Invention of Paper
Circa 105

Court official and eunuch T'sai Lun introduced paper (boiled and pressed tree bark, hemp, rags, fishnet) to the Chinese court. This invention led to his promotion by Emperor Ho-Ti. There may have been earlier papers, but this is the first recorded use. Prior to this mud and stone tablets, papyrus and silk sheets had been used for preserving the written word.
 

Invention of Movable Type
1450

Johannes Gutenberg (born circa 1400 A.D.), a German from Mainz, Germany printed the Bible associated with his name, probably the most famous book in history. Prior to this each line had to be written by hand (usually by monks), or carved in wood. With this invention metal letters could be moved around and interchanged in any combination, thus allowing the relatively cheap mass production of books. Prior to this each book was a scarce work of art which took months or years to produce.
 

First Novel
Eleventh Century

Murasaki Shikibu, 33 year-old widow, mother and attendant to the Japanese Empress Akiko, wrote 54 chapters as mini sagas, compiled into The Tale of Genji, for the entertainment of her empress. It tells of the misadventures of a favorite member of the imperial court, his relationships with his several wives and mistresses, sexual jealousy and family dysfunction.
 

First Novel of Western Literature
1605

Don Quixote, written by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), the son of a Spanish surgeon and a soldier in the Spanish army, is a compilation of short adventures of this windmill-tilting hero who could not distinguish between romance and reality.
 

First Children's Book
1658

Jan Amos Comenius, a Protestant minister from Moravia, published Orbis Pictus ("Pictured World") as a better learning tool for children. Each page had a picture with bilingual text (English and Latin) written beneath it. The book became popular also as a basic Latin text. This was 39 years before Charles Perrault published the Mother Goose rhymes.
 

Invention
of the
Eraser
1739

Joseph Priestley (1733-1803), English chemist, discovered the ability of the newly-introduced material, rubber, to remove pencil mistakes from paper, but it wasn't until Charles Goodyear developed vulcanization in 1839 to keep rubber from spoiling that anyone though to make a commercially viable rubber eraser. A Philadelphian, Hyman Lipman, got a patent on an erasure attached to the end of a pencil in 1858, but this was later declared invalid because his invention combined two things with no new use.
 

First U.S.
Public Library
1748

America's first architect, Peter Harrison, designed the Redwood Library, built in Newport, Rhode Island. He was an Englishman born in 1716, who immigrated to the Colonies in 1738, where he allegedly helped foil a French invasion of the colonies. The library was a modest affair with a simple Palladian-style design, but may be one of the New World's oldest examples of faux finishing (part of its pine plank exterior is beveled and covered in paint mixed with sand to simulate stone). As the Royal Customs Collector of New Haven, his neighbors threatened to lynch him just prior to the American Revolution. When he eventually died of a heart attack the townspeople ransacked his belongings and burned his house. He is little known in the U.S.
 

First English Dictionary
1755

Samuel Johnson, of London, published his mammoth Dictionary of the English Language in 1755. Previous lexicons of Greek and Latin had been published in the first centuries A.D. and B.C., but this was the first modern effort to compile a listing of the words used by an entire culture, although it dealt rather exclusively with words used by the upper and educated classes.
 

Invention
of the
Pencil
1794

Graphite in various forms has been used for many centuries and there is no known "inventor" of this writing tool, but by the time France went to war with Britain in 1793, the only worthwhile "pencils" were those made from natural graphite from England. Cut off from its usual source of graphite, the French government commissioned Nicholas Jacques Conté, chemist and painter from Paris, to devise a substitute. He patented molds of impure graphite admixed with clay which worked well.
 

First Comprehensive Dictionary of English
1806

Noah Webster, from Yale, spent most of his life publishing books on language, among other topics. His masterpiece, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, was the first English dictionary to include more than literary terms, e.g. technical, scientific, and colloquial terms. It established American English as its own specific style.
 

Invention of
Carbon Paper
1806

Ralph Wedgwood was the first to patent "carbonated paper" to replicate handwritten text. Originally a leaf of paper soaked in printer's ink and dried, it was eventually converted for use in the typewriter (carbon paper ribbons). This product is the cause of all the CC e-mails traversing the world today; CC stands for "carbon copy" to..., but the paper is in little demand today.
 

Invention of the Pencil Sharpener
1828

Bernard Lassimone, a French mathematician, patented the earliest-known pencil sharpener in 1828. The first manual sharpener resembling those in use today was patented in 1847 by Therry des Estwaux, another Frenchman.
 

Charles Dickens made the first literary tour (reading his own works), in U.S., in 1842, and again in 1867-68. His tours were so successful that he earned more money (today's equivalent of $500,000) touring America than he did selling his books. Black market tickets for his performances sold for today's equivalent of $300. After him, for some reason, the practice became quite popular among authors and is still so today.
 

First Book to Sell 1,000,000 Copies
1851

Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, published by J. P. Jewett, sold 3,000 copies on its first day of publication. It was shortly being read by virtually every literate citizen of the U.S. The book sold 1,500,000 copies in England during its first year in print, and by 1900 it had been translated into 23 languages. Besides the Bible, it was the best-selling book of the nineteenth century. When meeting Stowe in 1862, Abraham Lincoln said, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."
 

