Grantville Gazette, Volume XII

by Eric Flint

  If there are only a few people interested in a book, they will probably need to make, or commission, a hand or typed copy. It isn't much extra trouble to simultaneously prepare a speculative "sales" copy or two with the aid of a pantograph or carbon paper.

  When the level of interest justifies a print run of hundreds, we are talking about typing a stencil and then duplicating by means of a spirit duplicator, mimeograph, or "Vignelligraph."

  The picture changes somewhat if substantial computer resources can be invested in the duplication process. If you just need one copy, the combined speed achieved by scanning, followed by dot matrix printing in graphics mode, is about 0.5-3 ppm, more than ten times faster than typewriting.

  On the other hand, for making large numbers of copies of textual material, it is still faster to print from a typed stencil than to use a dot matrix printer.

  When the demand is for thousands of copies, the book will probably be reprinted by a conventional printing press. The copy quality is far higher, and the cost is spread over a large number of purchasers.

  Work Hours Per Copyist-Year

  We also need to decide how much time is spent by each copyist, per year. I realize that ten hour days, with only Sunday off (a 60 hour work week), were not unusual in this time period. But copying is not something that can be done accurately and efficiently if work is prolonged. Even if you are a Dickensian scrivener.

  Consequently, I am going to assume 2000 copy hours per copyist year. But 3000 certainly isn't impossible.

  The Encyclopedias

  A reasonable initial target for copying and printing (and, eventually, translation) would be the encyclopedias, especially the 1911 encyclopedia (only two copies known). Chances are that Grantville itself would want to increase the number of copies available, to minimize the risk of loss as a result of fire (not to mention Croat raids!).

  The 1911 EB is over 44 million words. Call it 45. So, by itself, it is a 22–23 copyist-year project with the liberal copying allowances made above. Half that, if you are using typists instead of scribes.

  The modern Encyclopedia Britannica claims (Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.) to have over 44 million words, and thus is comparable in size to the 1911 EB.

  According to Wikipedia, the 2004 edition of the Encyclopedia Americana contains 25 million words, and Collier's Encyclopedia (1997 edition?), 21 million.

  The World Book Encyclopedia is about 10,000 pages, but I don't have a word count. Likewise, I know Father Mazzare has a copy of the Catholic Encycopedia, but not its statistics.

  Since the encyclopedias are in heavy demand, there is likely to be a special protocol for getting them duplicated. It would be wise to set up typesetters inside the high school building so the encyclopedia doesn't have to travel far. I figure one volume at a time would be withdrawn from circulation. Options include

  1) bring the volume to the onsite typesetters and set directly. (The printing can be done offsite.) This is faster and more accurate than if they work from an intermediate copy, but other users will be screaming.

  2) Hand copy (or type) first. Then typeset from the intermediate copy. This will delay printing but keep the book in circulation.

  3) Photocopy the volume first, then typeset from the photocopy. That's the fastest method, but it will require devotion of our limited photocopy resources.

  4) scan the volume, OCR, correct the text, and print to a computer printer. That has the advantage of creating electronically searchable full text useful for data mining. We could decide to speed things up by doing an uncorrected preprint.

  5) scan the volume and print each page, as a graphic image, to a computer printer. That is faster than #4 and, if we can burn CDs to store the graphics, we can do the OCR at our leisure.

  In an ideal world, we would probably pick option 3. Unfortunately, even the 1911EB is close to thirty thousand pages. While paper is available in early seventeenth-century Europe, it doesn't meet the specifications for modern copiers. It is very doubtful that we have that much proper copy paper in Grantville. And even if we do, we might not have a matching supply of toner.

  It has been suggested that the library might have the encyclopedias being rebound so each of the standard volumes is split into several smaller sections. That would allow for more people to use the encyclopedias simultaneously, and it would also mean that only a smaller section is held out of circulation for typesetting purposes.

  Number of Books in Grantville

  Catch-22. If I explain exactly how I came up with my estimates, some readers will be bored. And if I don't, some readers will complain that my estimates aren't justified. So, I am providing a telegraphic, bare-bones explanation here, and if you want all the details, look in the "Books of Grantville Appendix" I have posted to www.1632.org .

  In a bottom-up estimate, we look at each kind of library, estimate its holdings, and add up. We need to look at the three school libraries, the public library, books at places of business, and home book collections.

  I have also made a top-down estimate of the number of books sold to Grantville residents, based on per capita book sales (adjusted for the lower interest in books in Marion County) and a simple "discard then buy" model of book purchasing and discarding. Public library annual discard rates seem to be in the 0.2–7% range. For a discard rate of 5%, the model person had 64 books at age 40. For a rate of 1%, the person was left with 122 books. For details, see the Appendix.

  Taking this into account, I decided to use, as my final estimate, 50 books/person (15 books/person from public and school libraries, 35 personal), or 175,000 total.

  Distinct Titles

  What we want to know is not how many distinct titles are in each of the libraries mentioned above, but how many there would be if all of those libraries were merged. I have looked at the distinct titles/holdings figures for a variety of individual public/academic libraries and library consortiums. I found a linear relationship between log titles and log holdings (R2); a holding of 175,000 is predicted to have 74,000 distinct titles.

