Journalist and historian Richard Rhodes delivered the Arthur Curley Memorial Lecture January 8 at the ALA Midwinter Meeting. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), Rhodes chose to talk to the ALA audience about the introduction and slow acceptance of new technologies, going all the way back to ancient times.
Rhodes quoted Augustine of Hippo, whose account in the Confessions remains the “first instance in Western literature of someone reading silently.” Since the invention of writing, a reader had to read aloud in order to comprehend the meaning of the text, he said. Therefore, in 383 A.D. Augustine was stunned when he came upon Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, reading silently without even moving his lips. This is his account of the incident: “Now, as he read, his eyes glanced over the pages and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. Often when we came to his room—for no one was forbidden to enter, nor was it his custom that the arrival of visitors should be announced to him—we would see him thus reading to himself. After we had sat for a long time in silence—for who would dare interrupt one so intent?—we would then depart, realizing that he was unwilling to be distracted in the little time he could gain for the recruiting of his mind, free from the clamor of other men's business.”
The process of reading aloud was a noisy social experience, while reading silently internalized the process, making it much more private. Rhodes speculated that online reading has reversed this trend, with shared social reading becoming a noisy group effort once again.
Up through the Renaissance, the tradition of text memorization was strong. An entire branch of rhetoric arose that taught young scholars to associate segments of memorized text with the architectural features of a building—a cathedral, for example, with various columns, doors, aisles, and chairs. The successful student could walk through the cathedral and recall specific texts at each point. “There was no other way to store information except by using your brain,” Rhodes noted. That is, until printed books made information retrieval relatively inexpensive.
“Similar to the debate in the 1990s over using hand-held calculators in school, with skeptics insisting that students would never learn the essentials of math,” Rhodes said, the introduction of the lower-cost printed book was viewed by scribes as impermanent (parchment lasts 1,000 years, while paper will survive 200 years at most), imperfect (riddled with typos, while “copying by hand involves more diligence and industry” to achieve accuracy), and deleterious to scholarship. Just as calculators won out eventually, Rhodes noted, printed books also prevailed.
“Nobody believes you when you come up with a new invention,” Rhodes said. He told the story of avant-garde composer George Antheil and Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr, who during World War II patented a method for rapidly changing radio frequencies in order to make it difficult for the enemy to detect or jam radio-guided torpedoes. They were ignored by the military but gained recognition in the 1990s when the technique was used in the development of wireless technologies, including Bluetooth.
Rhodes ended by saying that the most precious moment in his life was when he taught his 4-year-old daughter Kate (who, as an adult, was in the audience) to read. “One day in the middle of her favorite book (by Dr. Seuss), Kate understood” that those squiggles of ink on paper had meaning, and “a whole world of comprehension opened up to her right before my eyes.”
