Saturday, August 7, 2021

Fuelling the future

 










Fuelling the future | Aeon

Fuelling the future

Fantasies about new power sources for human ambitions go back a century or more. Could these past visions energise our own future?

From George Griffith’s novel The Angel of the Revolution (1893). Photo courtesy Archive.org


In his short story ‘Let There Be Light’, the science-fiction author Robert A Heinlein introduced the energy source that would power his Future History series of stories and novels. First published in Super Science Stories magazine in May 1940, it described the Douglas-Martin sunpower screens that would provide (almost) free and inexhaustible energy to fuel the future in subsequent instalments of his alternative timeline. It was simple, robust and reliable technology. ‘We can bank ’em in series to get any required voltage; we can bank in parallel to get any required current, and the power is absolutely free, except for the installation costs,’ marvelled one of the inventors as they worked out the new technology’s potential for rupturing the social order of the future.

The sunpower screens were clay-coated panels that absorbed sunlight and turned it into electricity with almost 100 per cent efficiency, or worked the other way to turn electricity into light. Like most of Heinlein’s Future History stories, this one offered readers a calculated blend of technology and culture. The sunscreens weren’t technology from nowhere – they fitted into a particularly American history of invention that emphasised individual ingenuity against corporate and collective power: in the popular imagination, they were the descendants of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. The story was stamped with Heinlein’s own distinctive brand of anti-corporate politics that emphasised individuals’ responsibility for making their own futures.

Installation of the first successful solar panel and solar battery (a solar array), for the Georgia telephone carrier Americus, 4 October 1955. Photo by Getty Images

Heinlein needed the sunscreens to make his future work; that is, to answer the problem of how technological culture might flourish in a world of diminishing resources. This was not a new problem, even in 1940, and it is an increasingly pressing one now. The question of what is going to fuel the future has never been more urgent. Is it going to be wind or wave power? Will fuel cells, solar panels or even the holy grail of fusion be the answer to our problems? Or are we going to frack ourselves into oblivion? If we want to better understand how we speculate about future energy now, then we need to appreciate the extent to which those speculations have a history, and that their history (from the early Victorian period on) contains such fictions as Heinlein’s story as often as, and frequently mixed in with, highly technical debates about the characteristics and requirements of different modes of energy production and consumption.

Heinlein’s story is a good example. The technology described in ‘Let There Be Light’ had its counterpart in the real world. The way exposure to light changed the electrical properties of selenium was noted by the telegraph engineer Willoughby Smith in 1873, and a few years later William Grylls Adams and Richard Evans Day managed to generate electricity by shining light on selenium arrays. But as early as 1833, the inventor Charles Fritts installed an array of solar cells made of selenium coated with a thin layer of gold on a New York rooftop. These were the technologies from which Heinlein’s vision of future energy took imaginative flight. Intriguingly, the file of materials in the Heinlein archives pertaining to the story contain a newspaper clipping from 1954, describing the newly invented Bell solar battery, headlined ‘A Sunshine-Sand Battery Produces Power’. Did Heinlein see his fictional technology as the precursor of that real one?

The Victorian antecedents of Heinlein’s sunscreens worked by means of what, in the 1840s, the physicist William Robert Grove termed the ‘correlation of physical forces’. Grove argued that:

Heat, Light, Electricity, Magnetism, Chemical Affinity, and Motion, are all Correlative, or have a reciprocal dependence. That neither taken abstractedly can be said to be the essential or proximate cause of the others, but that either may, as a force, produce or be convertible into the other, this heat may mediately or immediately produce electricity, electricity may produce heat; and so of the rest.

That was exactly what the sunscreens did. Explaining correlation, Grove offered an experimental demonstration of his own that involved using light to generate electricity, building on the experiments of the physicist Edmond Becquerel a few years earlier.

