Age of Invention A Series by Anton Howes antonhowes.substack.com I’m a historian of innovation. I write mostly about the causes of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, focusing on the lives of the individual innovators who made it happen. I’m interested in everything from the exploits of sixteenth-century alchemists to the schemes of Victorian engineers. My research explores why they became innovators, and the institutions they created to promote innovation even further. Upstream, Downstream inventioninnovationhistoryindustry
The arbitrariness of the sign A key difference between verbal language and the modernist ideal of a visual “language” is the arbitrariness of a verbal sign, which has no natural, inherent relationship to the concept it represents. The sound of the word “horse”, for example, does not innately resemble the concept of a horse. Ferdinand de Saussure called this arbitrariness the fundamental feature of the verbal sign. The meaning of a sign is generated by its relationship to other signs in the language: the sign’s legibility lies in its difference from other signs. Ellen Lupton & J. Abbott Miller, The ABC's of ▲■●: The Bauhaus and Design Theory Gods of the Word soundmeaninglanguage