Gutenberg's Printing Press
Gutenberg was experimenting with printing at Strasbourg by about 1440, and had a working system in Mainz by around 1450. Printing itself was not new. Block printing from carved wooden pages had existed in China for centuries, and movable type in ceramic and metal had been used in China and Korea — the Jikji was printed with metal type in Korea in 1377, seventy-eight years before Gutenberg's Bible. What Europe lacked was a way of producing thousands of identical, reusable, precisely uniform letters at speed, and that is a metallurgical problem rather than a conceptual one. Gutenberg was a goldsmith. His solution was the hand mould: a steel punch struck into a copper matrix, the matrix held in an adjustable mould, and an alloy of lead, tin and antimony poured in — an alloy that melted low, cast sharply, cooled fast and did not shrink. He also developed an oil-based ink that would stick to metal where scribal ink beaded off, and adapted a screw press. The alphabet mattered too: twenty-six letters make movable type far more economical than tens of thousands of characters. The forty-two-line Bible of around 1455 was produced in an edition of about 180 copies and is a technical performance nobody improved on for a century. Something like twenty million books were printed in Europe before 1500, from presses in more than 250 towns. The Reformation, the scientific revolution and the standardisation of vernacular languages all run through it. Gutenberg himself lost the workshop to his financier and died with a pension and no business.
- Year: 1440 CE
- Category: Cultural
