Most people take the printing press for granted, and many find it hard to imagine modern life if the printing press had not been invented. People would not have been able to read books, newspapers, and magazines. Posters, flyers, and pamphlets would not exist and would not come to individuals in the mail. The printing press allows a tremendous amount of information to be exchanged in the shortest possible time. It is one of the most important inventions for modern man and has made a huge contribution to society.
Before the invention of the printing press, all written material and images were written and copied by hand. This was done by certain people who were assigned places in monasteries called scriptoriums. The scribe would work in silence, first marking the page and then transferring the data from the book being copied onto paper. These texts were usually only owned by monasteries, educational institutions, or very wealthy people in the Middle Ages. Some families kept copies of the Bible, but these were very rare.
Humanity has been on its way to the invention of the printing press for a very long time, several thousand years. The idea of the printing press is embedded in the brand or tare that cattlemen used to mark their horses or cows. It is also seen in the personal seals of the leaders of ancient civilizations. Thousands of cattle and a great number of goods could be marked with one brand or seal. Archaeologists are still unable to decipher the text imprinted on the so-called Phaistos disc, which was found on the island of Crete. On the clay disc, spiral-shaped signs were stamped with the help of stamps. With the presence of stamps, many such discs could be made. The importance of this artifact is that this disk is, in fact, the first example of the printmaking of a coherent text.
The inventors of the first printing press were the Chinese, but its possibilities were limited and connected with the specificity of Chinese writing, numbering about 40 thousand signs, each of which denotes a separate word. A scribe, who knew no more than 3,000 to 5,000 characters, could not reproduce philosophical or literary works by hand, as he did not understand them all. Therefore, the following method was devised to disseminate the works of Confucius, Li Bo, and Bo Juyi. The text was copied on a wooden board, and from the board, smeared with paint, was transferred to a paper sheet. One text could thus be reproduced indefinitely; however, it was necessary to cut out the characters on a new board to print another text.
This printing method was not known in Europe until Johannes Gutenberg, the first inventor of the printing press. He invented a method of printing text using movable letters that were more advanced than the Chinese ones. It combined the principle of stamping with printing from boards or xylography. It was he who was able to find the best technical forms of embodiment of the ideas that had been partly expressed before him. There is no reason to believe that Gutenberg was familiar with the experience of the Chinese and Korean inventions. However, he came to the solution to the problem of movable letters in his own way. Thus, Gutenberg’s merit is confined to the generalization and systematization of inventions existing before him, putting into practice the idea of printing books and presenting to the world the first and immediately perfect examples of publications.
Gutenberg already had experience with printing, so he realized that using threaded bars could make the process faster. He sought to reproduce large texts in large volumes. Instead of wooden blocks, Gutenberg decided to use metal blocks. The design he invented was called the movable type machine because the metal letters could move around to form different combinations for imprinting words and phrases. Using this device, Gutenberg created the first printed book, which was the Bible. Today, the Bible printed by Gutenberg is a historical treasure.
The typewriter had a device that set groups of blocks in the right order so that the letters were put together into words and sentences, constantly moving. The blocks were dipped in ink, and paper was placed on top of them. Thus, as the paper moved, letters would appear on it. These typewriters were operated by hand. Later, by the 19th century, other inventors created steam printing presses that did not require operator control. Today’s printing presses are electronic, automated, and capable of printing much faster than all previous counterparts.
At the end of the Middle Ages, there was an economic boom, cities were actively developing, and intellectual life was revived. All this raised the question of printing as an urgent problem of the era and predetermined its inevitable emergence (Fry, 2018). Manuscripts could not keep up with the service of diverse social needs and the fixation of accumulated experience in science and art. Education was becoming more and more of a prerequisite for people wishing to take part in government, commerce, and other public occupations. The new stage of social development required the reproduction of books at a rate that medieval scribes could not provide.
Gutenberg’s invention resonated with society. Members of the higher social classes were not happy – for them, books written by hand were a sign of luxury. They believed that books should not be subject to mass production. Because of this, printed books were primarily distributed to the lower classes. Later, printing houses began to open, giving the world new professions. Printed texts became a new way of distributing information to many people. It benefited scientists, who could distribute their work, and politicians, who could interest voters through printed materials. The most important accomplishment achieved with the invention of the printing press was the ability to receive an education to which many people previously had no access. Consequently, the invention quickly started new ideas unseen before developments. Another contribution that the printing press made was the distribution of printed materials and books in all languages to the people.
