What has not been used for writing before. With what and on what they wrote in Russia, when the usual pens and notebooks were not in sight. Which countries write with fountain pens

Almost as long as there has been a person, there have been letters. The man felt a great desire to send his letter to others. But before people learned to write, they asked for help from messengers or friends to pass on any information to another person.

But only after the invention of writing, people could convey their thought to another person without intermediaries.

In ancient Egypt, the messages were tightly wound on a special stick, and they were written on papyrus. After writing, they gave this stick to the messenger, who carried it to the recipient. The importance of transmitting information was already understood by people at that time. Messengers defended themselves special law and enjoyed privileges. Heralds from ancient Greece enjoyed similar rights.

In ancient Rome, the road network developed very well, and people came up with faster transport and the recipients of the letter received much faster, and people began to move faster.

But then it was still very far from the advent of a special postal service. Only when many roads were built and trade between countries began to develop did people seriously begin to think about mail.

Special stations were placed on the roads to replace horses, a person could replace his tired horse with an already rested one. Various wagons and carriages also appeared near the stations. Of course, they carried letters, cargo and people. Special postal service appeared in several European countries. Letters were placed in bags, on which they wrote where to deliver them, after which they were given to the carrier.

Of course, their delivery was irregular and very slow. Everything depended on the condition of the roads and the condition of the drivers. Letters were delivered more slowly in summer and faster in winter. Only after the postal service also began to transport letters, the work immediately went faster.

At first, people painted on the walls of caves, stones and rocks, such drawings and inscriptions are called petroglyphs. On them, the first artists tried to capture what they were worried about yesterday, today and will be interested in tomorrow, and also tried to mark the boundaries of their possessions and hunting grounds for members from other tribes.

The most ancient writings have come down to us in the form of inscriptions carved on stone. Religious inscriptions, state decrees, texts of cult purpose were beaten out on the stone. But a stone as a carrier of information and a chisel as a tool for writing are extremely inconvenient to use. Therefore, later people began to write on the material that is easier to find or make. One of the first materials available was clay.

The clay tablet is the oldest written instrument, some of which archaeologists date back to 5500 BC. (for example, the Terteri tablets, which have inscriptions in the form of pictograms depicting cattle, tree branches and a number of relatively abstract symbols).

However, clay tablets from Mesopotamia are more widely known, the oldest of which date back to 2000 BC.

The method of making such plates was very simple. For their manufacture, clay was mixed with water. After that, it was possible to form clay tablets and put information on them. A tablet with raw clay was used for everyday purposes, and with a burnt one under the sun or in a kiln, it was used to preserve written information for a long time. Such clay tiles could be sent to each other over long distances or made into libraries and archives.

An interesting fact is that people even made letters with envelopes from clay. The finished burnt clay tablet with the text of the letter was coated with a layer of raw clay and the name of the addressee was written on it. Then the plank was re-fired or dried in the sun. From the release of steam, the inner plate peeled off from the “envelope” and turned out to be enclosed in it, like a nut kernel in a shell.

Later, the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans also used metal plates for writing. The ancient Greeks, for example, wrote letters on small lead plates, and in order to scare away evil spirits, a plate with spells or magic formulas was placed in the grave of a dead person. In Rome, the laws and decrees of the senate were engraved on bronze plates and put on public display in the Forum. Veterans of the Roman army, upon retirement, received a document of privileges inscribed on two bronze plates. However, the production of metal plates was time consuming and costly, so they were used on special occasions and only available to the upper class.

More accessible writing material was invented in ancient Rome. These were special wax tablets that mankind has been using for over 1500 years. These tablets were prepared from wood or ivory. From the edges of the board, at a distance of 1-2 cm, a recess was made by 0.5-1 cm, and then it was filled with wax around the entire perimeter. They wrote on the tablet, applying signs to the wax with a sharp metal stick - a stylus, which was pointed on one side, and its other end had the shape of a spatula and could erase the inscription. Such wax tablets were folded with wax inside and connected in two (diptych) or three (triptych) pieces or several pieces with a leather strap (polyptych) and a book was obtained, a prototype of medieval codices and a distant ancestor modern books. In the ancient world and the Middle Ages, wax tablets were used as notebooks, for household notes and for teaching children to write. There were similar waxed tablets in Russia and they were called tsers.