Grove’s gas battery (a forerunner of the modern fuel cell) offered another example of correlation at work. Describing his invention in 1842, he called it ‘a beautiful instance of the correlation of natural forces’. Uniquely, the gas battery generated electricity from a combination of oxygen and hydrogen rather than more conventional liquid electrolytes. Although Grove never considered his battery a viable source of power on a large scale, he was convinced that electricity would be the fuel of the future. ‘If, instead of using zinc and acids, which are manufactured, and comparatively expensive materials, for the production of electricity, we could realise the electricity developed by the combustion in atmospheric air, of common coal, wood, fat or other raw material, we should have at once a fair prospect of the commercial application of electricity,’ he wrote. The problem of making electricity the future’s source of power was practical rather than theoretical – and not his to worry about either: ‘It seems an over-refined sensibility to occupy ourselves with providing means for our descendants in the 10th generation to warm their dwellings or propel their locomotives.’

Still, the fantasy of a future powered by cheap and inexhaustible electrical energy was common throughout the Victorian period. In his utopian/dystopian account of a subterranean civilisation in The Coming Race (1871), Edward Bulwer Lytton was clear that the Vril-ya’s technologies were powered by electricity. The Vril-ya lived in a world in which electricity (or vril, as they called it) powered everything. Electricity ran their machinery, controlled the weather, and helped to grow crops. It was the source of their telepathic power, too. Such speculations worked for Bulwer Lytton’s readers precisely because they mirrored the futuristic speculations made in the real Victorian world. The prediction that electricity would soon supersede steam as the universal source of economic power was ubiquitous. Grove shared that optimism, even as he poured economic cold water over its imminent prospect. When the British Association for the Advancement of Science met in Grove’s home town of Swansea in 1848, the visitors were taken to his friend John Dillwyn Llewelyn’s palatial estate in Penllergaer to see a boat powered by a bank of Grove’s nitric acid batteries puttering about on the lake.

While our concerns about future energy are now primarily dictated by encroaching climate change, Victorians worried more about the need to ensure that future energy would belong to Empire: future energy in the wrong hands and its consequences was a favourite topic of fin-de-siècle scientific romance. In his novel The Outlaws of the Air (1895), George Griffith imagined rival anarchist groups (utopian and nihilist respectively) slugging it out upon the sea and in the air with electrical gunboats and airships wielding electrical weapons. In The Angel of the Revolution (1893), Griffith pictured revolutionary anarchists with access to a new source of energy in control of the air and terrorising the great European states into submission. In both stories, the social organisation of the future was going to depend on who owned the right kind of power. The realisation that controlling future energy was essential to maintaining (or subverting) the social order was what made stories about that energy falling under alien control simultaneously so terrifying and so alluring.

These fictional speculations were mirrored by inventors and entrepreneurs. Indeed, projection was part of the process of invention. Much of Tesla’s reputation at the height of his career depended on his ability to invoke futures for his plans for energy production and transmission. In the 1890s, while working with George Westinghouse to win the contract to provide electricity for the Chicago Columbian Exposition (we might almost think of that as providing energy for the future) and develop hydroelectricity from Niagara Falls, Tesla was fantasising about turning the planet into a machine for transmitting electrical power. ‘I do firmly believe that it is practicable to disturb by means of powerful machines the electrostatic condition of the Earth, and thus transmit intelligible signals or perhaps power,’ he argued.

Fictionalising the future can be an effective way of realising it and making it familiar

Such speculation moved back and forth between fact and fiction. In ‘Some Possibilities of Electricity’ (1892), for example, William Crookes built on the latest developments in physics to talk about electrical energy’s transformative prospects. He pictured a world where electrical energy grew crops and controlled the weather (had he read Bulwer Lytton?) and the ‘ideal way of lighting a room would be by creating a powerful, rapidly alternating electrostatic field, in which a vacuum tube could be moved and put anywhere, and lighted without being metallically connected to anything’. Inventors everywhere claimed inspiration from scientific romances whose authors mined the latest science for their imagined futures. It is an interaction that is still going on.

