Scars and Silk

Detailed physical descriptions often served as a kind of textual portrait. An Egyptian will from 242 BCE describes its subject with remarkable specificity: “65 years old, of middle height, square built, dim-sighted, with a scar on the left part of the temple and on the right side of the jaw and also below the cheek and above the upper lip.” Such marks made the body “legible” for identification.

In 15th-century Bern, Switzerland, when authorities sought to arrest a fraudulent winemaker, they didn’t just list his name. They issued a description: “large fat Martin Walliser, and he has on him a silk jerkin.” Clothing — then a significant investment and deeply symbolic — became part of someone’s identifying characteristics. A person’s outfit could mark their profession, social standing, or even their city of origin.

Badges and Insignia

Uniforms and insignia served a similar function, especially for travelers. In the late 15th century, official couriers from cities such as Basel, Switzerland, and Strasburg, France, wore uniforms in city colors and carried visible badges. Pilgrims and beggars in the late Middle Ages and beyond were also required to wear specific objects — such as metal badges or tokens — that marked their status and origin. Some badges allowed the bearer to beg legally or buy subsidized bread, offering both practical aid and visible authentication.

Seals, Signatures, and Letters

Seals also served as powerful proxies for the self. From Mesopotamian cylinder seals to Roman oculist stamps and medieval wax impressions, these identifiers could represent both authority and authenticity. In medieval Britain, seals were often made of beeswax and attached to documents with colored tags. More than just utilitarian tools, seals were embedded with personal iconography and could even be worn as jewelry. 

In many cases, travelers also had to carry letters from local priests or magistrates identifying who they were. By the 16th century, such documentation became increasingly essential, and failing to carry an identity paper could result in penalties. This passport-like system of “safe conduct” documents gradually started to spread. What began as a protection for merchants and diplomats evolved into a bureaucratic necessity for everyday people.

As written records became more widespread in medieval Europe, so did the need for permanent, portable identifiers. Royal interest in documenting property and legal rights led to the proliferation of official records, which in turn prompted the spread of literacy. Even as early as the 13th century in England, it was already considered risky to travel far without written identification.

The signature eventually emerged as a formal marker of identity, especially among literate elites, and was common by the 18th century. Still, in a mostly oral culture, signatures functioned more as ceremonial gestures than verification tools.

Heraldry and Livery

For the European upper classes, heraldry functioned as a visual shorthand for identity and lineage. Coats of arms adorned not only armor and flags but also furniture, buildings, and clothing. Retainers wore livery bearing their master’s symbols, making them recognizable on sight. Even death could not erase this symbolism — funerals were staged with heraldic banners, horses emblazoned with arms, and crests atop hearses.

Yet heraldry could also be diluted or faked. By the 16th century, unauthorized use of coats of arms was widespread, and forgers such as the Englishman William Dawkyns were arrested for selling false pedigrees and impersonating royal officers. In time, heraldry gradually lost its power to function as a reliable ID system.

Memory and Proximity

In the end, one of the most effective early methods of identification was simply being known. In rural communities, neighbors kept tabs on each other through personal memory and observation. You didn’t need a signature if the village priest or market vendor had known you since birth.

But with the rise of cities and the disruption of industrialization, such personal networks broke down. The state stepped in with systems of registration, documentation, and, eventually, visual records. Identity, once rooted in familiarity and the body, became a matter of paperwork and policy.

Before the photograph fixed the face in official form starting around the late 19th century, people relied on a more fluid, and sometimes fragile, constellation of signs: names, scars, clothing, crests, seals, and simple familiarity. All were attempts to answer the same eternal question — who are you? — in the absence of a camera’s eye.

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Test Cards Have Been Around Almost as Long as TV

Test cards date back to the 1930s, when the BBC used printed cards placed in front of cameras to help engineers align signals. The BBC’s first test card, used in 1934, was a simple black circle with a line underneath it. The practice caught on in the U.S. in the 1940s as commercial broadcasting expanded. These early test cards were often mounted on easels in front of studio cameras during off-air hours.

