[eesmith]

Your link says ſ (the long s) didn't disappear (from English) until several hundred years after the movable type printing press and makes no mention of physical problems when using that letter, suggesting instead removal gave a type a more modern feel:

> Pioneer of type design John Bell (1746–1831), who started the British Letter Foundry in 1788, is often "credited with the demise of the long s".[12] Paul W. Nash concluded that the change mostly happened very fast in 1800, and believes that this was triggered by the Seditious Societies Act. To discourage subversive publications, this required printing to name the identity of the printer, and so in Nash's view gave printers an incentive to make their work look more modern.

[california-og]

It's more of a pet theory I have. The 1787 Printer's grammar mentions the following:

"Kerned Letters being attended with more trouble than other Sorts, Founders are sometimes sparing in casting them; whereas they rather require a larger number than their Casting-Bill specifies; considering the chance which Kerned Letters stand, to have their Beaks broke, especially the Roman f, when it stands at the end of a line, where it is exposed to other accidents, besides those from the lye-brush: but in still more danger are Kerned Letters of the Italic; especially d f l, when they stand, with their Beaks unguarded, at the end of lines; and at the beginning of lines, f g j [long s] y run a great hazard; though of these, f and [long s] in particular are most liable to suffer."[0]

So, foundries are less likely to cast letters that break easily. This is just 4 years before Bell dropped the long s, so while the other reasons outlined in the Wikipedia are probably the main reasons, I speculate that it was also an economic decision based on them breaking quite easily. Especially when the new "modern" look required ever sharper and finer details.

And my point was that it is (partly) this material aspect of typography that contributed to the disappearance of a whole letter from English written language. Doesn't really matter if it's hundreds of years after the "invention" of printing press, it's still related to it.

0: https://archive.org/details/b2876058x/page/41/mode/1up

[eesmith]

Related to, perhaps, but not so relevant as my comment was in response to mousethatroared writing 'As I understand it, English lost a lot of characters when the movable type printing press was created.'

Also, the long s is not a letter of the English alphabet but rather a form of the letter 's', like how ꝛ (the r rotunda) is an archaic variant form of the letter 'r'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_rotunda

Similar, I believe, to how Greek σ when in the word-final position is ς, but both are lower-case sigma.

[california-og]

For more, read Paul Nash's "The abandoning of the long s in Britain in 1800", which mentions the material and economic aspects, but then digs deeper into why it happened so suddenly in 1800 (which he speculates is realted to the Act).