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Johann Gutenberg
Block printing existed long before Gutenberg. The Chinese had been carving wood blocks to print books as early as 868, but their process had one major drawback; a new set of woodcuts had to be made for each book. Producing one book was difficult; producing a variety of books was not practical. Writing ink dates from about 2500 BC in Egypt and China.
They took the soot from fires and mixed it with sap. Later civilizations
used plant material for ink, particularly the dark blue indigo plant.
Gutenberg used an oil-based printing ink that would last longer than other
inks used in his time. We don’t know much about Gutenberg because he was not famous during his lifetime. We know that he was born in Germany about 1400, and he worked as a goldsmith. In 1448, he developed engraved signatures for each number, letter, and punctuation mark. Gutenberg then built the molds to hold the signatures in place, and borrowed money to purchase a press. Gutenberg published the first mass-produced book: a 1,282 page Bible. To this day, more copies of the Bible have been printed than any other book. Copies of Gutenberg’s invention spread throughout
Europe, but Gutenberg did not get rich from his invention. Patents did
not yet exist, so anybody could build a printing press without compensating
Gutenberg for his inspiration. Some religious and government officials
denounced the invention of printing because they feared that it would
spread bad ideas. But they were a minority. By 1500 there were 1,700 printing
presses in Europe. The presses had already produced about 20 million volumes
of 40,000 different books. |
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To cite this page: |
A
good cook can take leftovers and turn them into a delicious meal. Like
a good cook, Johann Gutenberg took what had already been discovered, and
created a small invention that changed history. Gutenberg created a machine
that allowed him to move small blocks of letters in such a way that written
material could be printed and mass-produced. Before the printing press,
few people outside the clergy could read, but with inexpensive books,
literacy spread through Europe.