In a hot climate, the records on wax tablets were short-lived, however, some original wax tablets have survived to this day (for example, with the records of the French kings). Of the Russian tsers, the so-called Novgorod Code, dating from the 11th century, has been preserved. - This is a polyptych consisting of four wax pages.

By the way, the expression "from scratch" - "tabula rasa" came about due to the fact that periodically the wax from the boards was cleaned and covered with it again.

Papyrus, parchment and birch bark are the prototypes of paper.

A huge step forward was the use of papyrus, introduced by the ancient Egyptians. The oldest papyrus scroll dates back to the 25th century BC. e. Later, the Greeks and Romans adopted the papyrus script from the Egyptians.

The raw material for the manufacture of papyrus was the reed growing in the Nile River valley. The papyrus stalks were peeled, the core was cut lengthwise into thin strips. The resulting strips were laid out overlapping on a flat surface. Another layer of strips was laid out on them at a right angle and placed under a large smooth stone, and then left under the scorching sun. After drying, the papyrus sheet was polished and smoothed with a shell or a piece of ivory. The sheets in their final form looked like long ribbons and therefore were preserved in scrolls, and at a later time they were combined into books.

In ancient times, papyrus was the main writing material throughout the Greco-Roman world. The production of papyrus in Egypt was very large. And with all their good qualities papyrus was still a fragile material. Papyrus scrolls could not have been kept for more than 200 years. Papyri have survived to this day only in Egypt, solely due to the unique climate of this area.

And, despite this, it was used for a very long time (until the 8th century AD), longer than many other materials suitable for writing.

In other geographical areas where papyrus was not known, people began to produce writing material from animal skin - parchment. From antiquity to the present day, parchment is known among Jews under the name "gwil", as a canonical material for recording the Sinai Revelation in handwritten Torah scrolls. On the more common type of parchment “klaf”, passages from the Torah for tefil and mezuzah were also written. For the manufacture of these varieties of parchment, only the skins of kosher animal species are used.

According to the Greek historian Ctesias in the 5th c. BC e. leather has long been used as a material for writing by the Persians. From where, under the name "diftera", she passed to Greece, where, along with papyrus, processed sheep and goat skins were used for writing.

According to Pliny the Elder in the II century. BC e. The kings of Egypt in the Hellenistic period, wishing to support the book wealth of the Library of Alexandria, which found a rival in the person of Pergamon, in Asia Minor, banned the export of papyrus outside Egypt. Then in Pergamum they paid attention to leather dressing, improved the ancient diphtheria and put it into circulation under the name pergamena. The king of Pergamon, Eumenes II (197-159 BC), is erroneously listed as the inventor of parchment.

Parchment was inferior to papyrus in cheapness, but it was much stronger and could be written on both sides, but the high cost of parchment led to numerous cases of etching old texts for new use, especially by medieval monks - scribes.

The rapid growth of printing in the Middle Ages led to a reduction in the use of parchment, since its price and complexity of production, as well as the volume of production, no longer satisfied the needs of publishers. From now on, and to this day, parchment has been used mainly by artists and, in exceptional cases, for book publishing.

In search of more practical media, people tried to write on wood, its bark, leaves, leather, metals, bones. In countries with a hot climate, dried and varnished palm leaves were often used. In Russia, the most common material for writing was birch bark - certain layers of birch bark.

The so-called birch bark letter, a piece of birch bark with scratched signs, was found by archaeologists on July 26, 1951 during excavations in Novgorod. To date, there are more than seven hundred such finds, they testify that in ancient Novgorod, not only noble people, but even peasants and artisans were literate.

Paper.

While in the Western world there was competition between wax tablets, papyrus and parchment in China in the 2nd century BC. paper was invented.

