historical "jump to universality," where systems designed for specific, local tasks suddenly gained the power to represent everything in their domain. Early writing systems transitioned from rigid pictograms to rule-based alphabets, enabling the recording of any spoken word, including those not yet invented. Similarly, numeral systems evolved from simple tally marks and Roman numerals toward positional systems that could handle calculations of any magnitude without manual counting. Despite these breakthroughs, ancient innovators like Archimedes often resisted or ignored the infinite reach of their own creations, preferring to stay within parochial limits. The author suggests that it was only with the Enlightenment that society truly began to value the open-ended progress and abstract knowledge provided by such universal systems.