advantage of the linotype was that it allowed a single operator to be the machinist, typesetter, justifier, type founder, and type-distributor. The New York Tribune, in 1886, was the first newspaper to use this technology.

Nowadays, with a QWERTY keyboards any of us can be a typesetter of sorts. This keyboard draws its name from the six letters of the top alphabet row and was invented by C. L. Sholes , an American from Milwaukee in the 1860s. Sholes arranged the letters in such a manner as to prevent the keys of the typewriter from clashing and jamming. Little did he know then that his invention would one day become the universal interface. With it, American Ray Tomlinson succeeded to send a message across a network from one computer to another in 1971 and inventing e-mail. Of course, in the area of communications, we owe much to Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone in the 1870s and to Guglielmo Marconi, of Bologna, Italy, who gave us wireless telegraphy in the 1890s. I wonder what Bell and Marconi would think of the World Wide Web, invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a graduate of Oxford University, England. Berners-Lee is also responsible for the definitions of URL (Universal Resource Locator), HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Vannevar Bush, of Everett, Massachusetts, had proposed the basics of hypertext already in 1945.

However, before typewriters and computer keyboards, we had to rely entirely on pen and ink. The earliest writing implements are attributed to the Greeks, who used a stylus made of metal, bone or ivory to make marks on wax-coated tablets. The tables were made in hinged pairs to protect the writer’s notes. The first letter written on paper was also the work of a Greek - Cadmus, the scholar. In 2697 BC The Chinese mixed of soot from pine oil with the gelatin of donkey skin and musk and discovered indian ink, and invention that is attributed to the philosopher Tien-Lcheu. Other cultures also made inks out of dyes and colors derived from fruits, plants, and minerals.

The first fountain pen was invented by the Romans. It was made from the hollow tubular stems of marsh grasses, like the jointed bamboo plant. They sharpened one end of the stem into a point or nib, filled it with a fluid or ink and then squeezed it to release ink into the nib. However, the writing instrument that has had the longest run so far (more than one thousand years) is the quill pen, introduced around 700 AD. Quill pens were made of bird feathers, but they would wear out fast and had to be replaced often. Quill pens also needed sharpening, an pen knife was devised for this purpose. The pen knife would eventually evolve into a pencil sharpener. In 1828, Bernard Lassimone, a French mathematician, applied for a patent for a pencil sharpener, inspired by these pen knives.

Lewis Edson Waterman, an American insurance broker, is credited with the invention of the first practical pen with a reservoir. Although this fact might not be entirely accurate, Waterman was unquestionably the first internationally successful manufacturer of a portable pen. However, even fountain pens were not completely portable – they needed to be refilled with now and then. In the 1940s Ladislao Biro, a Hungarian-born Argentine invented the ball point pen and called it the Birome. Biro sold the patent to Eversharp-Faber, in the US and in Europe to Marcel Bich, of Bic Pen fame. To this day, birome is synonymous with ball point pen in Argentina.

The history of inventions to aid and correct vision also has been an international affair. Alhazen (Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haitham), a physicist, mathematician and religious scholar from Arabia, who was theorizing about using a lens to improve eyesight as early as the 1100s. By 1170, his work had been translated by the monks into Latin, the international language of the time, and read in monasteries across Europe, thus giving rise to more ideas. One such idea was the reading stone - a glass sphere that was placed on top of reading materials to enhance the size of the letters. In the 13th century, Robert Grosseteste, from Suffolk, England experimented with mirrors and lenses to prove his theory that it might be possible "to read the smallest letters at incredible distances". Roger Bacon, the philosopher from Suffolk, England, also emphasized the use of a lens as an aid to natural vision, but the invention of eyeglasses is attributed to an Italian, Alessandro di Spina, in the 1280s, and the explanation of how lenses work to a German astronomer, Johannes Kepler, in the 1600s. By 1784, Benjamin Franklin, an American, had invented the bifocal lenses that help many of us to see not only small letters at long distances, but also to be able to focus at short distances. George Airy, a British astronomer who suffered from astigmatism, found a way to correct it in 1825. Contact lenses are said to have been initially conceived in the sketches of the Italian Leonardo da Vinci, in 1508, and suggested in sketches by the Frenchman René Descartes in 1636, but it was Adolf Fick, a German physician and mathematician, who produced the first contact lenses worn by a human. In the 1940s, Kevin M. Tuohy, an American, improved on the technology and created corneal contact lenses made of plastic that were more comfortable and easy to wear.

Starbucks may be synonymous with coffee, but they owe their ability to brew their famous coffee to inventors like Ernest Illy, the Frenchman who invented the first espresso machine in 1933, and Achilles Gaggia, an Italian who devised a high pressure espresso machine in 1946. Also to the Faema company, founded in Canada by Italian-born Graziano Angeli, who produced the first pump-driven espresso machine in 1960 because he wanted Canadians to know what good coffee should taste like. The coffee filter was the brainchild of Melitta Bentz, a German housewife who was in a quest for the perfect cup of coffee. Melitta experimented with different materials until she found the one that worked best among her son’s school supplies: Blotting paper. Melitta and her husband Hugo patented the coffee filter and filter paper in 1908, and founded the Melitta Bentz Company. The company also has patents for the filter bag (1937) and vacuum packing (1962).