  However, a large library consortium might include 100 libraries, each with tens of thousands of books, and might make some effort to avoid duplication. Whereas we are looking at 3500 personal libraries, each with just tens of books, plus a few larger libraries, with minimal effort to avoid duplication. Consequently, I believe that the number of distinct titles in Grantville could be as low as 35,000 (20% holdings).

  Distinct Corpus Size

  So, it's time to multiply.

  35,000-74,000 distinct titles

  *70-100,000 words/book (see Appendix)

  =2.45-7.4 billion words!

  Of course, it is uncertain whether every book in Grantville will in fact be completely copied. Some researchers will read the books, take notes, and only copy key passages.

  My First Copy Time Estimate

  So, to hand-copy 2.45–7.4 billion words, at a rate of 17 wpm, working 2000 hours a year, we would need 1200–3600 copyist-years!

  That's not counting time for negotiating with people to let you borrow books from them, picking up and returning the books, cataloging what you have copied so you ignore duplicates, etc. It also ignores that you are competing with other would-be readers and copiers for access to the works.

  If typewriters, with "average" typists, are twice as fast, we would need only 600–1800 typist-years to accomplish the same goal. Thus, it could be done with 300–900 typewriters, and typists, working for two years. I think it probable that no more than 200–300 typewriters/typists would be devoted to the duplication project, and that would mean it could take two to nine years to be completed. The typing produces one typed copy or possibly a few hundred "ditto" copies or a thousand or so "mimeo" copies.

  Obviously, it isn't necessary to assume that all of the work is done by typists. But each typist (equipped with a typewriter) is worth at least two scribes. And typesetting is about one-sixth the speed of hand copying, so to truly reprint all the books with a letter press could take se
veral decades.

  In any event, it is important to recognize that all that hand-copying or typing accomplishes is to disseminate modern English texts. Which brings us to the translation problem.

  Translation

  Most down-timers are going to have trouble reading twentieth-century American English. So for the corpus to be useful, it will have to be translated. Most likely, into Latin, although there will probably be German and French translations, too. And there will be demand for down-time annotations, as well.

  A common modern standard for translation is 2500 words a day (proz.com). With translators working five days a week that would be about 650,000 words per translator year. And translating a 100,000 page book would nominally a 40 day job.

  The trouble with use of this standard is it makes a lot of assumptions: a professional translator (probably a native speaker of the target language and fluent in the source language) who is familiar with the subject matter of the book. But for down-timers, a lot of the social and technical referents will be very confusing. This subject was explored in some detail in Turner, "Non-Fiction: Exegesis and Interpretation of Up-Timer Printed Matter," Grantville Gazette, Volume 6.

  My guess is that the translators will be lucky to achieve 500 words a day if they want the translation to be a sensible one. But even at 2500 words a day, five days a week, translating two billion words would take over 3000 translator-years. Translating just 1911EB would require 69 translator years.

  Conclusion

  One of the great tragedies of history was the destruction of the Royal Library of Alexandria. The library contained perhaps 500,000 scrolls (the number of individual works is even less certain), and drew scholars from all over the Hellenistic World. There are many ancient manuscripts which we know once existed, and probably were held by that library, but which we know of nowadays only by reputation.

  The Grantville Corpus rivals the Royal Library of Alexandria in size, but its loss would be far more devastating. The only way to ensure that it is not lost through some mischance of war or nature is to reprint it.

  Bibliography

  The Bibliography for this article is in the Books of Grantville Appendix, posted at www.1632.org .

  Aircraft in the 1632 Universe

  by Gorg Huff

  The essence of the Ring of Fire was the knowledge, ideas and information that it provided to the Early Modern period. Perhaps the least predictable aspect of the Ring of Fire was the order of inventing. In our own history the railroad (1804) came a century before the airplane (1903). Now, I know someone is going to correct me here. They will point out, quite accurately, that the Englishman George Cayley made a glider flight in 1856. That the Montgolfier brothers flew in a hot air balloon in 1783. That several other people are credited with the first powered-flight in various parts of the world any time from the late 1880s to 1905. All true, all true. So what? If you go back and look for information on the railroad, you will find the first rut roads (an ancestor of the railroad) were in existence around 430 B.C. Yes, again, I know they weren't "real" railroads and they didn't have steam-driven locomotives. But the when of their invention depends on where you draw the line. For the railroad, we draw it in 1804 with the first steam locomotive. For aircraft, we draw it in 1903 with the first powered heavier-than-air flight.

  The important questions are: when did the world wake up and realize that there would be choo-choo trains? And when did the world wake up and realize there would be airplanes? And the answer is: about a century apart. By the time the first consistent, documented, repeatable powered-flight occurred, the Iron Horse had already conquered most of the United States, Western Europe, also large chunks of India, parts of Africa, China . . . Well, you get the idea. According to family history, a great-grandfather of mine who was, by all accounts, not a very nice person, once ordered a young woman from his home for having the effrontery to claim that man would someday fly in a powered heavier-than-air aircraft. This was in 1904. Apparently, the stiff-necked old coot was an honest man, because when an airplane flew over the house only a couple of years later, he went and looked up the young woman to apologize. There's actually a reason for me telling that story. Even after something can be done, whether it's railroads, airplanes or submarines, you still have to convince people that the attempt is worth the effort. From 1804 for the steam-powered railroad, and from 1903 for the airplane, that process really began and proceeded apace.