X-rays and radioactivity promised future energy, too. Fresh on the heels of Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays in 1895, Edison filed a patent for a lightbulb powered by X-rays. The radioactivity researcher Frederick Soddy in 1909 marvelled that ‘there is imprisoned in ordinary common matter vast stores of energy, which ignorance alone at the present time prevents us from using for the purposes of life’. Cracking the secret of radioactivity would mean that the ‘struggle for existence’ that characterised modern culture would be remembered by the future as ‘but a passing phase’. Such speculations fuelled the boys’ own adventure yarn The Radium Casket (1926) by Lawrence Bourne and its sequel Radium Island (1936), in which clean-cut Englishmen battled foreign hordes for control of the future’s fuel.

Working out just how the future will work still depends on this interplay between fact and fiction. Not just because, today, clear lines of connection link contemporary debates with their Victorian and Edwardian antecedents – though these are often forgotten in contemporary discussions of figuring out the future. But it turns out that fictionalising the future can be an effective way of realising it and making it familiar. When commentators and entrepreneurs debate future worlds in which power is generated by solar panels, fuel cells, wind farms or fusion, their imagined futures make sense to us largely because they seem familiar. And they seem familiar because we already know about other fictional futures that work like that – and, though this might seem less clear to us, because ours is a culture with a history of thinking like that about the future.

Put another way, our fictions offer a means of fixing the future’s energy technologies in the form of cultural expectations. Heinlein’s alternative futures effectively run scenarios of how different energy technologies might be played out, giving energy futurologists a playing field where they can work out what the social worlds of different future fuels might be. As the science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow put it in 2014: ‘There is nothing weird about a company doing this – commissioning a story about people using a technology to decide if the technology is worth following through on. It’s like an architect creating a virtual fly-through of a building.’ Generating future scenarios both factual and fictional is increasingly part of the world of future energy management. In this process, the boundary between fictional and factual worlds of energy becomes fluid in a number of interesting ways. Just as it did for Victorian speculators.

Two shared elements underline this seamless continuity between how we imagine the future and its energies now, and the past visions of the Victorians. Like them, we tend to see energy innovation as the work of individuals rather than collectives. And like their Victorian predecessors, our energy innovators consciously deploy imagined futures as a strategy for making their technologies real.

Heinlein’s fictional Douglas-Martin sunscreens were the invention of two mavericks (one of them female) who sit outside of, and are threatened by, corporate structures. Even in the Future History short story in which spaceflight is invented – ‘The Man Who Sold the Moon’ (1951) – D D Harriman, the protagonist and an advocate of space travel, is presented as a maverick outsider, notwithstanding his corporate creds. It is tempting to speculate to what extent Elon Musk models himself on Heinlein’s Harriman, whose opening line in the story was: ‘You’ve got to be a believer!’ The model for Harriman, in turn, was Edison, who perfected the act of looking like an individual, rather than the corporate head he actually was.

Victorian historians of innovation such as Samuel Smiles – the author of Self-Help (1859) – turned innovators into embodiments of virtuous and disciplined self-improvement. Consider James Watt, for example. The steam engine, by Smiles’s account, was less the product of individual genius than of individual character. Watt succeeded in developing the engine that would power the future not because he was a genius but simply because he kept on trying. Or maybe, more accurately, his genius was his perseverance. There were other models of individual future-makers available, too. Edison and his boosters promoted an image of him as the Wizard of Menlo Park (after the New Jersey lab that Edison founded in the 1870s), a man outside his age, possessing unique insights into how the road to future energy might be negotiated. This view of inventors as somehow already inhabiting their own future (Leonardo da Vinci offers another example) reinforces our sense of them as otherworldly outsiders.

Critically, changing perceptions of how the energy of the future will be generated entails changing the ways in which energy’s past is written. Grove and the fuel cell is a good example. Until quite recently, Grove was an almost entirely obscure figure in the history of Victorian science, his gas battery a forgotten technological curiosity. Yet his current reinvention as the father of the fuel cell and the rediscovery of the gas battery as the precursor of our hydrogen economy will mean rewriting the history of Victorian energy technology, too. It is almost tempting to imagine a future in which Grove will have replaced Watt as the icon of Victorian energy. Growing numbers of fuel-cell entrepreneurs are starting the process already, easing their energy technology’s way into the future by giving it the right kind of past.