Black-and-white patterns featured radial grids, concentric circles, and crosshairs to reveal image distortion, framing errors, or technical noise. With the arrival of color broadcasting in the 1960s and ’70s, test patterns evolved into electronically generated images such as the SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) color bars to test for hue, saturation, contrast, and brightness. Today, the calibration and troubleshooting of broadcast signals are handled by specialized test-signal generators, though they are not broadcast to viewers.

Test Cards Became Cultural Touchstones

Some test cards became more than just technical tools — they evolved into pop culture artifacts. In the U.S., the RCA “Indian head” test pattern — featuring a Native American figure flanked by geometric markings — was created in 1939 and ran for more than two decades, becoming a kind of visual shorthand for early American television. CBS had its own “bullseye” test pattern, a striking design with concentric circles and resolution wedges used to check focus and sharpness.

Depending on where you grew up, you might remember a specific local station’s test card — one that not only included the TV channel number and the affiliate’s call sign but also the location it was broadcasting from. For instance, ABC affiliate WJZ-TV in New York featured the Empire State Building on its black-and-white test card in the early 1950s, giving the broadcast a distinctly regional identity. These static images became a familiar part of daily television viewing, connecting viewers to their local stations and communities.

Across the Atlantic, the BBC’s Test Card F became one of the most iconic test patterns of all. Introduced in 1967, it featured a young girl named Carole Hersee (daughter of BBC engineer George Hersee) playing tic-tac-toe with a slightly unsettling clown doll named Bubbles. Airing for thousands of hours between 1967 and 1998, Hersee’s face became the most-broadcast image in U.K. television history.

A Nostalgic Link to Early TV

For viewers of a certain age, test cards were an unofficial signal that the day was over. When the test pattern appeared, you knew it was time to turn off the TV and go to bed.

In the 1980s and ’90s, however, 24-hour programming took over. Infomercials, syndicated reruns, and late-night variety shows replaced those once-quiet hours. Cable, satellite, and eventually streaming made content seemingly infinite and calibration test patterns largely obsolete. Today, if a station goes off the air (usually due to weather or technical issues), you’re more likely to see a local station logo or a digital error message than a test pattern.

Even though test cards have mostly vanished from live broadcasts, they still crop up in pop culture as a kind of retro shorthand — an inside joke for those who know what they represent. On The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon Cooper’s SMPTE color bars T-shirt turned vintage broadcast tech into a fashion trend; the image has been widely reproduced and sold on everything from clothing to coffee mugs. 

Some of us who remember when test cards signaled the end of the TV viewing day still have a strange fondness for their eerie stillness. In a world of endless choices and the seemingly judgmental “Are you still watching?” prompt, test cards remind us of a time when television showed us everything it had to offer — and then signed off for the night.

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The Underwater Exploits of Cornelis Drebbel

While it’s entirely possible that Alexander the Great used divers at Tyre, and possibly a rudimentary diving bell, it’s hard to give him credit for the first true submarine journey. That honor is more correctly bestowed on Cornelis Drebbel, a Dutch inventor who was invited to the court of King James I of England in 1604. 

Drebbel had already made a name for himself as an engineer and inventor, having created various contraptions in Holland, including perpetual motion machines, clocks, and a self-regulating furnace. But it was during his time in England that Drebbel came up with arguably his most famous invention. In 1620, while working for the Royal Navy, Drebbel designed and built the first documented navigable submarine. None of his original records or engineering drawings survive, but there were enough eyewitness accounts to give us a good idea of how his submarine worked. 

The basic design was like a rowing boat, but with raised and meeting sides, and the whole vessel covered in greased leather. It had a watertight hatch in the middle and was propelled by oars that came out the side through watertight leather seals. Large pigskin bladders were used to control diving and surfacing, while tubes floated at the surface of the water likely provided the crew with oxygen. 

Drebbel built three submarines in total, each one bigger than the last — the final model had six oars and could carry 16 passengers. He tested them on the River Thames in London in front of thousands of spectators, one of whom was King James I. Contemporary accounts suggest that the king himself may have joined Drebbel on one of his test runs, making James I the first monarch to ride in a submarine. Accounts of the test runs, which continued until 1624, state that the submarine could travel underwater from Westminster to Greenwich and back — a three-hour trip with the boat traveling 15 feet below the surface.

The Revolutionary War’s Turtle

Another hugely significant submarine journey took place a little more than a century and a half after Drebbel’s historic underwater excursions. In 1776, a one-man submersible called the Turtle became the world’s first combat submarine during the American Revolutionary War. 

