This section is a brief history that explains the evolutionary development of letterforms and how technology affected changes in typefaces. Many of us think of the tools as the technology. What people know and what people do with what they know is technology. Hand and Handtool Stage History traces communication and technology to the earliest known beginnings of civilization. The earliest known visual communication, images from the Paleolithic period, confirms the fundamental human need to communicate, and that visual communication is elemental.
Early images seem more literal than sign like, and seem to have no system to their use.
The mechanical stage is a period of compound tools and simple machines powered by natural means. They were animal powered, human powered, or nature powered, that is, by gravity, water, wind. Communication, socialization, and technology developed interconnectedly as Western culture began to form. Language is the unified and systematic means of communication by standardized sounds and signs that function through convention. The letters of the alphabet are the signs of our language system, each something in itself, a unique sign, and not a symbol of some other idea or object.