▲ 210 points
back
89 comments
My wife found a cool 1896 Harper's School Geography textbook at an antique shop and got it for me, and it had the original pupil's name and signature (and date of 1897!) written on the front matter, but there are also a few other handwritten notes and the name of the school itself... it's such a neat little self-contained time capsule.
It also boggles my mind:
1. How accurate it was, in terms of map fidelity
2. The quality of the illustrations and prints, many of which are in several (what I imagine was offset?) colors!
3. How well it's held up. The cover looks essentially completely trashed, but the interior of the book's pages are almost entirely intact, and in great shape. (I'm not worried of them turning to dust in my hands, for instance.)
It's always fascinating to see just how little has changed, especially among schoolkids in nigh on 300 years!
Here's essentially the exact book I'm talking about, so it's not _that_ uncommon. Looks to be in almost identical condition, too: https://www.ebay.com/itm/184283104558
Prolly a nitpick, but closer to 100 than 300 years. Rather significantly, too.
I believe the GP was referencing the posted article with the 300 years comment.
i feel that by the turn of the 20th century we generally had fully accurate maps. 1897 is not really all that long ago - we were well on our way to discovering special relativity at that point
> by the turn of the 20th century we generally had fully accurate maps
New Zealand may having something to say about that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omission_of_New_Zealand_from_m...
I wonder whether a YouTube video, a post on Instagram, or similar artifact of our modern world would ever be able to survive 350 years. This …longevity(?) seems to be something that is unique to physical objects like books, printed photographs, or paper cuttings. In 350 years, will we look back at this time and considering it another dark age because so little of the content we are producing will still exist in an accessible form?
Books are not at all special. Only a very small fraction of writings from antiquity are still available to us. Some exist only as lumps of carbon in the Herculaneum papyri and haven't been seen by humans in a thousand years.
Overall, most books ever printed have been destroyed. It's just that we've printed a lot of them. It's mostly a survivorship and recency bias.
We're barely into our first century of producing digital artifacts. Some things have been lost, of course, but we do still have a lot of information about the very earliest machines. We still have some of the first programs, some of the first machines are still running today.
We might be able to preserve things in the very long term if we can convince ourselves it's worth the effort, but more than likely the far future will have lost as much from our time as we have from antiquity.
Is it due to a bias on our part that we think that it's fascinating? Why would people be different? People haven't changed, we just have phones now.
> we just have phones now
That’s a huge understatement. We have electricity, refrigeration, medicine, mass transit (including international), human rights, enormous increases in population, fast media, internet, nuclear weapons, universal literacy, factory lines, spaceships, cities of many millions of people. Anyone that’s played Civilisation knows how far the tech tree goes once you hit the Enlightenment.
And you can see how much internet and social media have changed society, so imagine the impact of all those things combined on the human brain.
I have an "autograph book" that belonged to my great-great grandmother, with many signatures from around 1886. It's the equivalent of kids signing a yearbook.
What boggles my mind is how incredible all these kids' handwriting was. Precise, flowing, beautiful cursive.
It's also a quality cover and paper.
A few years ago I visited a high school for some competition that one of my kids was in. They had posters of each graduating class going back decades, and most of the photos had the kid's signature underneath. It was amazing to compare the signatures from the 1970s and 1980s to the modern ones. The old ones were neat, and showed a lot of individual style. As time went on they looked less confident and showed less individual variation -- most of them looked like standard elementary school cursive. The newest ones were the worst, some were a shaky-looking cursive, some were just printed.
Penmanship, and even just ordinary cursive writing, is just not taught anymore. I understand that it's hardly needed in today's world, but there's something about putting thoughts to paper by hand that enforces some deliberate thinking, unlike keyboarding or speech-to-text. Some studies show that taking class notes by hand is more effective than using a keyboard or recording.
looks like you made a sale. Almost makes me wonder if this was an elaborate ploy to promote your ebay store. In which case, well done
My mom lived in a historical house when she was a kid in the 60s. Since then, the house has become a museum. There are a lot of "artifacts" on display that "came from the 1800s" that are actually just toys my moms brothers made. My mom got a good laugh about it when she took me to visit the place.
I'm sure these finds must have dated in some way to verify the authenticity, but I always think back to seeing my uncles toys on display as if they were historical artifacts when I see stuff like this.
A lot of these historical house “museums” are a pleasant diversion for tourists more than anything else. Note how they are all haunted - ghost tours are pretty easy money
I have never come across a house museum that claims to be haunted. Must be a cultural thing that doesn't exist in Belgium. Possibly because loads of things are ancient here anyway, no need to embellish with more nonsense I guess.
>> sure these finds must have dated in some way to verify the authenticity ....
What happens if the uncle used very old wood or cloth to make the toys. Will the dating technique be able to find the actual age ?
Dating is done with more than just material analysis. Evidence of tools used to make the toy, techniques for things like joins and stitching, etc. can all be indicative of methods that can give at least a lower bound. How applicable method differentiation is to this specific case obviously depends on a number of things.
Has your mom got in touch with the museum to tell them that, so they can improve? If not why not?
I honestly don't know. I imagine not.
It’s not their mothers responsibility to correct their incompetence, or (imo) more likely negligence and information falsification.