Indeed, it sometimes seems as if finding the right kind of history for new energy technologies is an essential part of the process of finding them a future. The rewriting of Grove is one example. Tesla’s place in Musk’s future-making is another. Tesla himself clearly understood that telling compelling tales about his visions of new energy futures – setting out where they came from and where they were going – was central to their promotion. Coming up with stories about his inventions’ future was part of the process of realising them. Musk, too, appreciates that finding compelling narratives about the future matters to his project: he understands that giving his future a history (hence Tesla the company, and the car) is a necessary part of getting there.

Our stories assume that one principal form of energy – solar, wind, nuclear – will monopolise the future

The recent launch by SpaceX of a Falcon Heavy rocket carrying a Tesla roadster into space on an orbit heading towards Mars is another instance of Musk’s ability to meld scenes from fictional and factual futures to promote his vision. When I saw those images, I am sure I was not the only one reminded of a scene from the TV series Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001), in which the crew encounters a pickup truck floating in space. Musk’s plans to colonise Mars likewise draw on imagery and desires derived from science fiction, while the Tesla electric car appeals by putting clean energy technology into a vehicle designed to invoke dreams of a sci-fi-styled future. Musk is very good at offering plausible technological roads to fantastic futures.

He is not the only contemporary future-maker to do this. Bill Gates’s calls for humans to invent their way out of the problems of encroaching climate change draws on a similar appeal to an imagined future of limitless clean energy. Such future-building carries conviction on the back of a long history of invoking the power of technological innovation to literally transform worlds – as in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992-96), for example. The same might be said of current speculation about how geoengineering might provide answers to the problems of climate change.

Today, the solar power that fuelled Heinlein’s speculations in ‘Let There Be Light’ is big business. Its prophet-entrepreneurs might not elicit the instant recognition of Musk and Gates, but they tell the same sorts of stories to link their technologies to the future. The leading company First Solar traces its origins back to the inventor Harold McMaster, who stuck stubbornly to his single-minded vision of a future powered by solar energy, despite setbacks. It’s another instance of our valorising individual ingenuity.

From Lyle Monroe’s (Robert Heinlein) ‘Let there be light’. Courtesy the Internet Archive

We have been imagining the future of energy and the worlds it will generate for more than two centuries, and the cross-fertilisation between inventors and their literary counterparts continues to shape our imaginings, more often than not by invoking a pervasive individualism. It’s as if we struggle to get away from the notion that energy technologies have a single origin point and so these origins have to be located in specific individuals. Such individualism is often accompanied by the suggestion that only one fuel, be it hydrogen, wind or solar power, will dominate our futures, real or imaginary. Just as coal and steam powered the 19th century, or oil and electricity the 20th century, our stories about future fuels assume that one principal form of energy – solar, wind, nuclear – will monopolise the future. too.

If we want to overcome these imaginative limitations, we need to rethink the sorts of stories and histories we tell about energy, its origins, and its cultures. Though we’re conditioned to see energy revolutions coming about through individual rather than community action, the danger of this narrative – seductive and potentially useful as it is – is that it presents the future and its energies as belonging to someone else. To overcome that, we need to recognise that the expertise needed to make sure that the future is powered how we want is collective.

As the cyberpunk writer William Gibson put it in the 1990s: ‘The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.’ Gibson’s comment matters because it underlines the ways in which the ingredients from which futures are made are always, already, parts of our present and our past. If access to those ingredients is unevenly distributed now, then the futures made out of them will be just as problematic. This is why, when it comes to the energy that will make the future work, it’s vital that we get our histories right. Promoters of future energy regimes such as Musk weave stories that compel because they seem familiar – they have a singular history. If we want to make sure that those future energy regimes address all our interests, it’s important that the stories that get told, and the routes they map out to get us to those futures, include everyone in the process. In short, we need to change the history of the future.





