In the early 1440s, in the German city of Strasbourg, a secretive craftsman named Johannes Gutenberg was pinning his hopes on a scheme to sell polished metal mirrors to religious pilgrims. The idea was that the little mirrors would capture the holy light radiating from sacred relics displayed at a great pilgrimage in Aachen. The venture collapsed when the pilgrimage was postponed by an outbreak of plague, leaving Gutenberg with anxious investors and no market. Out of that failure, or alongside it, he was quietly perfecting something that would matter far more than any mirror: a way to print with movable metal type.
Gutenberg did not invent printing, and it is worth saying so plainly, because quizzes love the point. Block printing, in which a whole page is carved into a single wooden block, was centuries old in East Asia. Movable type had also been tried far earlier — the Chinese artisan Bi Sheng made ceramic type in the eleventh century, and Korea was printing with cast metal type before Europe; the Korean Buddhist text known as the Jikji, printed in 1377, is often cited as the oldest surviving book made with movable metal type. What Gutenberg achieved, in isolation from all this, was a complete and commercially workable system for the West.
The system, not just the type
His genius lay in assembling several inventions at once. He devised a hand mould that could cast large quantities of identical metal letters quickly, using an alloy of lead, tin and antimony that melted at a low temperature and cast crisply. He formulated a thick, oil-based ink that would cling to metal type rather than run off it as water-based inks did. And he adapted the screw press already used for pressing grapes and olives so that it could push paper evenly against an inked bed of type. Individually these were clever; together they were revolutionary, because they made it possible to produce books in quantity, quickly, and at falling cost.
The masterpiece that announced the technology was the Gutenberg Bible, also called the 42-line Bible for the number of lines in most of its columns, produced in Mainz around 1455. It was a thing of beauty, printed to rival the finest handwritten manuscripts, with space left for decoration to be added by hand. Perhaps around 180 copies were made, on both paper and vellum, and each still had to be finished by hand before it could be sold. Fewer than fifty survive today, most of them incomplete, and a complete copy is among the most valuable books in the world, changing hands for sums that dwarf almost any other printed volume.
Bankrupt at the moment of triumph
Success did not bring Gutenberg riches. To fund the enterprise he had borrowed heavily from a Mainz financier named Johann Fust. When repayment stalled, Fust sued, won, and took control of the printing workshop and much of its equipment — very possibly just as the Bible was being completed. Fust went into business with Gutenberg's own skilled assistant, Peter Schöffer, and it was their firm, not Gutenberg's, that prospered. The man who cracked the technology ended his days in relative obscurity, granted a modest pension by an archbishop, and the details of his final years are thinly documented.
The consequences, by contrast, are impossible to overstate. Within fifty years of the 42-line Bible, printing presses had spread to hundreds of European towns, and millions of books had been produced — the works of this first era, printed before 1501, are known as incunabula. Ideas that had crept from monastery to monastery at the speed of a copying monk's hand now raced across the continent in print runs of thousands. The Protestant Reformation, launched when Martin Luther's arguments were printed and distributed faster than the Church could answer them, is almost unimaginable without the press. So is the scientific revolution, which depended on scholars everywhere reading the same accurate diagrams and figures.
Historians sometimes call it information's first big bang: the moment the written word stopped being scarce. A dealer in devotional mirrors, chasing reflected holy light and going broke in the process, had instead built the machine that would let the whole of Europe read.
Quiz nuggets
- Johannes Gutenberg developed movable-type printing in Mainz, Germany, in the mid-fifteenth century, producing the 42-line Gutenberg Bible around 1455.
- Gutenberg did not invent movable type globally: Korea's Jikji (1377) is the oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type, and China's Bi Sheng made ceramic type in the eleventh century.
- Gutenberg's system combined a reusable type mould, an oil-based ink, and a screw press adapted from wine and olive presses.
- He lost his workshop after a lawsuit brought by his financier Johann Fust, whose firm with Peter Schöffer went on to prosper.
- Books printed in Europe before 1501, in the earliest era of printing, are known as incunabula.