Gutenberg’s invention spread very quickly throughout the whole of Europe. In Italy, the first printing press was installed in the Benedictine monastery on the outskirts of Rome through the efforts of German printers. Soon book printing appeared in Rome, then in – Venice, Milan, Naples, and Florence. Italian typography quickly acquired its own distinctive features – a Venetian font was developed as a counterbalance to the Gothic type. Venice became the capital of Italian printing – in the 16th century, there were as many as 113 printers (Kikuchi, 2018). More than half of all Italian publishers and booksellers lived there.
The spread of printing in Europe virtually coincided with the beginning of the Reformation in Europe. The leaders of the Reformation were the first to take advantage of the printing press for propaganda (Boerner, Rubin, and Severgnini, 2019). Luther and his supporters printed polemical pamphlets in large numbers, which explained to the supporters of the new doctrine the basic theological problems and the specifics of the current political situation in an understandable form. Already by this time, the importance of the Gutenberg invention was extremely great. Printed texts had tremendous power and were used by all political and religious camps without exception. The printing possibilities that opened up determined the course of European history. However, the printing of newspapers came somewhat later, as a series of transformations and changes in the life of Europe (Lamal, Cumby, and Helmers, 2021). Europeans had already learned how to make cheap paper, but the communication system was still archaic.
Due to the spread of mass printing, there was the birth and organization of postal communication and the spread of literacy among relatively large segments of the population. The Middle Ages limited human spiritual life to religion, and the Inquisition declared knowledge to be a grave sin. As a result, the overwhelming population of Europe was illiterate (Eskelson, 2021). Overcoming the Middle Ages was also overcoming ignorance, the awakening of the human mind. Along with the first machines, trading firms, and books, the thirst for knowledge developed. Not only monks but also merchants and even some ordinary townspeople learned to read and write. Intellectuals were born as a single, socially significant stratum of society, which means that during the Middle Ages, the spiritual and political life of society was defined by books. They were not accessible to everyone but nevertheless played a huge role in disseminating knowledge.
Venice was the main trading center and seaport of Europe at the time, making it the place where information flowed from all over the world. This city received information from the East (India, Turkey, China, and Arab countries), from the papal court in Rome, which played a paramount role in the life of Europe, and from imperial Vienna. A wealth of information material required systematization, and in a systematized form, it was already a commodity. The enterprising Venetians were not slow to put it into circulation (Gialdini, 2021)). A bureau was set up in the very center of the city to collect all the news that arrived in Venice by ships and merchant caravans, to transcribe them onto special pieces of paper and sell them for a small coin known as a gazette. Thus, printing arose due to the development of capitalist relations of production and market exchange, later becoming an ideological weapon.
Gutenberg’s invention revolutionized the world because it solved the problem of making books of any size and sped up the printing process many times over. It provided an acceptable price for books and made the work more cost-effective. This invention completely changed the technique of printing and restructured the printing process. Gutenberg divided the artisanal unity of simple printing into separate specialized types of work. Making type, typesetting, and printing after him became separate independent stages in the printing process. With his invention, he foresaw the emergence of manufactory forms of production organization, which from the seventeenth century were to overcome the handicraft.
Reference List
Boerner, L., Rubin, J., and Severgnini, B. (2019) ‘A time to print, a time to reform,’ European Economic Review, 138, pp. 1-55.
Eskelson, T. (2021) ‘States, institutions, and literacy rates in early-modern Western Europe,’ Journal of Education and Learning, 10, pp. 109-123.
Fry, A. (2018). ‘Factors affecting the use of print and electronic books: a use study and discussion,’ College & Research Libraries, 79, pp. 68-85.
Gialdini, A. (2021) ‘Bookbinders in the early modern Venetian book rrade,’ The Historical Journal. Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–21.
Kikuchi, C. (2018) ‘Competition and collaboration in the Venetian book world from 1469 to the early sixteenth century,’ Cambridge University Press, 73(1), pp. 179-205.
Lamal, N., Cumby, J., and Helmers, H. J. (2021) Print and power in early modern Europe (1500–1800). Brill.