This list could go on and on, but the point of all this to show that it takes a world to raise ideas, from the most insignificant to the most important, that impact civilization and the way we live. No one achieves greatness in a vacuum (with tongue-in-cheek exception made for the Melitta Company and their invention of vacuum packing). Take for example, lenses - an Arabian came up with the idea and the monks translated his concepts into Latin, so they could be read and understood by even more people and generate more ideas. After all, translation is also an idea that has been around for a very, very long time. Therefore, it is not surprising that people around the world have collaborated ideas to make the process more efficient. 

Using a device to aid the translation process is called  Machine Translation, or MT for short. Today, MT is computer-powered, but the use of a mechanical device to aid the translation process dates back to the 17th century, when mechanical dictionaries were conceived. These dictionaries not only attempted to facilitate word searches, but also to provide the user with an unambiguous language based on logic and iconic symbols that enabled people who did not speak each other’s language to communicate. It may have been this concept of reducing language’s inherent ambiguity and replacing it with logic that in the mid-19th century drove Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, a Russian ophthalmologist who lived in the border between Russian and Poland, to formulate his idea of a common language. Zamehof, or Dr. Esperanto by his nom de plume, believed that conflicts among people could be resolved by improving understanding. Therefore, he called the new language Esperanto, “the hopeful one”. Hopes to make international communication more efficient continued in 1933, when Geroges Artsrouni, a Frenchman, and Peter Troyanskii a Russian, were granted patents for mechanical dictionaries that replaced words in one language with words in another (Hutchins 1993).

Perhaps the Air Force was also taking a cue from Zamehof, when, in the late 1960s, during the cold war, they contracted the services of Peter Toma, a Ph.D, linguist and MT researcher, to develop a Russian to English MT system. This is how Dr. Toma’s company in La Jolla, California undertook the largest MT project in the United States to develop Systran a product that draws it name from System Translation. Today, Systran offers 36 language pairs and powers the well-known automated translation website, Babel Fish, in a quest to make the Internet truly international.

However, translation consists of the ability to read, comprehend and render the text from one language into another, maintaining the message that the original author intended to convey intact, while adapting it to the cultural and linguistic requirements of the target audience. A very tall order for a machine and further complicated by semantic difficulties, such as the ambiguity that is inherent in most written communication and dual meanings.

For example, a phrase like Sold by prescription only, translated into Spanish by the computer becomes: Vendido por la prescripción solamente, but the word for prescription in Spanish is receta, a term that has the dual meaning of recipe, in the sense of instructions for food preparation. Therefore, a correct translation of Sold by prescription only is Vendido solamente bajo receta médica.

Araña is another example of a Spanish word with multiple meanings. El gato araña means The cat scratches, but given to the machine to translate, it becomes The cat spider in English, because  araña also means spider in English. To futher complicate matters, araña is also chandelier, but given to the machine, the phrase Colgar una araña (to hang a chandelier) becomes To hang a spider.

Machine translation has come a very long way and it will continue to improve, but for the time being, this work is best left to human translators. This is what the German town of Homberg-an-der-Efze, North of Frankfurt and the subject of an article in the BBC News World Edition of October 13, 2003 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3186936.stm) found, when they had to scrap their expensive travel brochure upon realizing that tourists were being promised casual value, the literal translation of the German word for leisure potential, at venues such as the free bath - better known as an open-air swimming pool.

However, Machine translation does have a role in improving informal communication between people who are not fluent in each other's languages. It offers many language combinations and can help you to get the gist of what your correspondent is saying, but if you are considering translating your website, or localizing your product communication, consult an expert (a human expert, that is).

There are other useful inventions in this venue that aid the translator and contribute to making the translation process more efficient, such as Translation Memory. Be sure to inquire about this when you contract a service to work on your next localization project.

References:

The Invention of Paper (http://www.wipapercouncil.org/invention.htm)What you need to know About Inventors (http://inventors.about.com)
The Linotype (http://www.woodsidepress.com/linotype.html)
BBC News World Edition (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3186936.stm)
Machine Translation (http://www.fi.muni.cz/usr/wong/teaching/mt/notes/node3.html.iso-8859-1)
Fifty Years of the Computer and Translation, by John Hutchins (http://www.bcs.org.uk/siggroup/nalatran/mtreview/mtr-6/nalamt67.htm)
A Common Language (http://www.multiline.com.au/~johnm/common.htm)
A Brief History of SYSTRAN® Translation Software (http://www.translation.net/systrans.html)