Here’s a photo of what I mean. I was reading this newspaper clipping from the 1700’s (it was used to repair the binding from a Bible printed in the 1600’s), and realized that all of the lowercase “s” characters look like “f”, but capitol “S” characters are identical then as they are now. Any ideas on how this came about, why, and how it has changed over time?

edit: found out why... it’s called the “long s”... but I’ll leave this question here in case others have the same question in the future and stumble across this post using the search feature.