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06662_Field_TCUM T227.txt
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1996-04-10
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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