History History and more History

History is such a part of life here. Back home, we really don’t have much history and/or just don’t know much of it. Over here, it is embedded into every part of life.

Several months ago we purchased a cheese knife and got a history lesson on the assassination of Henry IV because the knife we purchased was similar to the one used to kill ole Henry. Last week when Paul was on his business trip, he was telling the story of the knife and said that it was used to kill Henry the Fifth. He was quickly corrected. “Excusez-moi,” one of his colleagues said, “it’s henry the Fourth.”

When we were instructed to use an A5 envelope for mailing something, we had to find out what size that was. But finding out “just the facts” is clearly impossible. We got our history lesson and learned that in 1794, the French government issued a law that specified paper size formats. Well, bien sur... (of course).


So you can learn more that you ever wanted to know here.


Upon further investigation... another website explains...

The practical and aesthetic advantages of the sqrt(2) aspect ratio for paper sizes were probably first noted by the physics professor Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (University of Gottingen, Germany, 1742-1799) in a letter that he wrote 1786-10-25 to Johann Beckmann. After introducing the meter measurement, the French government published 1794-11-03 the "Loi sur le timbre" (no. 2136), a law on the taxation of paper that defined several formats that already correspond exactly to the modern ISO paper sizes: "Grand registre" = ISO A2, "grand papier" = ISO B3, "moyen papier" = ISO A3, "petit papier" = ISO B4, "demi feuille" = ISO B5, "effets de commerce" = ISO 1/2 B5.
The French format series never became widely known and was quickly forgotten again. The A, B, and C series paper formats, which are based on the exact same design principles, were completely independently reinvented over a hundred years after the "Loi sur le timbre" in Germany by Dr. Walter Porstmann. They were adopted as the German standard DIN 476 in 1922 as a replacement for the vast variety of other paper formats that had been used before, in order to make paper stocking and document reproduction cheaper and more efficient.
From:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000bl&topic_id=1

And that’s your history lesson for today!