Printing Press

The first commercially successful mass printing press with moveable type is generally credited to German jeweler and metalworker Johannes Gutenberg (1398–1468) in the year 1448. Other printing techniques existed prior to 1448 in Asia and Europe (e.g., woodblock printing, moveable clay and metal type). The development of mass printed books, however, provided the impetus to great social and cultural changes such as the Reformation, the Renaissance and the scientific revolution. Critics also question how our evolution from a handwriting to a print culture has impacted areas as diverse as societal attitudes towards handwriting, the use of ancient languages and later technological advancements such as digital media.

Brief History

While Johannes Gutenberg is usually cited as the inventor of the printing press, printing existed in various forms before Gutenberg's time. Nearly six hundredd years before Gutenberg, Chinese monks had woodblock printing, and in Japan and Korea as such technologies were used as early as the eighth century. One ancient book, The Diamond Sutra from 868, was discovered in 1900, having been sealed inside a cave near the city of Dunhuang, China. Eleventh century Chinese peasant Pi Sheng developed the world's first moveable type from baked clay characters and ink (a mix of pine resin, wax, and paper ash). In Korea in 1377, a monk printed what is believed the world’s oldest book printed with metal type, a two-volume Buddhist themed book known as Jikji. One volume resides at the National Library of France. Moveable type was initially more popular in Europe than Asia, perhaps because of the complexities of Asian writing systems compared with the relatively few characters of the Latin alphabet.

Europeans used woodblock printing pre-1448, but each block was carved in one piece and would break with repeated use, making the process long and labor-intensive. In addition to woodblock printing, European monasteries ran scriptoria where monks, some illiterate, copied and then decorated manuscripts by hand. The process was costly, lengthy, and mistake ridden. Essayist Kai-Wing Chow argues that European paper and ink weren’t as amenable to block printing as their Chinese counterparts, thus necessitating Gutenberg to innovate a new pressing technique and printing media.

Previously a debt-ridden entrepreneur and son of a noble family from Mainz, Germany, Gutenberg had already experimented with woodblock when he streamlined the printing process with his press. Gutenberg broke woodblocks down into their components of individual letters, punctuation marks, spaces, and so on, and cast the individual pieces in an alloy of lead, antimony, and tin. Gutenberg could then use and reuse the separate pieces of type, as long as the metal did not wear down. Since letters could be arranged into any order, a potentially infinite number of texts could be set as text in a printing plate. What especially distinguished Gutenberg’s press was its mechanized transfer of ink from moveable type to paper using a wine press screw mechanism. Gutenberg also created better ink from linseed oil and soot and a simple hand mold to recast type. This mold led to the standardization of book fonts and facilitated the reproduction of his printing press.

Gutenberg and his partner Johann Fust operated the first successful press business using the new technique. By 1452, using borrowed money, Gutenberg undertook his famous project to print Bibles and completed two hundred copies of the two-volume work, a small number of those on vellum. The Bibles, sold at the 1455 Frankfurt Book Fair for the equivalent of three years of a clerk’s pay, are credited with launching the Protestant Reformation by putting the word of God into the hands of average people. Interestingly, the Gutenberg Bible was decorated to look like hand copied manuscripts. Fifty of his Bibles are believed to exist today.

Gutenberg’s press spread quickly. Around the year 1500 an estimated 2,500 European cities had presses. German and later Italian printers set new printing standards. Printing made it possible to store more information in libraries for less money, and standardized information in printed texts helped advance science, technology and scholarship. Historians estimate that European presses produced more than twenty million copies of books by 1500 and 150 to 200 million copies by 1600. Early books were religious but later publications also concerned medicine, travel, and practical topics.

The printing press along with economic prosperity sped the spread of Renaissance culture post-1450. A growing and literate middle class not versed in Latin gravitated to books in their own languages, which contributed to national identities. Alternately, humanists began learning Latin and Greek so they could read the revived ancient Greek and Roman manuscripts on science, government, rhetoric, philosophy, and art. As reading became a silent and solitary activity, the printing press challenged the oral tradition and the work of scribes. The printing press also led to the standardization of grammar and syntax.

Despite the great cultural changes created by printed books, historian Peter Stallybrass notes that Gutenberg did not make his money from printing the Bible but from smaller jobs printing broadsides as well as legal and other documents. This is true not only of Gutenberg but of later press operators such as Benjamin Franklin. Also, despite the success of his printing press, Gutenberg died in a state of poor finances. Public recognition of Gutenberg and his invention came more than thirty years after his death at the start of the sixteenth century.

Impact

Until the early nineteenth century, printers still completed each step of the printing process by hand. Printers used hand operated press plates, also called hand and platen, much like Gutenberg had. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, iron replaced much of the previously wooden press body. Philadelphian George Clymer’s 1816 Columbian Press printed 250 copies an hour with better impression force control that made cleaner copies. When electrical and steam engines were added to the process in the early nineteenth century, productions sped to 400 copies an hour. In 1832, American Richard Hoe innovated on German Friedrik Koenig's high-speed steam press by adding a cylinder that rolled the design onto paper, enabling 1,000–4,000 impressions an hour. Hoe invented the rotary press, in 1844, with paper rolling between two cylinders, one of which was inked, allowed up to 8,000 copies an hour; this press was used by large newspapers. In 1865, William Bullock introduced the Bullock Press, which used continuous self-feeding roll paper, printed simultaneously on both sides by two cylinder forms, cut with a serrated knife and printing up to 30,000 pages an hour. The printing press continued to evolve into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with advancements in color printing, the introduction of computers into the printing press (1970s), and more recently the ability of authors and readers to "print on demand." In the twenty-first century, more words are being printed every second than were printed every year during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

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