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THE HISTORY OF THE BULLETIN BOARD
By Robert L. Plunkett
Originally, when people had urgent messages to convey, they would tie them to a spear or arrow, and shoot them in the direction of the person they wished to have read it. You sometimes still see this method in old western movies where the arrow is usually shot at a homesteaders wall or the chest of a cowpoke,
With the invention of the gun, people tried to wrap the messages around bullets and shoot them at their communicants. This was called, Bulleting the message. This proved both dangerous and tough on the paper. Around 1750, the Marquis dFrisbe came up with the idea of nailing the messages onto flat boards and flinging them much like one would later throw his other invention, the Frisbe or Frisbey. These bulleting boards saved many lives which would otherwise be lost through accidental gunshots.
It wasnt until the 1877 that Thomas Edison patented the process of nailing the boards to some central location so that people could come to the messages rather than having the messages thrown or shot at them. When his patent expired in 1894, bulletin boards came into wide use. The trademark on the word bulletin as abandoned in 1896 and the word itself came into general use to refer to any breaking news item.
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