What do you do when you have an idea and it comes to you in the middle of the night?
Too easy.
Switch on the light and write it down on a piece of paper on your bed stand or tap it out onto your phone.
Well back in Lewis Carroll’s time, you can imagine his lament when this happened and he had to go through the rigmarole of lighting a candle or a lamp.
I had never thought about this before until I was introduced to the nychtograph this morning.
My husband was showing me a video of a kitten on his phone while I was reading the Horrible Histories book on the history of Oxford and they mentioned this contraption that Lewis Carroll had created in 1891.
Now for those who have been reading my blogs, you know that I’m a sucker for the history of different alphabets and systems of categorising. If I’m not learning about the odious horrible Espsteinesque of a man who developed the Dewey Decimal System, I’m fascinated by alphabets and language.
At one stage, I was so enamoured with my local history of a secret World War II receiving station in our street (the Australian government had made the information Top Secret for 50 years post the war) that I learned Morse code (for the fun of it) just to learn what the WRANS had to go through to learn the Japanese kana in morse. I found the English one hard enough.
You can see my frustrating attempt at learning morse in the video that is within this post below at the 5:22 mark).
Well anyway, where was a I going with this…..
Ah! Look at what Carroll developed. The nychtograph!
He created his own substitution alphabet that he can record his thoughts and notes IN THE DARK. It’s actually quite genius.
Or is it?
It’s a small rectangular piece with squares cut out and each letter has a corresponding symbol. You lay the square over a piece of paper and with a pen, you quickly write out the symbols which are a series of strokes and dots.
It looks remarkably like braille which in itself is a form of ‘night writing’ which is what nychtography means (trust me, I’m Greek – it’s a greek word, well two greek words for exactly that: night and writing).
Anyway, I do wonder why Carroll went into this whole new way of taking notes in the dark.
Wouldn’t it have been easier simply to have some loose leaf papers near his bed and in the dark, reach for them and using one hand to feel the edge of the paper, simply write out the notes in the dark and try to decipher the hand writing in the light of day the next?
Why go through the extra cognitive load of creating a new alphabet, learning this new alphabet and then at night, when you’re so sleepy and tired, having to remember the alphabet to write the notes?
The thing is, he would have had to have dipped his pen into ink. Or, he would have been ahead of his time by using a fountain pen that were the new fad in the late 19th century – or a pencil.
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