The invention of the printing press changed the world in 7 ways.
The invention of a mechanical type printing press helped spread knowledge more widely and faster than ever before.
German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around 1436, although he was far from the first to automate the book-printing process.Korean bookmakers were printing with metal type a century before Gutenberg, and woodblock printing in China dates back to the 9th century.
Most historians believe that Gutenberg's adaptation, which used a screw-type wine press to squeeze down evenly on the metal type, was the key to the modern age.Every literate European, whose numbers doubled every century, had revolutionary ideas and priceless ancient knowledge placed in their hands with the newfound ability to inexpensively mass-produce books on every imaginable topic.
The printing press helped pull Europe out of the Dark Ages and accelerate human progress.
Gutenberg did not live to see the full impact of his invention.The first print run of the Bible in Latin took three years to print around 200 copies, which was a miracle in the day of hand-copied manuscripts.
Gutenberg's invention wasn't profitable until there was a distribution network for books.Palmer, a professor of early modern European history at the University of Chicago, compares early printed books like the Gutenberg Bible to how e-books struggled to find a market before Amazon introduced the Kindle.
There are about three people in your town who can read the Bible in Latin.What are you going to do with the other copies?
Gutenberg died penniless and his presses were seized by his debts.The central shipping hub of the Mediterranean in the late 15th century was Venice, where other German printers fled for greener pastures.
The first mass-distribution mechanism for printed books was created by Palmer, who said that if you printed 200 copies of a book in Venice, you could sell five to the captain of each ship leaving port.
The ships left Venice carrying religious literature and news from all over the world.Local printers in Venice printed four-page news pamphlets for sailors, and when their ships arrived in distant ports, they would give them to riders who would race them off to dozens of towns.
In the 1490s, locals would gather at the pub to hear a paid reader read the latest news, which was everything from bawdy scandals to war reports.
Palmer says that this changed the way that people consume news.It made it normal to check the news every day.
The Italian Renaissance began almost a century before Gutenberg invented his printing press, when 14th-century political leaders in Italian city-states like Rome and Florence set out to revive the Ancient Roman educational system that had produced giants like Caesar and Cicero.
The aim of the early Renaissance was to find and republish long-lost works by figures like Plato and Aristotle.Wealthy patrons funded expeditions to look for isolated monasteries.In the Ottoman Empire, Italian emissaries learned how to translate Ancient Greek and Arabic into Latin.
The operation to retrieve classic texts was in action long before the printing press, but publishing the texts had been difficult and expensive for anyone other than the richest of the rich.According to Palmer, a hand-copied book in the 14th century cost as much as a house and a small fortune.The largest library in Europe in 1300 was the university library of Paris.
By the 1490s, when Venice was the book-printing capital of Europe, a printed copy of a great work by Cicero only cost a month's salary for a school teacher.The rediscovery and sharing of knowledge was greatly accelerated by the printing press.
Palmer says that the project to educate the few wealthiest elite in this society could now be used to build libraries in every medium-sized town and a library in the house of every reasonably wealthy merchant family.
"Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one" is a famous quote attributed to German religious reformer Martin Luther.
Luther was the first to publish a message questioning the Church.The movements of other "heretics" were quickly quashed by the Church and the few copies of their writings were easily destroyed.The explosion of printing presses across Europe coincides with Luther's crusade against the selling of indulgences.
On October 31, 1517, Luther nailed his "95 Theses" to the church door.Broadsheet copies of Luther's document were being printed in London in 17 days.
Luther became the world's first best-selling author thanks to the printing press and timely power of his message.5,000 copies of Luther's translation of the New Testament were sold in two weeks.Luther's writings accounted for a third of all books sold in Germany from 1518 to 1525.
The complete work of Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus can be seen in the tables from his seminal text "De revolutionibus orbium caelestium" (On the revolution of heavenly spheres).
The three inventions that changed the world were gunpowder, the nautical compass and the printing press, according to the English philosopher Francis Bacon.
Science was a solitary pursuit for thousands of years.The sloth-like pace of hand-written publishing separated great mathematicians and natural philosophers.handwritten copies of scientific data were expensive and prone to human error.
Science took great leaps forward in the 16th and 17th centuries because of the ability to publish and share scientific findings and experimental data with a wide audience.In the early 1500s, Polish astronomerNicolaus Copernicus relied on printed tables of planetary movements to help develop his sun-centered model of the galaxy.
When Elizabeth Eisenstein wrote her book about the impact of the printing press, she said that the biggest gift to science was the accuracy with which the original data were copied.With printed formulas and mathematical tables in hand, scientists could trust the fidelity of existing data and devote more energy to breaking new ground.
The people who were silenced in the earlier system, which means radical voices, are among the first groups to be loud when a new information technology comes along.
It takes a lot of effort to adopt a new information technology.Those who had no voice before that technology existed are the people who are most willing to take risks.
Palmer says that in the print revolution, that meant radical heresies, radical Christian splinter groups, and critics of the government.The Protestant Reformation is just one symptom of print enabling these voices to be heard.
Those in power tried to keep critical and alternative opinions out of the public discourse.It was easy to censor before the printing press.Killing the "heretic" and burning his or her notebooks was all it took.
It became nearly impossible to destroy all copies of a dangerous idea after the printing press.The more dangerous a book was, the more people wanted to read it.When the Church published a list of banned books, the booksellers knew what to print next.
Philosophers like John Locke and Jean- Jacques Rousseau were read a lot during the Enlightenment era.The elevation of critical reasoning above custom and tradition encouraged people to question religious authority.
Increasing democratization of knowledge in the Enlightenment era led to the development of public opinion and its power to topple the ruling elite.In pre-Revolution France, Louis-Sebstien Mercier wrote.
The last thirty years have seen a great and momentous revolution in our ideas.One may hope that enlightened ideas will bring about the greatest good on Earth and that tyrants of all kinds will tremble before the universal cry that echoes everywhere, awakening Europe from its slumbers.
The most beautiful gift from heaven is printing.Printing was only born a short while ago, and already everything is heading toward perfect... tyrants of the world!The writer should be trembling before him.
The literate could not resist the attraction of Enlightenment authors.In 1776, the literacy rate in the American colonies was around 15 percent, yet there were more copies printed and sold of the revolutionary tract than the entire population.
The printing press introduced the world to the idea of machines taking jobs from workers, but the Industrial Revolution didn't get into full swing in Europe until the mid-18th century.
Scribes were in high demand before Gutenberg.Dozens of trained artisans would painstakingly hand-copy and illuminate manuscripts.The printing press rendered their unique skillset obsolete by the late 15th century.