Stories and literatureFuture of technologyThe environment

Typos, tricks and misprints

 


Weekend reads
 
Saturday 7 August 2021
 
Language and linguisticsLast week’s most read
Typos, tricks and misprints
Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable? Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology
by Arika Okrent



Typos, tricks and misprints | Aeon

Typos, tricks and misprints

Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable? Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology

The title page of Thomas Blount’s Glossographia, 1661 edition. Courtesy the National Library of Scotland

English spelling is ridiculous. Sew and new don’t rhyme. Kernel and colonel do. When you see an ough, you might need to read it out as ‘aw’ (thought), ‘ow’ (drought), ‘uff’ (tough), ‘off’ (cough), ‘oo’ (through), or ‘oh’ (though). The ea vowel is usually pronounced ‘ee’ (weakpleasesealbeam) but can also be ‘eh’ (breadheadwealthfeather). Those two options cover most of it – except for a handful of cases, where it’s ‘ay’ (breaksteakgreat). Oh wait, one more… there’s earth. No wait, there’s also heart.

The English spelling system, if you can even call it a system, is full of this kind of thing. Yet not only do most people raised with English learn to read and write it; millions of people who weren’t raised with English learn to use it too, to a very high level of accuracy.

Admittedly, for a non-native speaker, such mastery usually involves a great deal of confusion and frustration. Part of the problem is that English spelling looks deceptively similar to other languages that use the same alphabet but in a much more consistent way. You can spend an afternoon familiarising yourself with the pronunciation rules of Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Polish and many others, and credibly read out a text in that language, even if you don’t understand it. Your pronunciation might be terrible, and the pace, stress and rhythm would be completely off, and no one would mistake you for a native speaker – but you could do it. Even French, notorious for the spelling challenges it presents learners, is consistent enough to meet the bar. There are lots of silent letters, but they’re in predictable places. French has plenty of rules, and exceptions to those rules, but they can all be listed on a reasonable number of pages.

English is in a different league of complexity. The most comprehensive description of its spelling – the Dictionary of the British English Spelling System by Greg Brooks (2015) – runs to more than 450 pages as it enumerates all the ways particular sounds can be represented by letters or combinations of letters, and all the ways particular letters or letter combinations can be read out as sounds.

From the early Middle Ages, various European languages adopted and adapted the Latin alphabet. So why did English end up with a far more inconsistent orthography than any other? The basic outline of the messy history of English is widely known: the Anglo-Saxon tribes bringing Old English in the 5th century, the Viking invasions beginning in the 8th century adding Old Norse to the mix, followed by the Norman Conquest of the 11th century and the French linguistic takeover. The moving and mixing of populations, the growth of London and the merchant class in the 13th and 14th centuries. The contact with the Continent and the balance among Germanic, Romance and Celtic cultural forces. No language Academy was established, no authority for oversight or intervention in the direction of the written form. English travelled and wandered and haphazardly tied pieces together. As the blogger James Nicoll put it in 1990, English ‘pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary’.

Plus ça change. The opening pages of The Lytille Childrenes Lytil Boke, an instructional book of table manners dating from around 1480 and written in Middle English. Amongst other directives, children are told Bulle not as a bene were in thi throote (Don’t burp as if you had a bean in your throat) and Pyke notte thyne errys nothyr thy nostrellys’(Don’t pick your ears or nose). Courtesy the Trustees of the British Libray

But just how does spelling factor into all this? It wasn’t as if the rest of Europe didn’t also contend with a mix of tribes and languages. The remnants of the Roman Empire comprised Germanic, Celtic and Slavic communities spread over a huge area. Various conquests installed a ruling-class language in control of a population that spoke a different language: there was the Nordic conquest of Normandy in the 10th century (where they now write French with a pretty regular system); the Ottoman Turkish rule over Hungary in the 16th and 17th centuries (which now has very consistent spelling rules for Hungarian); Moorish rule in Spain in the 8th to 15th centuries (which also has very consistent spelling). True, other languages did have official academies and other government attempts at standardisation – but those interventions have largely only ever succeeded at implementing minor changes to existing systems in very specific areas. English wasn’t the only language to pick the pockets of others for useful words.

