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A question about the history of the maths classroom (which I hope isn't off topic).

The idea of using a chalky stone to write graffiti diagrams on a dark plastered wall (marks that could be washed off and replaced) surely MUST have occurred early to ancient teachers of geometry in the academies. So much easier, you'd have thought, than drawing in the sand ....!

OK, so when do we first hear about something like blackboards??

Glorfindel
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Peter Smith
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  • Did you google “history of blackboards”? – KCd Mar 06 '21 at 10:58
  • Well yes; and https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept12/2012/10/28/the-history-and-future-of-the-chalkboard/ suggests mid nineteenth century for modern-style blackboard. Which is astonishingly late. But my underlying question is, I suppose, did the ancient teachers of geometry really just rely on e.g. diagrams drawn in sand (not that easy to write clearly) or wax tablets (not easy for a group to see?) Do we ever hear of writing on walls or like? – Peter Smith Mar 06 '21 at 11:16
  • Yes, it is a surprisingly late invention. See, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conic_Sections_Rebellion#1830_incident, 1830 incident. – Alexandre Eremenko Mar 06 '21 at 12:41
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    A very detailed account can be found here. – Jean Marie Becker Mar 06 '21 at 18:21
  • On my opinion this was one of the greatest inventions which helped mathematics, comparable with the invention of TeX :-) – Alexandre Eremenko Mar 06 '21 at 20:48
  • Bicycles were invented at about the same time, even though abstractly one may think that they could make and use them already in antiquity, see Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? Many things that were technologically possible earlier became culturally and economically viable only during the industrial revolution with its mass production and delivery infrastructure. – Conifold Mar 06 '21 at 22:44

1 Answers1

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If we ignore the "wall" part
enter image description here
"Pastel of Boy with Slate" 1822
Schoolboys would use these, since paper was too expensive to waste on practice or scratch work.

The exact origins of the writing slate remain unclear. References to its use can be found in the fourteenth century
Wikipedia

for the wall version

the first mounted classroom chalkboard was pioneered in Scotland in the early 1800s,
... Teachers would usually have to individually transcribe the problems onto each individual slate, which took up a lot of time. All of this changed when teachers began mounting bigger boards onto classroom walls.
wisegeek

This leap forward is widely believed to have first happened in a geography classroom in Edinburgh, Scotland; that teacher, James Pillans, is said to have taken a rough piece of raw slate and mounted it himself up on the wall behind his desk.
Wikipedia

Gerald Edgar
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    The Portrait of Luca Pacioli (XVc.) described in wikipedia: "The painting portrays the friar and mathematician with a table filled with geometrical tools: slate, chalk, ..." – sand1 Oct 10 '21 at 19:10