Two-piece printer and toner

Posted by noelbynature under Lifestyle, Traditions, art
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yg writes about an ancient technology that has changed the face of the world:

Ok, it’s really an ink-stone and ink-stick that is used for inking Chinese calligraphy. But I’m not kidding about changing the face of the world. The development of writing and writing systems has had a profound influence on the development of human civilisation, because it allows for knowledge to be stored and retrieved for later use. After all, before writing, all you had to work with was just memory.

Of course, by the time we get to the ink-stone stage, writing has evolved from being just a utility task to becoming more of an artform. yg writes:

i remember the ink-stone was rectangular and had a small reservoir for water. to produce the ink for writing, you dipped the ink-stick in the water and ground or rubbed it, in a circular motion, on the ink-stone or ink-slab. the ‘mau pi’ (hair brush) had a handle made from bamboo and the brush was made from some animal hair, usually sheep hair.

my immediate neighbour had to write a few pages - i cannot remember how many - each school day. i would volunteer to help him write. you had to hold the brush straight and upright and your palm should not come into contact with the writing paper. i quite enjoyed the exercise because i treated i as a form of art, which it is.

It should be interesting to note that the earliest forms of Chinese writing emerged at around 1,500 BCE, but the earliest forms of writing is found in Sumeria (present day Iran and Iraq) where evidence appears from around 8,000 BCE. It took far longer for humankind to get from stone tools to the development of writing than it did for the development of writing to the internet. Read more about this ink-stone here.

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