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Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger

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this is a stub for Wilkins' book Mercury: or the Secret and Swift Messenger

Stephensonia

Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger is called Cryptonomicon in the shared Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver & The Confusion universe.

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Community entry: Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger

from Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger:

Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger

Shewing how a Man may with Privacy and Speed communicate his Thoughts to a Friend at any distance.

John Wilkins' work on codes and ciphers published in 1641 (pp. 179-180), a work of some ingenuity on the means of rapid correspondence. He explored a wide range of ideas associated with communication and language. Wilkins defines his "real character", which is a new orthography for the English language that resembles shorthand, and his "philosophical language" which is based an early classification scheme or ontology (in what would later become the computer science meaning of the term).

  • The orthography of a language is the set of rules of how to write correctly in the language. The term is derived from Greek ορθο ortho- ("correct") and γραφος graphos ("that writes") and, in today's sense, includes spelling and punctuation; it is distinct from typography.

Wilkins describes a large number of possible concepts as single words by first dividing all reality into forty different categories, each assigned to a different syllable, then sub-dividing these categories into sub-categories, and so on. The resulting words thus encode some of the semantics of their meanings into their spelling. Such a-priori languages were inspired by accounts of how the Chinese writing system worked.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a critique of Wilkins' philosophical language in his essay El idioma analítico de John Wilkins (The Analytical Language of John Wilkins).

Quicksilver:

This relates to the philosophick Mercury in a way as a alchemical agent of a sort. Daniel Waterhouse uses the Quicksilver version as a doorstop in the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts laboratory building (a log cabin constructed with local materials).