First Pop-up
Book
Circa 1860s

Mystic and poet Ramon Llul of Majorca, Spain, used revolving discs to help illustrate his theories in the thirteenth century, but the first pop-up books were first mass-produced by children by the London-based Dean and Son's Publishers. Ribbons were usually pulled to make the parts pop up. Lothar Meggendorfer, a Munich artist, is still considered the great master of this art, especially for his Internationaler Zirkus (1888).
 

Invention
of the
Typewriter
1868

Christopher Latham Sholes, newspaperman, printer and state senator from Wisconsin, patented the first commercially successful writing machine with his partners, Samuel Soulé and Carlos Glidden, but could never raise the capital to market it. He sold the patent rights to Remington Arms shortly thereafter. The machine featured a moving carriage return, pianolike key action, and the QWERTY keyboard arrangement (commonly used letters spaced out to prevent jamming of type arms). He patented an improved keyboard arrangement in 1896, but everyone thought it not worth the cost to retrain all the typists; the QWERTY system is still the most popular arrangement for keyboards, including computer keyboards.
 

Invention of the Fountain Pen
1884

Lewis Waterman, a New York businessman, patented the first reliable fountain pen. Annoyed with the messy and unpredictable pens of his day, he used capillary action to make a reliable ink feed which ran smoothly without blotting or skipping. For this he is considered "the father of the fountain pen."
 

First Nobel
Prize Winner
1901

The first Nobel Prize for literature went to French poet René Francois Armand Prudhomme, known as Sully Prudhomme. Born in Paris in 1839, he studied law and worked in a notary's office, and his first book of poems was published in 1865. His most famous, and melancholic, work was a 4,000-line epic poem about a Faustian search for love and knowledge, entitled Le Bonheur (1888). The poem is out of print today and the poet is also largely unknown today. The Nobel Committee now considers his selection to one of their major mistakes.
 

First Portable Public Library
1905

The first horse-drawn "bookmobile" looked like a hearse as it traveled the Maryland hills around Hagerstown, Maryland. The Washington County Free Library, the first chartered county-wide library in the U.S., used $2,500 to buy a Concord wagon and several horses, and convinced its janitor, Joshua Thomas, to drive it throughout 462 square miles of the county. In the first 6 months it lent out 1,008 books. When the wagon was demolished by a train 5 years later (driver was safe), the library introduced the first motorized bookmobile: an International Harvester Wagon.
 

First Paperback Book
1935

Aldus Manutius, medieval mastermind and inventor of the italic typeface, was the first to try the creation of a paperback book, in the form of romance works (precursor to the Harlequin romance) in the octavo format. He and several others failed to make the form popular until Sir Allen Lane, of London, began mass producing economical "Penguins" for sixpence each. The books were originally sold outside bookstores (train stations, department stores, etc.) and Sir Lane sold more than 3,000,000 during the first year of publication. The 1950s and 1960s saw a "paperback revolution" which included censorship battles. Penguin was charged under England's Obscene Publications Act for publishing an unabridged version of Lady Chatterley's Lover. It acquittal marked a turning point in obscenity law, and Penguin sold 2,000,000 copies of the book during the 1960 Christmas season. Today the Penguin name is greatly revered and even in the 1960s the "newpapers spoke of it like the BBC."
 

Invention of the Ballpoint Pen
1938

Lazlo Biro, a Hungarian journalist, invented the ballpoint pen because he was tired of wasting time filling his fountain pen and cleaning up spills. While visiting  a printer, he noticed that the ink on the printing press dried quickly without smudging. His brother, Georg Biro, a chemist, helped with the creation of the pen. During World War II, the British government bought the licensing rights so that the Royal Air Force fighter pilots would have something to write with, since fountain pens leaked at high altitudes. This model is still today's most popular pen, aka the Bic, with 14,000,000 pens sold daily.
 

Invention
of the
Xerox
1938

Chester Carlson, founder of the Xerox Corporation, made the first electrostatic copy machine in his lab in Queens, New York, using India ink, sulfur, a cotton cloth, waxed paper, a glass slide, a zinc plate, and a bright lamp. In 1947, after being turned down by every major office company, Carlson's invention was finally produced commercially by the Haloid photographic paper company, which called the process "xerography" (Greek for "dry" and "writing"). Carlson, who gave most of his money to charity, died a wealthy man in 1968.
 

First
Audiobook
1952

Marianne Roney and Barbara Cohen, two recent college graduates, got Dylan Thomas (sober at the time) to record several of his poems being read by himself, including "Do not go gentle into that good night" and the first publication of a new poem, "A child's Christmas in Wales." A child's Christmas in Wales and five poems was the first release for Caedmon, Roney and Cohen's company, which recently released Dylan Thomas: The Caedmon Recordings to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Walt Whitman, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway had all recorded their voices prior to Thomas, but those tapes were unavailable to the public for many years.
 

Invention
of the
Word Processor
1976

Michael Shrayer, an avid computer hobbyist from California, created the Shrayer's Electric Pencil program on his Altair (one of the first commercially available personal computers) to make it easier to write manuals for his programs. It took him a full year to complete and it allowed people to create, edit, store, retrieve and print documents digitally. In 1979, Micropro International produced the first commercially viable descendent of the Electric Pencil, WordStar.