At first, paper in China was made from defective silkworm cocoons, then they began to make paper from hemp. Then in 105 AD. Cai Lun began making paper from crushed mulberry fibers, wood ash, rags, and hemp. He mixed all this with water and laid out the resulting mass on a mold (wooden frame and bamboo sieve). After drying in the sun, he smoothed this mass with the help of stones. The result is strong sheets of paper. Even then, paper was widely used in China. After Cai Lun's invention, the papermaking process improved rapidly. They began to add starch, glue, natural dyes, etc. to increase strength.

At the beginning of the 7th century, the method of making paper becomes known in Korea and Japan. And after another 150 years, through prisoners of war, he gets to the Arabs.

born in china paper production slowly moving to the West, gradually taking root in the material culture of other peoples.

On the European continent, paper production was founded by the Arabs in Spain they conquered in the 11th century. The paper industry in the XII - XV century, quickly acclimatized in European countries - first in Italy, France, and then in Germany.

In the 11th-12th centuries, paper appeared in Europe, where it soon replaced animal parchment. Since the 15th-16th centuries, in connection with the introduction of printing, the production of paper has been growing rapidly. Paper was made in a very primitive way - by manually grinding the mass with wooden hammers in a mortar and scooping it out in forms with a mesh bottom. Of great importance for the development of paper production was the invention in the second half of the 17th century of a grinding apparatus - a roll. At the end of the 18th century, rolls already made it possible to produce a large amount of paper pulp, but manual ebb (scooping) of paper delayed the growth of production. In 1799, N. L. Robert (France) invented the paper machine, mechanizing the ebb of paper by using an infinitely moving grid. In England, the brothers G. and S. Fourdrinier, having bought Robert's patent, continued to work on the mechanization of the ebb, and in 1806 they patented a paper machine. By the middle of the 19th century, the paper machine had become a complex machine that operated continuously and largely automatically. In the 20th century, paper production becomes a large, highly mechanized industry with a continuous flow technological scheme, powerful thermal power plants and complex chemical workshops for the production of fibrous semi-finished products.

Who want to be a millionaire? 10/14/2017. Answers in the game Who wants to be a millionaire? for October 14, 2017

In this article you can find out all the answers in the game "Who wants to be a millionaire?" for October 14, 2017 (10/14/2017). First, you can see the questions asked by the players by Dmitry Dibrov, and then all the correct answers in today's intellectual TV game "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" for 10/14/2017.

Questions to the first pair of players

Alexander Rosenbaum and Leonid Yakubovich (200,000 - 200,000 rubles)

1. What is the name of a driver who travels long distances?
2. What effect is said to be produced by the purchase of an expensive item?
3. What is the name of the piglet, the hero of the popular cartoon?
4. How did the slogan of the era of socialism end: "The current generation of Soviet people will live ..."?
5. What, according to the laws of physics, does the lift force act on?
6. What is the name of the property warehouse in a military unit?
7. What part of ginger is most commonly used in cooking?
8. How many millimeters are in a kilometer?
9. What "flared up" in the verses from the movie "Jolly Fellows"?
10. Where is the ashes of the American astronomer Eugene Shoemaker?
11. With what pain did the poet Gerich Heine compare love?
12. What position did Shota Rustaveli hold at the court of Queen Tamara?

Questions to the second pair of players

Vera Brezhneva and Alexander Revva (200,000 - 0 rubles)

1. Where is jam usually put during tea drinking?
2. What do they say: “Neither light nor dawn”?
3. What card suit is often called "hearts"?
4. What are the data stores on the Internet?
5. What became the home of the heroes of the famous Beatles song?
6. What was not used for writing in the past?
7. What does the silver spider fill its underwater nest with?
8. What liquid is usually not poured into?
9. What could the cloak of Doctor Strange, the hero of movies and comics, do?
10. Which of these poetic forms has the smallest number of lines?
11. Who is not depicted on the coat of arms of Iceland?

