Gutenberg's press

You might have heard that: "Johannes Gutenberg invented the press machine in the middle of the 15th century". That's not strictly true... It's easy to get that impression when you read about Gutenberg. But he didn't invent the press. What he did was to put together several earlier printing discoveries into a machine of his own design.

But even though he didn't invent the first press his achievement was of such importance that it changed the way of distributing ideas and literature forever. You could say that Gutenberg invented a printing technology that Europe was ready for. During the middle ages in Europe books had both been written and copied by hand. It was mostly monks that did the copying. As they rewrote the copies by hand the task could take several years.

You can just imagine how rare and expensive every book became. It's said that the cost of every book in the University of Cambridge equaled the cost of a....Vineyard. In China, they had been printing books for almost a thousand years. At the beginning of the 15th century, fifty years before Gutenberg's press, there were approximately 4000 books in the Chinese emperor's library. At the same time the rich king of Portugal in Europe owned...six books.

The most common technique used in China was that they carved out every single book page from a wooden block. It was time consuming; and when done you couldn't reuse the wooden blocks. But the Chinese printers were quick and able and there was plenty of cheap labour. This printing technique is called woodblock printing. Woodblock printing reached Europe at the beginning of the 15th century but it never became as common as in China.

In China they also used a printing technique with separate movable characters: "types". These types could be combined to lay out a whole page. Types were first made in wood, later in ceramics, and finally in metal. But the Chinese language consists of so many characters - several thousand - that this technique wasn't very practical. But in Europe, there were much fewer letters in the latin alphabet, only 26, so here the "movable-type" technique was much more practical.

Gutenberg realised this. He had been working as a goldsmith so he was used to working with metal. Gutenberg created movable types out of a lead and tin-mix. They could be combined to print any book page, over and over again. And when the types were worn out it was easy to mould new ones.

When it came to constructing the press itself, Gutenberg was inspired by presses that were used for pressing wine or oil. He also experimented with different ink-mixes to produce the one most suitable for his print. Of the books printed by Gutenberg one is very famous: It's a bible called The Gutenberg Bible. Gutenberg's press made this much easier and cheaper to get hold of. And with more copies of every book, ideas now spread quicker during the renaissance than in the middle ages.

And with them criticism of the Catholic Church. But the renaissance you will learn about in another film.