The answer to the weirdness of English has to do with the timing of technology. The rise of printing caught English at a moment when the norms linking spoken and written language were up for grabs, and so could be hijacked by diverse forces and imperatives that didn’t coordinate with each other, or cohere, or even have any distinct goals at all. If the printing press has arrived earlier in the life of English, or later, after some of the upheaval had settled, things might have ended up differently.

It’s notable that the adoption of a different and related technology several hundred years earlier – the alphabet, in use from the 600s – didn’t have this disorienting effect on English. The Latin alphabet had spread throughout Europe with the diffusion of Christianity from the 4th century onward. A few European vernacular languages had some sort of rudimentary writing system prior to this, but for the most part they had no written form. For the first few hundred years of English using the Latin alphabet, its spelling was pretty consistent and phonetic. Monks and missionaries, beginning around 600 CE translated Latin religious texts into local languages – not necessarily so they could be read by the general population, but so they could at least read aloud to them. Most people were illiterate. The vernacular translations were written to be pronounced, and the spelling was intended to get as close to the pronunciation as possible.

Often the languages these monks and missionaries were trying to transcribe contained sounds that Latin didn’t have, and there was no symbol for the sound they needed. In those cases, they might use an accent mark, or put two letters together, or borrow another symbol. Old English, for example, had a strange, exotic ‘th’ sound, for which they originally borrowed the thorn symbol (þ) from Germanic runes. They later settled on the two-letter combination th. For the most part, they used the Latin alphabet as they knew it, but stretched it by using the letters in new ways when other sounds were required. We still use that sound, with the th spelling, in English today.

English was at home in the kitchen, the workshop, the marketplace, but less sure of itself in other registers

Writing was a specialised skill handled by dedicated scribes. They were trained by other scribes, who in turn passed on their spelling conventions. Different monasteries might have had different styles or habits for representing English sounds, and there were dialects and variations in pronunciation in the spoken language as well – but a written standard and eventually a whole literature emerged.

That tradition was broken after the Norman invasion in 1066. For the next 300 years or so, with a few exceptions, written English disappeared entirely. French was the language of the conquerors, and became the language of the state and all its official activities. Latin remained the language of the Church and education. English was the spoken language of daily life for most people, but the social class that had previously maintained and developed the written standard for English – landholders, religious leaders, government officials – had all been replaced.

English began its return as a written language in the 14th century. Over generations, it had crept back in among the nobility, as well as the clergy, although French and Latin were still the languages of educated and official pursuits. By then, English had changed. A few centuries of language evolution had led to different pronunciations. And Old English writing habits had been lost. As English started to make its written comeback, these people found themselves not only trying to figure out how to spell English words but also reaching for English ways to say educated, official things. English was completely at home in the kitchen, the workshop, and the marketplace, but less sure of itself in other registers. Grabbing the nearest convenient French word was often the solution. Things such court proceedings, government decrees, property ownership documents and schooling relied heavily on French vocabulary to fill in the gaps where English was out of practice. Words such as governjudgeofficepunishmoneycontractnumberactionstudent and many others became part of the vocabulary of English official life – and then of everyone, as most people had some sort of interaction with officialdom.

Prior to the Norman conquest, Old English predominated, a thoroughly Germanic cousin of Dutch and German. To a speaker of Modern English today, it’s nearly unrecognisable as English, and requires translation to understand. In the next few hundred years after the conquest, it evolved into Middle English – still Germanic, but less thoroughly so, as grammatical endings disappeared and French vocabulary flowed in. Middle English looks much more like the English we know.

By the time written English started coming back, around 1300, there was no general standard for spelling. People, taken from French peuple, might be spelled peplepepillpoeple or poepulBeauty, from French beauté, might be bewteebuute or bealte. It didn’t help matters that, at the time, French also had inconsistent spelling. All the vernaculars of Europe were on early, wobbly footing with respect to developing a consistent standard as they moved toward their own written tradition and away from Latin as the only choice. Then came the printing press.