Answers to the questions of the first pair of players

1. trucker
2. hitting the pocket
3. Funtik
4. under communism
5. aircraft wing
6. kapterka
7. root
8. million
9. on the moon
10. with dental
11. treasurer

Answers to the questions of the second pair of players

1. into the outlet
2. about early morning
3. hearts
4. cloudy
5. yellow Submarine
6. bumazea
7. air bubbles
8. in a tube
9. fly
10. quatrain
11. polar bear

Showing modern devices to people of the past who lived without electricity, they would definitely be confused. Smartphones and tablets would seem to them incomprehensible “things” to beware of. So we, contemporaries, do not always understand everyday things and various devices that were used in the past. Now all these things are stored in museums - perhaps our gadgets will cause bewilderment among the people of the future.

Bear hunting suit

This strange design, which turns a person into a kind of fish-ball, is the costume of a Siberian bear hunter or a daredevil participating in the fight with a bear. For hunting alone, such a "chain mail", of course, was too heavy: it is difficult to imagine that in this outfit a person could move freely and even more so run fast. But when there was no such need (for example, in battles or when they went hunting in a group), the suit protected well from bear bites and paw strikes.

Belgian version of the powder tester, "test tubes" (eprouvette)

The earliest apparatus on record for testing the strength of gunpowder was invented by Berne in 1578. It was a small cylinder with a tightly fitting hinged lid. The gunpowder exploded inside, and the angle to which the lid was lifted was thought to indicate the strength of the gunpowder.

Ophthalmotrope is a device that clearly demonstrates the movements of the eye and the structure of the entire visual system in the human body.

In fact, this is just a model of eyeballs (they are made as hollow balls moving around their own center of rotation). The eyeballs are set in motion by the eye muscles - the role of the muscles here is performed by six cords attached in different places to the eyeballs and extending back, as in real eyes. All cords are thrown over blocks and balanced by weights. By pulling on one or another cord, the model of the eyeball is rotated accordingly.

Vinegar

As is well known from the literature of the 19th century, the ladies of those times fainted every minute. However, often the cause of fainting was not an excess of feelings, but too tight corsets, fumes from wallpaper (often the paint contained arsenic or lead, which led to poisoning), or simply terrible smells on the streets of cities that did not know sewers. Therefore, the ladies carried bottles of smelling salts with them, or a small vinegar bowl, in which there was cotton wool soaked in vinegar or ammonia. At the first sensation of indisposition, it was supposed to open the lid and take a breath.

Mailbox

Sailors began to use mailboxes to exchange letters in the 16th century. The sea route from Europe to India was long and dangerous, and in this way sailors informed trusted recipients about the number of people on the ship, the direction and purpose of the journey. The Cape of Good Hope off the southern tip of Africa became the site of an exchange of letters.

The messages were placed in boxes and hidden in designated places, disguised as stones so that the outsider could not find the notes. Ships passing by entered the bay and took the records from the cache, leaving their own in return. Thus, if the ship went missing, it was possible to find out where it was going to sail and who was on board.

Tokens for receiving services in brothels of the Wild West

Such tokens were paid in brothels for savory services in the 19th century in the USA. The use of such tokens was convenient for the owners of establishments - this minimized the opportunity for women to keep more money for themselves and promote the client in the process.

Type of credit card

Notches about the borrowed goods were simultaneously made on both sticks. One was kept by the buyer, the other by the seller. This ruled out fraud. When the debt was repaid, the sticks were destroyed.

Shameful flute, or shandflöte (Schandflöte)

It was used in Germany in the 16th-17th centuries for public humiliation of bad musicians, and also as a punishment for minor violations of the laws: slander, foul language, heresy and blasphemy. The name "instrument" received for its appearance, reminiscent of a flute. Shandflete was made from different types of fruit trees.

A metal ring was put on the neck, the fingers were inserted into the clamps. The heavier the wine, the more the planks were compressed. The punishment was aggravated by the fact that the unfortunate was exhibited at the pillory in front of the mocking crowd. Everything looked as if the unfortunate man was playing the flute, and the painful sensations that he experienced caused laughter and delight from the public, which gave this type of punishment a particularly humiliating character. Sometimes the torture could last for several days.

Vampire Hunter Pack

The fearsome suitcase looks like it was confiscated from a maniac or taken away from the filming of another Hollywood movie about vampires. But in fact, such a set is not a props and not an accessory for Halloween, but a very real thing from the life of our ancestors.

