Johannes Gutenberg
Johannes Gutenberg invented printing with movable metal type in Europe, and lost the business to his financier. Born in Mainz around 1400 to a patrician family connected with the archbishop's mint, he trained as a goldsmith — which is the trade that mattered, since the problem he solved was metallurgical rather than mechanical. Printing from carved wooden blocks already existed, and movable type had been used in China and Korea for centuries. What Europe lacked was a way to produce thousands of identical, reusable, precisely uniform letters quickly. His answer was the hand mould: a punch cut in hard steel, struck into copper to make a matrix, and the matrix held in an adjustable mould into which an alloy of lead, tin and antimony was poured. The alloy melted at low temperature, cast sharply, cooled fast and did not shrink. He also developed an oil-based ink that would adhere to metal, where water-based scribal ink beaded off, and adapted a screw press. He borrowed 800 guilders from Johann Fust in 1450 and a further 800 in 1452 to produce a Bible. The forty-two-line Bible was finished around 1455, in an edition of about 180 copies, and is a technical performance nobody improved on for a century. Fust sued that same year, won, and took the workshop, the type and the stock, and went into business with Gutenberg's foreman Peter Schöffer. Gutenberg was granted a pension by the archbishop in 1465 and died in 1468. Some twenty million books were printed in Europe before 1500, and the Bible that bankrupted him is the most valuable book in the world.
- Lived: 1400 CE – 1468 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: inventor, craftsman