Moveable type was invented in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg c1450. It involved making letters from metal alloys and setting them in a print tray-bed, inking them, and then pressing paper over the top to make an imprint – saving hours compared with laborious manual transcription. The earliest works printed with this new technique were in Latin, but printers soon spotted the potential market for books in vernacular languages, and began making them in great numbers. English got off to an early start: an enterprising merchant named William Caxton set up the first English press in 1476. This followed the success of an English translation he had printed while working in Bruges. There were no style guides, no copyeditors, no dictionaries to consult.

Moveable type was a wonderful invention: once the type had been set, you could print off as many copies as you wanted. But setting the letters, or pieces of type, into lines, and then pages, was intense, specialised labour. You had to spend years learning the trade. For his new press, Caxton brought typesetters back with him from the Continent, and some didn’t even speak English all that well. They set type working from manuscripts that already had quite a bit of variation, and the overriding priority was getting them set quickly.

Some standards did spread and crystallise over time, as more books were printed and literacy rates climbed. The printing profession played a key role in these emergent norms. Printing houses developed habits for spelling frequent words, often based on what made setting type more efficient. In a manuscript, hadde might be replaced with hadthankefull with thankful. When it came to spelling, the primary objective wasn’t to faithfully represent the author’s spelling, nor to uphold some standard idea of ‘correct’ English – it was to produce texts that people could read and, more importantly, that they would buy. Habits and tricks became standards, as typesetters learned their trade by apprenticing to other typesetters. They then often moved around as journeymen workers, which entailed dispersing their own habits or picking up those of the printing houses they worked in.

Some spellings got entrenched by being printed over and over again in widely distributed texts, very early on

Standard-setting was only partly in the hands of the people setting the type. Even more so, it was down to a growing reading public. The more texts there were, the more reading there was, and the greater the sensibility about what looks right. Once that sense develops, it can be a very powerful enforcer of norms. These norms in the literacy of English speakers today are so well entrenched that simple adjustments are very jarring. If ai trai tu repreezent mai akshuel pronownseeayshun in raiteeng, yu kan reed it, but its difikelt and disterbeeng tu du soh. It just looks wrong, and that feeling of wrongness interrupts the flow of reading. The fluency of reading depends on the speed with which you visually identify the words, and the speed of identification increases with exposure. The more we see a word, the more quickly we recognise it, even if its spelling doesn’t match the sound.

Some spellings got entrenched this way, by being printed over and over again in widely distributed texts, very early on. The word ghost, which had been spelled and pronounced gast in Old English, took on the gh spelling under the influence of Flemish-trained compositors. It was such a commonly encountered word in English text, particularly in the phrase holy ghost and other translations of Latin spiritus, that it just began to look right.

Other spellings arose, and were then cemented through the power exerted by the visual shape of similar words. The existence of would and should, for example, brought about the spelling of couldWould and should were once pronounced with the ‘l’ sound, as they were the past-tense forms of will and shallCould, however, was never pronounced with an ‘l’; it was the past tense of canCould was coude or cuthe. Then the visual power of would and should attracted could to their side. At printing’s rise, the ‘l’ sound was already often absent from the pronunciation of would and should, so the ‘l’ was less a cue to pronunciation than to word type. Could is a modal verb, same as would and should. There was no explicit intention to make them look the same, but the frequency of their appearance nudged them toward ending up that way.

Visual patterns strengthened their hold on spelling in other languages, too. The many homophones and silent letters in French arose from letters that represented sounds that used to be pronounced, but hung on in the writing system after they were no longer spoken. And since French was a Romance language with its roots in Latin, and literacy in French often went hand-in-hand with literacy in Latin, Latin spellings could reinforce French spellings that had lost phonetic justification. For example, in speech, cent and sang might be pronounced the same, but there was also the implicit knowledge that cent came from centum and sang came from sanguinum. This Latin connection served as a reference point that helped stabilise French spelling, even when it was disconnected from pronunciation.