Tear catcher or teardrop

A small vessel with a narrow neck is made in such a way that it can be pressed directly to the corner of the eye. Its purpose is to collect tears, and the history goes back more than three millennia. Catchers of tears are mentioned in the Psalms, in Psalm 55: “Put my tears in Your vessel, are they not in Your Book?” Tears were popular, for example, in Persia: men returning home after a fight would first check their wives' tear bottles to see if they were bored.

Defender Ring

In the Victorian era, when the quality and quantity of lighting on the streets of large cities left much to be desired, crime on the streets was commonplace. Therefore, to ensure their safety, the Victorians came up with a variety of devices.
With the help of two small buttons in the ring, sharp blades were folded back - and the advantage in the street fight immediately turned out to be on the side of its owner.

Mortsafe

Mortseifs were called steel or cast-iron lattice caps that were put on coffins.

AT early XIX centuries, with the development of medicine and anatomy in England and Scotland, there was a great need for corpses for dissection. But in God-fearing Victorian society, not only was there no institution of organ donation, but there was a persistent dislike for burials not according to the rules: even cremation was met as something completely terrible, satanic and monstrous - progressive Victorians even had to organize a movement “for cremation”.

"Clockwork Canary", or a mechanical imitator of birdsong

One of the main manufacturers of such mechanisms was the French company Bontems of Paris: first, at the end of the 19th century, Blaise Bontem began to produce mechanical boxes with bird voices, and then his son Charles and grandson Lucien continued his work, improving the mechanism already in the 20th century - their production worked until until the 1950s.

Flea trap

Inside the swirling flea traps, a small piece of cloth soaked in honey, blood, resin or fragrant substances was placed as bait. An insect that crawled inside stuck to the bait. Flea caps were worn under wigs and inside women's hairstyles, under clothes and around the neck like a pendant, and also placed in the bedroom by the bed. Catching fleas was an everyday affair and to some extent even erotic.

The women in these figurines showed the doctor exactly where it hurts.

In the past, only men were doctors, and they were forbidden to directly touch high-ranking female patients. Therefore, special dolls were used for diagnosis. They were made of ivory and mammoth ivory, wood, and even mother-of-pearl 10–25 cm high. An interesting detail: some Chinese dolls show bandages to form a small leg. Whether the doctor brought the doll or the ladies had their own, historians cannot yet establish for sure.

Strigil, or simply a scraper for cleansing the body

In the days of the ancient Romans, when there was no soap, shower gels, shampoos, scrubs and other advances in chemistry, all the dirt, sweat and dust from the body were scraped off with such scrapers.

Storm Foreteller

This invention belongs to Dr. George Meriwether, who lived in the city of Whitby in England in the 19th century.
Once the doctor noticed that before the onset of a thunderstorm, leeches begin to behave uneasily, and decided to use this feature of theirs. He came up with a cunning device, which was called the "storm predictor."

12 one-pint bottles were placed in a circle. At the neck of each bottle was a metal tube with a piece of whalebone and a wire attached to the hammers. Sensing the approach of a storm, the leeches began to climb up the bottle and touched the whalebone, which, in turn, pulled the wire and actuated the hammers that hit the bell.

Toaster

Toasters were extremely popular in the 19th century and therefore came in a wide variety of designs: for example, some especially expensive models had a ceramic core that heated more evenly, double walls and removable "doors" to make it easier to clean the inside of the device, as well as two removable wire coasters to put slices of bread there to keep warm or to keep fresh toast from cooling down so quickly. Simpler models were simply a tin pyramid with holes in the side panels as a body - coals smoldered under the pyramid and thereby toasted pieces of bread leaning against the panels. Then, of course, the first electric toasters appeared - one of the first models was developed by Alan McMaster in Edinburgh in 1893.

bullet extractor

The structure of the extractor is quite simple: there is something like a screwdriver in the hollow long tube: it is lowered into the wound with the help of screws, the bullet is felt for, picked up and pulled out. Despite its apparent benefits, the bullet extractor often brought much more trouble than relief: there were practically no anesthesia and antiseptics in those days, so many patients died from pain shock, and others from infections.

