The printing press is an invention that can copy books without anyone writing them out by hand. It uses ink on movable type which is pressed on paper to make a copy of a page. Johannes Gutenberg made the first working printing press in the 1450s in Germany.
Movable type is made up of thousands of letters made out of metal called type. Type can be put in any order to create any page of writing. The type is locked into a wood frame, ink is spread on it and then it is pressed against paper to copy the page. Putting together the type for one page can take longer than writing it out by hand, but once you have it together, the press can turn out hundreds of copies an hour.
You repeat this process for all the other pages of a book.
Printing with wood blocks had been known for hundreds of years – it seems to have started in Korea. But making wood blocks for a whole book was slow, mistakes were hard to fix and the blocks wore out too quickly. This sort of printing did not cut the cost of making books by much.
Movable type first appeared in China in 1041, but it did not catch on in China the way it did in Europe. Perhaps because a movable type of Latin letters was much easier to work with than one of Chinese characters.
Gutenberg was not the only one trying to build a working printing press in the 1440s and 1450s. He was one of many, but he was the first to succeed.
Gutenberg was a goldsmith by trade. That matters because the hard part of making a working printing press was getting the metal of the type just right: if the metal was too soft, the type would wear out too quickly; if it was too hard, it would make holes in the paper. To get his printing press to work, Gutenberg also had to make changes to the paper and ink he used. The sort of paper and ink used to copy books out by hand did not produce clear letters in a printing press.
Gutenberg produced huge church Bibles. They looked just like the old huge church Bibles except that they were made by his new invention. Even the letters were made to look as if they were handwritten.
His first Bible came out in 1456. In Latin. Because the Bible is a long book, it was an excellent test for a printing press. He printed only large church Bibles, about 150 of them.
Before Gutenberg a huge church Bible cost about 160 crowns ($1500). That was about four years’ pay for a labourer. Gutenberg cut the cost down to a fourth of that, 40 crowns. Now, with all the advances made in printing since then, you can get the same sort of Bible for 5 crowns.
The printing press made possible not just cheap books, but new forms of reading material. Among others:
- newspapers starting in the 1600s
- magazines starting in the 1800s
- junk mail starting in the 1900s
With the printing press a new medium was born: print. It gave the written word a power and presence it never had before.
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