What We Leave Behind III
May 18, 2021

I've recently been reading "Thomas Jefferson and His Copying Machines," a book
that discusses the tools Thomas Jefferson used to make copies of his
correspondence. It's been a fascinating (to me, at least) read. When Jefferson
was a young man, the family house burnt down and he lost not only his entire
library, but all his personal papers. As a result, Jefferson was fixated on
making sure he had copies of anything he wrote. I don't blame him. Imagine
losing the one laptop that held everything you'd written over the past decade.
(You do make regular backups of your data, right? In multiple formats? And
stored in different locations?)

Jefferson used a number of methods as time passed: special inks and presses that
transferred copies of letters onto tissue-thin paper; a "polygraph" -- a
complicated machine of levers and bars which held a second pen that copied what
you wrote as you wrote it; an early version of carbon paper. He also had a
filing system to hold all the letters he received and copies of those he sent.
His practices wouldn't have seemed out of place in an office of the 1850s or
even the 1950s.

Reading the book got me thinking about how big my output would be if I were to
print it out. A quick search online told me that 1MB of text is roughly equal to
500 printed pages. Using that figure and looking at the size of the computer
directory that holds my writing, then subtracting for things such as PDFs I'd
saved for research, my best guesstimate is that I've filled a four-drawer filing
cabinet entirely with words. (At the same time, that writing also all fits
handily on a single USB thumb-drive.)

The book also made me more aware of the ephemerality of digital storage. While
Jefferson had to worry about fire, flood, tornadoes, theft, and animals chewing
up his papers, he didn't have to worry about solar flares, power outages,
bitrot, and extinct file formats. His papers exist more than two hundred years
after their creation and can still be read today at the Library of Congress. In
just twenty years of writing, I already have two or three computer files that I
can't open anymore. And so I find myself absently pondering where in my office I
could fit a four-drawer filing cabinet, as well as how much a bulk order of
paper and printer cartridges might cost....

(c) 2021 by Andrew Gudgel 
email: contact [at] andrewgudgel.com