  In the 1632 universe those processes were separated by two years. It is a safe bet that when the first airplane flew over Magdeburg, there were still people in town that did not believe railroads worked. People like my great-grandpa. For all practical purposes the first functional railroad engine and the first functional airplane might as well have taken place at the same moment. So why does that matter? Because this article is not about how to build an airplane. There are lots of articles that go into much more detail than I ever could; there are even kits. If you have the time and money you can build your own. I know several people who have. This is not even an article about how to build an airplane in the 1632 universe, though of necessity it will touch on that using two examples: The Jupiter, built by TransEuropean Airlines by S&M Aircraft and the Gustav built for the USE Air Force. (For the Jupiter, see "The Monster" in Grantville Gazette, Volume 12.)

  This is an article about why to build an airplane or whether to build an airplane. Why invest the resources in such an expensive undertaking? Both for the government and for private enterprise, the resources necessary to make something fly in a controlled way will buy a lot of guns and, for that matter, quite a bit of butter.

  Militarily, aircraft have proven both their worth and their limitations in the twentieth century, as scout platforms and weapons platforms that can observe and hit the enemy from the highest of high ground. They are an important, perhaps even vital, part of a combined arms approach to warfare and offer those who have them rapid reconnaissance and communications. Those advantages are quite clear to the generals of the USE. What isn't clear at all is how much are they going to cost to produce and how long it will take. Those questions get answered in 1633 when the Las Vegas Belle takes its first flight. And the only reasonable reason that it takes that long is because the New US government was unwilling to make a significant investment in aircraft production until they knew for sure, not just that it could be done, but that they could do it in a reasonable amount of time. While the Las Vegas Belle is answering that military question, it is also answering the parallel civilian question.

  In our timeline, the first attempt at a for-real passenger plane happened in Russia. Not in the United States or England or France, but in backward, barbaric Russia. I don't mean to insult Russia or Russians when I say that, but that is pretty much the way most of Europe and America thought of Russia at the time. And they weren't totally wrong. In 1913, when the 16-passenger, four-engine Ilya Muromets was first flown, Russia was a nation of contrasts. There was both great wealth and knowledge and grinding poverty and ignorance. So why there? Why not the good old USA or England, France or some other "civilized" country? Well, part of the reason was that Igor Sikorsky was an honest-to-goodness genius, but I submit that that wasn't the whole reason. Curtis was a genius too; so were lots of other people working in the newly-born field of aircraft design. And Sikorsky didn't build the Ilya in his basement nor from his own funds. He was a wealthy man from a wealthy family which supported his efforts, but that would not have been enough by itself. It was enough to get him started and enough to let him win some prizes and come to the attention of the elite of Russia. But his wealth alone was not enough to build the Ilya. He was able to raise significant money for the project. I submit that the reason he was able to raise that money was because Russia was backward.

  Imagine the conversation when some bright-eyed enthusiast in the good old USA started to wax poetic about his plans to build a multiengine passenger plane:

  "It will never work!"

  "It will, sir. I'm convinced we can buil
d this plane."

  "Don't interrupt. Even if you did manage to get it to fly, what advantage would it have over the already existent network of railroads and roads. Will it be faster than the trains?"

  "Well, yes, probably. Most of them anyway. It should go about fifty to eighty miles per hour, depending on a number of factors. (Remembered this is the early teens to the early twenties. Airplanes just weren't that fast then.) There are some express trains that go faster than that. But most are slower and the plane will travel as the crow flies. That will help some."

  "Will it be safer than trains?"

  "Well, no. Not at first. Trains are a proven technology."

  "Will it be cheaper than the trains?"

  "No. It will be much more expensive."

  "So I should invest a medium-sized fortune in a device that won't work and, even if it did, would be more expensive, less safe. And not much faster or even quite as fast as the fastest trains?"

  This not the sort of conversation likely to produce large investments in the development of commercial aircraft.

  Sikorsky, on the other hand, was in Russia. Russia did have railroads, however the rail network was much less extensive with larger gaps. He was not asked how a working passenger plane would compete with railroads because his potential investors already knew the answer. "What railroads?"

  That lack of existing solutions also had a secondary effect: The potential investor was not as likely to focus on reasons why his designs wouldn't work. They were looking for a solution, not for a reason not to invest. When the Ilya Muromets first flew, the reports were met in the west with skepticism. The experts in Europe and America had, for the most part, convinced themselves that a plane that large would never get off the ground. Even after WWI when the Russian Revolution caused Sikorsky to leave Russia and come to the USA, he was not able to build planes as big as the Ilya Muromets. This was after more than forty Ilya Muromets had been built by Russia and used as heavy bombers during WWI.