The smoky enema was one of the most popular devices in medicine in the 17th-19th centuries.

Its device was extremely simple: a smoky enema was similar to a regular one, but instead of a pear, it had furs from a pig's stomach, which fed tobacco smoke into the patient's anus. Tobacco was considered a good remedy for drowsiness and colds, and it was even prescribed to the sick. However, European doctors learned the methods of non-standard introduction of it into the body from North American Indians. Such a procedure, it was believed, was supposed to help with pain in the stomach, and also revived the drowned. It was believed that the smoke dries out all excess moisture in the body.

According to domestic experts in the field of pedagogy, the main reason for the long ban on the use of ballpoint pens in educational institutions Soviet Union was due to the fact that they did not contribute to the development of good handwriting in students.

Modern educators look at this problem more broadly - there is an opinion that fountain pens initial stage learning is an ideal writing tool that positively influences the child's psychomotor abilities.

Ballpoint pens became widespread in the USSR at the end of the 60s, but for a long time they were not accepted into service with Soviet schoolchildren. At first, the quality of such writing instruments left much to be desired. But the main reason for refusing to use ballpoint pens was the struggle for the calligraphic handwriting of a Soviet student.

Until the mid-70s, schoolchildren in the USSR used pens with inkwells - "non-spill" and later - fountain pens refilled with ink from factory bottles. If the teacher noticed that the text in the notebook was written with a ballpoint pen, he could give the student a “deuce”, as for outstanding work.

What are the disadvantages of a ballpoint pen

According to Garmash, director of the Moscow School No. 760, Soviet bans on the use of ballpoint pens were designed not only and not so much to develop a beautiful handwriting in a child, but to provide optimal conditions for his psychophysical development.

Vladimir Yuryevich refers to the opinions of physicians who drew conclusions not in favor of ballpoint pens for young children: with such a letter, the child experiences a delay in breathing, a failure of the heart rhythm. In addition, a junior high school student can continuously write with a ballpoint pen in this mode for up to 20 minutes, which adversely affects his health.

When writing with a ballpoint pen, the muscles of the back and abdomen of the student are tense, causing the child's motor skills to suffer. Largely as a result of this forced constraint, many childhood diseases occur, and the educational and cognitive capabilities of children decrease.

Pen pros

Another authoritative specialist in the field of national pedagogy and medicine, doctor of medical sciences, honorary worker, agrees with Vladimir Yuryevich general education V. F. Bazarny. Vladimir Filippovich is convinced that the refusal to use fountain pens in Soviet schools was the wrong decision: these writing instruments are optimally suited for the development of certain skills in a child at school, and moreover, the process of writing with a fountain pen goes in unison with the psychophysical activity of the student.

Firstly, the use of a fountain pen initially correctly “sets” the child’s hand, and secondly, the vital rhythms of the body - brain impulses, heartbeat, breathing rate, proceed at the same frequency as the process of impulse-press calligraphic writing with such a device, Bazarny believes. .

Such a letter, according to the scientist, eventually contributes to the development of a child's motor automatism, consistent with the nature of endogenous biorhythms. Bazarny is convinced that it is enough to use fountain pens during the first years of study - then the necessary, correct writing rhythm will be retained by a person when writing with other accessories.

Teachers from the Balashikha zemstvo gymnasium, where students use fountain pens, say that children use them to write more competently and deliberately. The child performs the task more calmly because the frequency of pressing the pen coincides with the heart rate. Moreover, it is easier to write with a fountain pen than with a ballpoint pen: you do not need to press so hard on the paper.

Which countries write with fountain pens

At the state level, primary school is required to use fountain pens in Ukraine, in Germany. Last year, the Association of Parents' Committees and Communities addressed an open letter to the President of Russia, the Minister of Education and other authorized persons, asking them to support the system of education and national patriotic education of children "Russian Classical School".

The project, in particular, provides for a return to many positive teaching methods and tools in general education institutions that were used in the USSR. There is also a clause in it about the mandatory use of fountain pens instead of ballpoint pens in the lower grades.