THE INVENTION OF INVENTION^51
well in advance of anything known in Europe. Such was the legendary
clock that Haroun-al-Raschid sent as a gift to Charlemagne around the
year 800: no one at the Frankish court could do much with it, and it
disappeared to ignorance and neglect. Like the Chinese, the Muslims
were much taken with Western clocks and watches, doing their best to
acquire them by purchase or tribute. But they never used them to cre
ate a public sense of time other than as a call to prayer. We have the tes
timony here of Ghiselin de Busbecq, ambassador from the Holy
Roman Empire to the Sublime Porte in Constantinople, in a letter of
1560: "... if they established public clocks, they think that the au
thority of their muezzins and their ancient rites would suffer diminu
tion."^7 Sacrilege.
- Printing. Printing was invented in China (which also invented
paper) in the ninth century and found general use by the tenth. This
achievement is the more impressive in that the Chinese language,
which is written in ideographs (no alphabet), does not lend itself eas
ily to movable type. That explains why Chinese printing consisted pri
marily of full-page block impressions; also why so much of the old
Chinese texts consists of drawings. If one is going to cut a block, it is
easier to draw than to carve a multitude of characters. Also, ideographic
writing works against literacy: one may learn the characters as a child,
but if one does not keep using them, one forgets how to read. Pictures
helped.
Block printing limits the range and diffusion of publication. It is
well suited to the spread of classic and sacred texts, Buddhist mantras,
and the like, but it increases the cost and risk of publishing newer work
and tends to small printings. Some Chinese printers did use movable
type, but given the character of the written language and the invest
ment required, the technique never caught on as in the West. Indeed,
like other Chinese inventions, it may well have been abandoned for a
time, to be reintroduced later.^8
In general, for all that printing did for the preservation and diffusion
of knowledge in China, it never "exploded" as in Europe. Much pub
lication depended on government initiative, and the Confucian man-
darinate discouraged dissent and new ideas. Even evidence of the falsity
of conventional knowledge could be dismissed as appearance.^9 As a
result, intellectual activity segmented along personal and regional lines,
and scientific achievement shows surprising discontinuities. "The great
mathematician Chu Shih-chieh, trained in the northern school, mi
grated south to Yang-chou, where his books were printed but he could
