The Printing Press

The Printing Press
(High School)
The Gutenberg Press: Mainz, Germany, 1440

Song China
Chinese civilization is responsible for many firsts: paper and silk, porcelain and gunpowder, tea and the compass, and movable type printing. From the latter discovery, came the world’s first printing presses, well over four hundred years before Johannes Gutenberg’s mechanical press took Europe by storm. Eleventh century China saw a restored golden age under the early Song Emperors. Decades of war left the country divided and bleeding. Reunited under the Song, the Chinese rebounded, leading to widespread economic growth, the rise in population, and with these, the rise in cities. Adhering to Confucian principles of human and virtuous action, the Song Emperors presided over a Chinese renaissance unequaled for its day and age. Porcelain and textile manufacturing boomed, as did the production of silk, aided greatly by a thriving economy, which began to utilize the world’s first paper currency. In technological innovations, the Song era witnessed the creation of the magnetic compass, gunpowder - and the plethora of armaments that derived from such a discovery - and the first widespread use of printing, to produce books focused upon Buddhist and Daoist scriptures, and classical philosophical and historical texts.

Into this age of prosperity, the artisan and inventor Bi Sheng pioneered a technique that consisted of taking gummed clay and cutting them “into characters as thin as the edge of a coin,” with each of these characters forming a single type. After backing his types over a fire to harden them, he placed them upon a metal plate “covered with a mixture of pine resin, wax, and paper ashes.” Finally, in printing, a metal frame covered the plate and into this, he inserted his clay types so as to form cohesive sentences, depending upon what he wished to print; lathered in ink, the characters were ready for the paper to be pressed down upon them and in this way, the age of mass printing began. But Bi Sheng’s technique did not long last, for the clay types did not absorb the ink well enough, leading to distorted images upon the page, and in the centuries to come, the Chinese settled upon wood - and later metal - movable type, which were superior to the original ceramic pieces, in terms of the quality of the printed material they produced.

These early forms of printing heralded an age of greater accessibility of written material, and as such, stand as a noble - but forgotten - precedent for the European presses that emerged in the centuries to come.

Gutenberg
The name is inextricably linked with the press and the spread of information and ideas across Europe. The written word in Europe was a privileged article, usually painstakingly written by hand from the pens of master scribesmen, who created exquisite manuscripts all too few in number. That was the big problem: too few books. So, a fifteenth century German inventor, named Johannes Gutenberg, happened upon a method of mass producing them.

A metal worker by trade, Gutenberg possessed the skills and acumen necessary for the task at hand. To make the type with which he would print, he “developed a unique alloy of 80 percent lead, 5 percent tin, and 15 percent antimony to maintain a constant mass throughout the process of manufacturing type.” Gutenberg’s durable type was capable of producing high quality pages of a mass scale. The press itself consisted of a pair of upright timbers, linked together with cross pieces at top and bottom. Through these timbers rested the wooden frame, into which the pieces of type were arranged and inked, using a ball of leather stuffed with wool. Over this, the printer spread his paper, before being pressed down by a metal frame called a ‘platen,’ from which process emerged a fully printed page, with clearly distinguishable text.

Though Gutenberg ran into financial troubles with his business backers, the technology wrought forth was enough to kick off a revolution that quickly overtook Europe. Within fifty years, the presses had sprung up continent-wide, leading to a greater production of written material than ever before. Exposure to such fueled ideas and thought, previously unheard of, led to many of the great revolutionary movements of the sixteenth and later centuries. Indeed, had Gutenberg’s press not become such a familiarity among the peoples of Europe, the great written works of the renaissance, the treatises of Machiavelli, Erasmus, and Luther, the poems of Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso may never have achieved the notoriety - and infamy - that helped change the world! Knowledge is power, and the printing press brought such into the hands of millions.

Before the printing press books were handwritten, painstakingly rendered into being by a skilled scribe. Beautiful works in and of themselves they were paltry in number, the property of a select few. Printing presses changed all that. First in China, and later in Europe, the printing revolution was on. Suddenly, the average Joe had the wealth of humanity to hand, and in this was unheard-of liberty - the right to think for oneself! Staggering. So, for this activity pick up that glorious conveyer of wisdom, perversion, and rebellion galore: the book...and read it! Simple. Here’s how it evolved:

• Book 1
• Book 2