popularizing prints and, finally, making printing possible by the 
fifteenth century.

     With the moving of information in printed form, the wheel 
and the road came into play again after having been in 
abeyance for a thousand years. In England, pressure from the 
press brought about hard-surface roads in the eighteenth 
century, with all the population and industrial rearrangement 
that entailed. Print, or mechanized writing, introduced a 
separation and extension of human functions unimaginable 
even in Roman times. It was only natural, therefore, that 
greatly increased wheel speeds, both on road and in factory, 
should be related to the alphabet that had once done a similar 
job of speed-up and specialization in the ancient world. Speed, 
at least in its lower reaches of the mechanical order, always 
operates to separate, to extend, and to amplify functions of