Designed by American inventor David Bushnell, this remarkable vessel was shaped somewhat like a large acorn, or, as Bushnell described it in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, as “two upper tortoise shells of equal size, joined together.” The submarine was propelled vertically and horizontally by hand-cranked and pedal-powered propellers operated by the single pilot. 

On September 7, 1776, Sergeant Ezra Lee of the Continental Army piloted the Turtle in the first ever combat mission involving a submarine. He used the vessel in an attempted attack on the British flagship HMS Eagle in New York Harbor. The Turtle was equipped with a mine that was to be attached to the hull of the enemy ship, but Lee failed to attach the explosive charge to the hull. The perilous mission was a failure, as were subsequent missions involving the sub. It was, nevertheless, a pivotal moment in the history of warfare, with the Turtle demonstrating the potential of submarines in combat. 

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 It Was Aesthetically Appealing as Well as Practical

While sepia toning was primarily adopted for its preservation benefits, its aesthetic qualities also contributed to its widespread appeal. The warm, brownish hues of sepia prints conveyed a sense of elegance and timelessness. Unlike the stark contrast of black-and-white images, sepia tones were considered more flattering, making them particularly popular for portraits and sentimental keepsakes. The process deepened contrast, refined tonal gradation, and offered a softer, dreamlike image compared to black-and-white photography.

Culturally, sepia-toned photographs came to define the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras, a period marked by industrial progress and significant social and cultural changes in both Europe and the United States. Photography during this time captured moments from everyday life, such as family portraits, weddings, christenings, and postmortem photos of deceased loved ones, as well as architecture, nature scenes, and historical events. As a result, sepia-toned photography became linked to collective memories of the past, reinforcing its association with history and nostalgia.

Sepia Toning Eventually Fell Out of Favor 

The dominance of sepia-toned photographs began to fade in the early 20th century as advancements in technology introduced more efficient and affordable ways to preserve images. Black-and-white photography became the standard because it was simpler, faster, and less costly than the additional chemical treatment required for sepia toning. By the 1920s and ’30s, photographers increasingly preferred gelatin silver prints, which produced high-quality black-and-white images without the need for sepia toning.

The decline of sepia toning continued with the rise of color photography in the mid-20th century. As color film became more widely available and affordable in the 1940s and ’50s, both sepia and black-and-white photography fell out of fashion. Sepia tones remained relevant in some artistic and archival contexts, but today that nostalgic aesthetic is often recreated digitally rather than through chemical processing.

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Why QWERTY?

Here’s where things get a little foggy. An often-repeated explanation for the QWERTY keyboard layout is that it was designed by Sholes to slow typists down in order to prevent typewriters from jamming. If you’ve ever used an old-fashioned typewriter, you might have noticed how easy it is to strike letters in quick succession, or simultaneously, which can cause the type bars to become stuck together. 

But would Sholes really have sabotaged his own keyboard layout to hamper the speed of operators? In reality, there is little to no hard evidence of any deliberate slowdown. And the patent that first mentions the QWERTY layout contains no direct mention of why the keys were placed in such a manner. If it was indeed designed to cause fewer jams, this feature would likely have been a primary attribute of the patent. What’s more, at the time that Sholes patented the QWERTY layout, there were no “touch typists,” so no one was typing particularly quickly, let alone speed-typing. 

So, why did QWERTY become standard? One convincing and particularly thorough answer comes from Kyoto University researchers Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka. In their 2010 paper “On the Prehistory of QWERTY,” the researchers conclude that the mechanics of the typewriter did not influence the keyboard design. Instead, the QWERTY system was a rather circuitous result of how the first typewriters were being used. 

Among the most prominent early adopters of early typewriters were telegraph operators, whose priority was to quickly transcribe messages. These operators found an alphabetical keyboard arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating morse code. The Kyoto paper suggests the QWERTY keyboard evolved over several years as a direct result of the input provided by these telegraph operators. According to the researchers, “The keyboard arrangement was incidentally changed into QWERTY, first to receive telegraphs, then to thrash out a compromise between inventors and producers, and at last to evade old patents.”

