History
The most famous early systematic use of error detection was by Jewish scribes in the precise copying of the Jewish bible, beginning before Christ. An emphasis on minute details of words and spellings evolved into the idea of a perfect text in 135 CE, and with it increasingly forceful strictures that a deviation in even a single letter would make a Torah scroll invalid. The scribes used methods such as summing the number of words per line and per page (Numerical Masorah), and checking the middle paragraph, word and letter against the original. The page was thrown out if a single mistake was found, and three mistakes on a single page would result in the entire manuscript being destroyed (the equivalent of retransmission on a telecommunications channel). The effectiveness of their methods was verified by the accuracy of copying through the centuries demonstrated by discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947-1956, dating from c.150 BCE-75 CE.
Read more about this topic: Error Detection And Correction
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“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Josephine K. Henry, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 15, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations ... all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)