The Printing Press and the Spread of Knowledge

The machine that copied a book a day

Before about 1450, a European book was copied by hand. A long book could take a scribe months. Around 1450, in Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg combined several inventions into a system that could print hundreds of identical copies. His most famous product, the Gutenberg Bible, was finished around 1455. About 180 copies were printed, and fewer than fifty survive.

But Gutenberg did not invent printing. To understand the significance of his press, we need to look at East Asia first.

Printing in East Asia

• Woodblock printing was used in China for centuries. The Diamond Sutra from Dunhuang, dated 868, is the oldest dated printed book that survives.
• Around the 1040s, the Chinese craftsman Bi Sheng made movable type from baked clay.
• In Korea, printers used metal movable type. The Jikji, a Buddhist text printed in 1377, is the oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type: about 78 years before the Gutenberg Bible.
• In 1443, King Sejong of Joseon created the Hangul alphabet, which made reading far easier than with thousands of Chinese characters.

Why didn't movable type transform East Asia the way it did Europe? One reason is the writing system: Chinese uses thousands of characters, so carving one woodblock per page was often cheaper and more flexible than storing huge sets of type. Woodblock printing in fact produced vast numbers of books in Ming China.

Gutenberg's system

Gutenberg's achievement was to combine:

1. A hand mould that cast large numbers of identical letters quickly;
2. A metal alloy (mostly lead, with tin and antimony) that melted easily and hardened fast;
3. An oil-based ink that stuck to metal type;
4. A screw press, adapted from presses used for wine and olive oil.

The Latin alphabet needs only a few dozen letters, plus capitals and punctuation, so a set of movable type could be reused for any text. This made printing cheap and fast in Europe.

How fast did it spread?

Printers, often trained in Mainz, set up shops across Europe. By 1500 presses were working in many towns, and Venice had become a great printing centre, where Aldus Manutius published small, affordable editions of Greek and Latin classics. Books printed before 1501 are called incunabula ("cradle" books). Historians estimate that millions of copies had been printed by 1500.

Printing also crossed into other worlds. Sephardic Jewish exiles printed Hebrew books in Istanbul from 1493. The first press in the Americas operated in Mexico City from 1539, and Jesuits printed in Goa from 1556. In the Ottoman Empire, however, printing in Arabic script for Muslim readers was not established until the 1720s. Historians debate why: the power and prestige of skilled calligraphers and scribes, religious respect for hand-copied texts, and the fact that manuscript copying met demand well.

Consequences: a "printing revolution"?

The historian Elizabeth Eisenstein (The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 1979) argued that printing transformed European culture:

• Standardization: identical copies meant scholars everywhere could cite the same page, maps and diagrams.
• Preservation: texts were less likely to be lost or corrupted by copying errors.
• Spread of ideas: the Reformation (next lesson) used printed pamphlets and woodcut images; Martin Luther became the best-selling author of his day.
• Science: astronomers and anatomists could share accurate tables and images.
• Vernacular languages: printing in German, English, French and Italian helped standardize spelling and grammar, and may have strengthened national identities.

Other historians, such as Adrian Johns, argue that this is too simple: early printed books were full of errors and pirated editions, literacy rose slowly (most Europeans could not read in 1600), and how people used print mattered as much as the machine itself. This is a debate about the significance of a technology.