In other words, QWERTY came about through a combination of factors. There was direct input from telegraph operators, as well as compromises made between inventors and producers — practical changes made by the manufacturers who actually had to mass produce the product. (The keyboard layout on Scholes’ original prototype, for example, was altered by the mechanics at Remington.) And then there were old patents to contend with. In 1886, a new company called Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict (WS&B) released the Remington Standard Type-Writer No. 2. To avoid existing keyboard layout patents, the company slightly altered the design, placing M next to N and swapping around C and X. This became the QWERTY format keyboard we use today.

The Persistence of an Imperfect Design

While the precise intentions behind Sholes’ QWERTY design are at least partially lost to history, there is undoubtedly a strong argument against the popular belief that it was designed to slow typists down. 

What we know for sure is that the QWERTY layout is remarkable for its staying power. Despite the development of potentially more efficient keyboard layouts — most prominently the Dvorak layout, designed in the 1930s, which is supposed to be faster and more comfortable — QWERTY has remained the global standard. By the time alternative layouts were proposed, millions of people had already learned to type on QWERTY keyboards, and switching would have required massive retraining efforts for typists, not to mention a lot of grumbling from the general public. 

So, for now at least, QWERTY is very much here to stay — at least on laptops and PCs. Researchers at the University of St Andrews in Scotland have developed a split-screen keyboard they claim can increase typing speeds for touchscreen users who type with their thumbs. Known as KALQ (the letters at the bottom right of that keyboard), its layout is a radical departure from the QWERTY system, which has been unchanged for about a century and a half. Will KALQ gain a foothold? Only time, and more typing, will tell. 

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Green Gemstones

The ancient Romans seemed to believe that emeralds and other green gemstones could be used as a means for soothing the eyes and possibly providing visual aid. One famous example appears in Pliny the Elder's Natural History, where the author notes how Emperor Nero watched a gladiatorial event with the assistance of a smaragdus — an emerald or similar gem. However, historians largely believe that the stone may not have magnified the spectacle so much as it helped to block the glare of the sun.

Water Globes

In his first volume of Naturales Quaestiones (Natural Questions), the Roman philosopher Seneca described the magnifying effect of water in glass: “Letters, however small and dim, are comparatively large and distinct when seen through a glass globe filled with water.” His contemporary Pliny the Elder also noted the lenslike qualities that resulted from combining these elements, although his observation was related to the potential for flammability when focusing the sun's rays through a glass water vessel. While the result may have been satisfactory, Seneca's lack of follow-up thoughts suggest that this particular method of magnification likely wasn't widely used.

Mirrors

In the same sentence describing the magnification qualities of the water vessels, Seneca wrote, "I have already said there are mirrors which increase every object they reflect." Indeed, concave metal, glass, or crystal mirrors could be used to magnify smaller texts for those with vision problems. As noted by Ilardi in Renaissance Vision From Spectacles to Telescopes, French author Jean de Meun wrote of the efficacy of this tool in the late-13th-century poem “Le Roman de la Rose,” although there aren’t many other documented uses of mirrors for this purpose.

Reading Stones

A major development in the area of visual tools came with the invention of reading stones. Often credited to ninth-century Andalusian scholar Abbas ibn Firnas, the concept of curved glass surfaces being used to magnify print was discussed at length in Arab mathematician Ibn al-Haytham's 1021 Book of Optics, which later received a wider audience with its translation to Latin.

Typically made from quartz, rock crystal, and especially beryl, reading stones were fashioned in a plano-convex shape, with the flat side against the page of a book and the rounded top providing a clear view of the lettering below. Initially used to assist the elderly with faltering vision, the stones became popular among younger readers as well, especially as beryl was said to possess magic and healing powers.

One surviving example of such reading stones are the 11th- to 12th-century Visby lenses discovered in Gotland, Sweden, in 1999. Along with providing excellent magnification of tiny text, many of these quartz lenses are mounted in silver, suggesting a decorative purpose as well.

It's unknown if the Visby lenses were the work of a local professional or somehow made their way from Muslim regions where other reading stones first appeared. Regardless, the quality of the images generated by these artifacts, and the craftsmanship that went into their creation, underscores how people were hardly left grasping in the dark for assistance in the days before eyeglasses became commonplace.

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