NOTATIO

We are now used to strings being shown with Roman numerals, even though placing them above the stave is a recent habit favoured by the biblical devotion to Gould's manual.
Before that, it was very common to find "sul ..." followed by the name of the string in either Anglo-Saxon letters (A-D-G...) or in plain words (Re-Sol...).

While preparing a talk on cello schools—which I held on Saturday—I found how around 1830-40, in Germany, the convention was to write the string in Arabic numerals (1,2,3...) below the stave, in a bigger typeface from the fingerings, which were placed above.
Here is an example (showing a harmonic scale of C major on the cello): Could we try to pinpoint the moment when the modern convention started to be applied and by what publisher/publication?
French editions still use "sul..." today, but it would already be great if we could find when German notation stopped using that notation in favour of Roman numerals.
Thanks!

I'm quite surprised there's been no intervention to this.
As a cellist who has grown up with "sul..." and Roman numerals, this was a breakthrough!
And it's in a relatively modern time, 1830, when notation was already very similar to ours!

Just saw this, Neera. I don't have the foggiest, not being a string player, but I have long thought that a book that dealt with questions of this type would be very helpful to a wide range of musicians, editors, scholars. That is, a History of Western Music Notation from, say, 1600 on. There may be such in other languages, but I am not aware of anything quite like this.

Thank you anyway John.
I hope to find some enlightening on this topic, and will report back when I do.