The most significant discovery of the New World is not the Viking’s discovery but that of the Spanish.

In 1484 the Portuguese were already working on a way to Asia by going around the coast of Africa, and rejected Christopher’s theories that the Indies could be reached by sailing west around the world.

Columbus moved to Spain, and initially met similar rejections from a Spanish royal commission. In April 1492 his persistence finally paid off as Ferdinand V, king of Castile, and Queen Isabella agreed to sponsor his expedition with promises of riches and nobility for the navigator if his theories were right.

The fact that Christopher Columbus (who was not originally Spanish) appealed to a foreign court to offer his services proved that the discovery of America was not incidental.

The Canary Islands were an excellent bridgehead for alternate routes. This is what Christopher Columbus offered and he offered it to a State that needed them, but which was also accustomed to and prepared for this type of venture. Unified Spain possessed in 1492 a powerful war machine, a solid economy, an exterior projection, naval experience including the exploration of trade routes and notable scientific-technical potential mathematicians, geographers, astronomers and shipbuilders who had been formed in a melting-pot of three cultures (Jews, Muslims and Christians). Its only rival was its neighbor, Portugal, which had put a stop to Spanish expansion in Africa.

In 1492 the joint rulers of Castile and Aragon conquered the Moorish kingdom of Granada, that had been providing Castile with African goods through its tribute, and they decided to fund Christopher Columbus’ expedition that they hoped would bypass Portugal’s lock on Africa and the Indian Ocean reaching Asia by travelling west.

Christopher Columbus made a total of four voyages from Spain to what he called the New World, between 1492 and 1504.

On the 12th of October of the same year 1492, Columbus did not reach Asia, but rather found a New World, America. It was the first voyage which was set sail from Palos, Spain, on August 3, 1492, with Christopher Columbus in the Santa María; accompanied by the Niña and the Pinta, and less than one hundred men.

The mast of the Pinta was damaged after three days and they were forced to drop anchor in the Canaries to repair it. The three vessels weighed anchor again on September 6 and sailed west.

After more than a month at sea, the crew could have been forgiven for thinking that their commander had lost his way and perhaps his marbles too. Columbus altered course to the south-west and the men soon saw signs that they were approaching land.

Early on the morning of October 12th land was indeed sighted, and a landing party arrived on an island in the Bahamas and named it San Salvador. The natives must have been surprised to hear that their island now belonged to Spain.

Over the next few weeks landings were also made on Cuba, named Juana by Columbus, and Española, now known as Hispaniola and shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Columbus believed that they had arrived in the Indies.

In the end, the continent that celebrates Columbus Day is actually named after Amerigo Vespucci, another Italian navigator who explored the northern coast of America between 1499 and 1500, and told the world that they had discovered a new continent.

The discovery of making paper or papyrus in Egypt had spurred great enthusiasm among the ancient scribes because it imparts ease and speed of transcribing their pictographic scripts which previously were done clumsily through carving into wooden tablets, stones and wet clay pads.

But with papyrus’ potential as an excellent transcribing medium, it still was in those days “writing” in its purest sense of the word was still an arduous task for those scribes.

It takes more than 3000 years until the Chinese Cai Lun, a government official of the Eastern Han dynasty’s invention of the progenitor to our modern paper that another very important discovery which was being developed which eliminated the arduous undertaking of writing scripts came into being.

The discovery of printing during that time though in its infancy was at the time had already automated the process of writing scripts. Block printing which was the earliest process of printing still had so many inconveniences aside from being very time-consuming because this required carving a whole block for each page.

The need for a faster and more convenient way to print spurred the discovery and development of the movable type method of printing which was discovered by Pi Sheng during the Ch’ing-li period (1041 AD - 1048 AD).

This method is done by carving into wood only all of the more than two thousand Chinese characters instead of a whole non reusable block for each page and thus greatly simplified the printing process because it needs only to carve and assemble the carved characters which could now be rearranged and reused many times over and thus hastened the spread of knowledge among the Chinese literates during those days but did not have significant impact on the majority of the people and was only confined within their society.

It was not until three hundred years later on the early part of the 15th century that the development of the movable type in Germany by John Guttenberg spurred the further development of the printing press because it has now made knowledge universal and thus revolutionized the Western World more than what happened in China few hundred years earlier.

Most people today would agree that the discovery of printing dwarfs into inferiority every human invention when compared to it.

The discovery of writing by the Sumerians has brought with it the the inevitable innovations to the writing materials and tools used during their time.

As for the writing pad, the Sumerians used wet tablets of clay and used reed pens with wedge-shaped tip for writing the earliest form of script called cuneiform which means “wedge shape”. At almost the same time, writing began to be developed and used by the Egyptians using a different script forms called hieroglyphics derived from the Greek word “hieros” meaning sacred and the word “gluphein” meaning “to carve” or “to write” though of the same concept of being pictographic and still using the wet clay writing pads and stones.

At this early stage of Egyptian development of their written language they discovered the need for a writing medium other than wet clay pads and stones to get away with the difficulties of transcribing, handling and storing such bulky and heavy slabs. This need was solved by the discovery of making papyrus, the forerunner of our most common writing medium called paper. With this development, the former transcribing by carving is now replaced with brushes made from reed and ink from coal, ocher and other coloring materials.

The discovery of making papyrus is the birth of the discovery of making paper. In fact, the word “paper” is derived from the word “papyrus” but the first true paper which is the forerunner to our modern paper is the one made by the Chinese in 100 AD.

Today paper making is a big and important industry and paper is an indispensable material in our modern living for it is that one material commonly used in schools and offices which are very important entities for human development.