There's no mention in the article as to why the cuttings were beneath the floorboards. My guess is one girl got mad at another and slipped her classwork between the boards. Possible since this predated tongue & groove (the technology angle).
According to another article, they just slipped through the cracks on the floor from time to time and accumulated over the years.
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/london/sutton-house-a...
I imagine the debris also included coins and the like.
Reminds of this story where they found paper planes in the school house ceiling dating before 1910 - https://youtu.be/A555LYvAPp0?t=16m08s
I wonder how old they were, they are quite good!
I've often wondered if people back then were more skilled at music and art overall since there were fewer mindless leisure activities.
But, at the same time, I'm sure a guitar or ink and paper were comparatively expensive, so who knows.
Plus people could drink at 10 back then, so I'm sure they found plenty of mindless distraction.
The majority of instrument makers of that time had to work almost solely to the market which was primarily working musicians who generally did not make much money, they did not have a massive middle class buying their instruments like we have today so most instruments were not terribly expensive. But music did not become a past time for the average person for a couple centuries with the rise of the guitar which was cheap on a whole new level and much cheaper than the lutes it replaced. The guitar gave us a good sounding instrument that was easy to make and easy to play without years of training and all the luthiers, musicians and composers were hopping on that band wagon to make a little extra cash which only fueled the romantic era guitar craze. The vast bulk of innovation when it comes to the acoustic guitar happened in this period and most of the "new" ideas we see these days were actually done centuries ago and a surprising amount of it by Rene LaCote who does not get anywhere near the recognition or credit he deserves.
I'd assume singing was much more ubiquitous in the past, since it was one of the few ways ordinary people could entertain themselves/each other (this was clearly the case well into the 1900s in most, if not all, Western societies).
> But, at the same time, I'm sure a guitar or ink and paper were comparatively expensive, so who knows.
When I once came across the price for paper in mid 18th century Germany (I did not keep a reference unfortunately), I compared it to the estimated average annual wage of that time and used today's average annual wage to calculate a price in Euro. The result: the price of a DIN A4 sized piece of paper (623.7 cm²) was aprox. 1 Euro. Not cheap, but in principle still affordable in low quantities for most people. And this is half of today's typical price for one such sheet of handmade paper.
Fun aside re: guitars:
Guitars as we know them are actually quite new, and going by "350 years" in the article, didn't really exist when these bits of paper were dropped through the floorboards.
Vermeer's The guitar player dates back to just over 350 years ago, shows a baroque guitar, and as far as I am aware these were complex, really expensive things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o-TOg-y_BI
I would guess there were lots of lutes and gitterns, though; they are relatively less complex. And I would absolutely think that the children who went to this school saw, owned and were expected to play musical instruments; they came from those sorts of families.
Can’t remember where I first heard but in the 18th century in England they had wooden cat gin vending machines. You walk up, say a magic phrase, put a coin in and it would pour gin through its paw. This was apparently a way to skirt a licensing law.
> the first vending machine was specifically created to serve gin
The first vending machine was actually first century and dispensed holy water. It was actually mechanized similarly to pre-electronic vending machines. https://www.logicvending.co.uk/history-vending-machines
We used to hide fruit in sockets with a small piece of paper signed "Decay Inc". Looking forward to a Smithsonian article about it in 350 years.
Too bad “hean” was a misspelling. A hitherto unknown mythical bird would have been even more interesting. Or was it a species that became extinct?
Standard spelling was only being proposed around this time, so it's not a misspelling.
The article says it is a misspelling.
I was suprised to see that claimed as a misspelling. The lettering was very neat, nearly perfect otherwise, so with that evident attention to detail I thought a misspelling was unlikely. I assumed it was just an older variation of the spelling.
Why where they so much more skilled than today's schoolchildren?
> Why where they so much more skilled than today's schoolchildren?
Because today's school children spend a little more time studying mathematics and science. Music, arts and crafts took up a much larger part of 17th century girls education. Upper and middle class girls were being taught what they needed to be good wives.
> The school provided lessons in writing, reading, math, music and art. The girls studied paper cutting alongside other crafts, such as embroidery and needlework
If the only way you could entertain yourself is either make something interesting or (maybe) read the Bible, you'd be very good at making things.
Because that's what they practiced, presumably. Given that they misspelled a 3 letter word, I suspect they were better at arts and crafts than writing?
No cable, radio serials, abundant and cheap ready-made toys, recorded music, game boys, smart phones, pre-made mass manufactured decorations for nearly no money, dirt-cheap puzzle books at every store, clothes so cheap they’re disposable, et c.
If you want creative and skillful culture to be mass culture, just make stuff really expensive and eliminate recording and mechanical reproduction. Elevate the social and financial rewards of sub-superstar levels of craft, art, and creativity. We’re losing those things because the value of them’s been driven into the ground.
Were they?
Sorry but that paper looks too white.
IIRC paper was mainly made from linen or cotton back then and it actually was less likely to turn yellow than more modern wood pulp paper (which was only invented in the early 1800s)
Paper made from textile is slightly alkaline and contains very little lignin which is highly reactive and causes paper to turn yellow over time. Pulp paper is also more acidic which also makes it more susceptible to degradation.
You have no idea of the white balance settings used.
Earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41045233
Thanks! Macro-expanded:
Lost by Schoolgirls: A display of 17th century papercuts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41045233 - July 2024 (20 comments)