Actually, a Picture is Worth 378 Words! Traditional Cache
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Actually, a Picture is Worth 378 Words!
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1/21/2013
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Public Service Adjustment #1:
While the process of pressing ink to paper had been around for years, Johannes Gutenberg improved it greatly when around the year 1440 he invented the movable type printing press.
The new developments allowed for quick and easy changing of all the type and other features in a printing job. Separate metal letters and characters were used to put together each “plate” to print pages for books, newspapers, and many other printed items.
One struggle that this new development did not immediately cover was photographs. There was no quick way to engrave a plate with each custom photo. At first Gutenberg developed empty frames to fit into his plates that could then be illustrated by an artist. Eventually a new process was designed that could be tagged on to the end of Gutenberg’s printing press to fill in these empty frames.
A standard size and placement for the frames had to be agreed upon in order for the two machines to work together smoothly. Through several trials, it was found that it looked and worked best (both with the illustrator machine and the placement of the “type” on Gutenberg’s plates) to have a frame that had a width of 63 characters and a height of 36 characters.
The photo could be placed only on the left of right edges of the printing and the letters would then fill in around the photos. The placement of the photo frames greatly increased the time it took to arrange the printings and the cost of each layout. While the photo was nice looking, it reduced the amount of space for the actual story. It was well known in the printing and publication world that a photo took up a 36 x 63 letter spot, which equaled 2,268 letters lost from the possible amount of letters put on each plate. Since the average length of words (including spaces) was 6 characters back then, this worked out to 378 words lost to the photograph.
Through the years, this saying morphed into “A picture is worth a thousand words”, when in reality, if it rolled off the tongue a bit better, it would be “A picture is worth 378 words”. Next time you hear the incorrect saying at a geocaching event, feel free to look like the smart one there and pull out the original phrase!
Oh, and this should be a quick park and grab here. I listed the size as “Not Chosen” because I could not locate my intended container. For now it is a smaller peanut butter jar.
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