 Bertrand Russell Quotes 366 |
In 1906 I discovered the Theory of Types. After this it only remained to write the book out. Whitehead's teaching work left him not enough leisure for this mechanical job. I worked at it from ten to twelve hours a day for about eight months in the year, from 1907 to 1910. The manuscript became more and more vast, and every time that I went out for a walk I used to be afraid that the house would catch fire and the manuscript get burnt up. It was not, of course, the sort of manuscript that could be typed, or even copied.
Source: Bertrand Russell: The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, v.１, chap. 6: Principia Mathematica, 1967
More info.:https://russell-j.com/beginner/AB16-140.HTM
* a brief comment
Principia Mathematica is full of special logical symbols, which could not be typed (on a typewriter) and had to be handwritten. Therefore, the fear that the manuscript, which had been painstakingly written, might be destroyed in a fire must have been considerable.
By the way, I was curious about 'even copied'. Does it mean "it was the sort of thing that couldn't even be copied on a photocopier"? Or was Russell saying that because of the parade of logic symbols, it was the kind of thing that other person "could not reproduce (by hand)"?
When I was young, photocopiers were 'wet' machines that used chemicals (diazo copiers?). I imagine that the photocopiers that existed between 1907 and 1910, when Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, were of much lower performance. A little research on google revealed the following statement.
'The photocopier was invented in 1779 by James Watt, an English inventor famous for inventing the steam engine. He devised a method of transferring content from one sheet of paper to another, using a thin sheet of paper that allowed ink to soak through to the reverse, and it continued to be used into the 20th century."
'It continued to be used into the 20th century.' So we can imagine that photocopiers in the 1900s also used a method of "transferring content from one sheet of paper to another using thin paper, where the ink can easily soak through to the reverse ". Thus, the manuscript of Principia Mathematica would have been "the sort of thing that could not even be copied".
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)