Had the Norman invasion not interrupted the literary tradition of Old English, we might have ended up with a similar situation – a spelling system with silent letters and shifted sound values, but grounded in the spellings of their earlier forms. Old English would have continued to be the basis of the writing tradition that would have later been set into type. Instead, we had a number of parts, moving and changing independently from each other, often with no anchor at all.

What’s more, in the years when printing was slowly establishing and fortifying spelling habits, English was undergoing what’s now called the Great Vowel Shift. In broad terms, over the course of a few centuries, sounds changed and vowels moved around. Words such as name and make, for example, once had an ‘ah’ vowel as they do in German name and machen, or English father. During the Great Vowel Shift, it moved to more of an ‘eh’ vowel as in bed, and eventually to the ‘ay’ where it is today. But the words affected in this way continue to be spelled with the ‘a’ of father.

Words that ended up with an oo spelling generally used to be pronounced with a long ‘o’ sound. Moon and book both used to sound something like moan and boke; the two o’s, quite logically, represented a long ‘o’, before moving to an ‘u’ sound, as in June. However, sometimes the long vowel became a short vowel: eg, the more lax ‘u’ vowel, as in pushMoon (also goosefoodschool) ended up with the June vowel, while book (footgood, stood) with the push vowel. These changes happened at different times in different places. For some words (roof), the change hasn’t completely gone through, and still wavers (at least in my own Midwestern US dialect) between the two pronunciations. In some places in Scotland and the north of England, moonbook, goose and foot still have the same vowel.

The changes that came to be grouped under the Great Vowel Shift were gradual and went unnoticed as they were happening. When an English speaker sat down to write something at the end of the Middle Ages, the way they wrote it could depend on where they lived and what the dialectal pronunciation of vowels was there. It would also depend on what they had read and incorporated into their spelling habits. When a printer was setting type for that writing, they had their own pronunciation and spelling preferences. When a piece of writing was set in type and spread to other towns, it would be received by people of varying literacy levels, and that would influence how it was incorporated into their habits. In other words, there was tremendous variation at each of these waystations on the journey to being read. When a text was set in type and distributed, it had the effect of propagating the habit it represented, but how much it propagated depended on how widely it was distributed and where. Which specific aspects of the habit would stick and which fall away? The answer could be some or none. The result, ultimately, is a very irregular habit.

Writing attaches to language in the way that the fork is a technology that attaches to our eating habits

If English had been later to the technology of printing, further behind in the expansion of literacy, it might have been able to approach the development of its spelling system with a cleaner slate and a more stable idea of what was to be represented. But when a tool comes along, you don’t wait to figure out the optimal way to use it or worry about what the effects of using it might eventually be. Instead, you just start.

When a technology spreads, so does a habit of using it. Before we had printing, we had writing. Can we go back further? Isn’t human language itself a technology? This is arguable, a philosophical question. I would say no. In any case, language is much, much closer to our very natures as humans than is any invented or discovered tool passed along for practical problem-solving. Put a group of humans without a language together (as has happened in some cases with Deaf communities) and they will do language. A language will emerge from what they do.

But they won’t necessarily come up with writing. Writing is unquestionably a technology. It attaches to language in the way that the fork is a technology that attaches to our eating habits. Eating is undeniably a necessary part of our nature. The fork is a recent, unnecessary (no matter how useful) innovation. That analogy doesn’t go much further. There are very few things that capture the relation between language (the behaviour) and writing (the technology that represents the behaviour). It’s hard to find a good analogy. The point is that the eating happens whether we have the fork or not. Language happens whether we have writing or not.

When we first got the technology of writing, the people who used it represented a tiny fraction of the speaking population, in most cases for hundreds of years. Throughout the history of writing, most people have been illiterate. It was the technology of printing that made it possible to put writing into widespread use. The written word got cheaper and more plentiful. People had the access and exposure necessary to learn, practise and become literate. That access and exposure was created, in stages, by the competing and conflicting demands of history. That history and its lumps, bumps, silent letters and all, was pressed in with metal and ink.

Language and linguisticsHistory of technologyPhilosophy of language