Cart 0. Featured Design Galleries Business Cards. View Gallery. Greeting Cards. Invitation Cards. The Invention and History of the Printing Press. Table of Contents Life before the printing press Inspiration and invention of the printing press How the printing press works Impact of the printing press. Life before the printing press Before the printing press was invented, any writings and drawings had to be completed painstakingly by hand.
Scriptorium The monasteries had a special room called a "scriptorium. Inspiration and invention of the printing press Around the late s, a German man named Johann Gutenberg was quite desperate to find a way to make money.
Gutenburg printing press, movable type Instead of using wood blocks, Gutenberg used metal instead. How the printing press works With the original printing press, a frame is used to set groups of type blocks. Offset press: The offset press revolutionized the printing industry, making it possible to print enormous quantities efficiently and cost-effectively. Types of pressess Though these are the most popular types of printing presses, other types exist for specialized purposes.
Get Connected. Our Locations. Mountain Lakes U. Highway 46 Mountain Lakes , NJ Most importantly, Goryeo rulers intended most of its printing projects for the use of the nobility alone.
Nonetheless, it is possible that printing technology spread from East to West. Kublai Khan had access to Korean and Chinese printing technology, and he may have shared this knowledge with another grandson of Genghis Khan, Hulegu, who was then ruling the Persian part of the Mongol empire. This could have moved printing technologies from East Asia westward by thousands of miles. In the middle of that route lay the homeland of the Uyghur people, a Turkic ethnic group that had been recruited into the Mongol army long before.
This is because, in the 13th century, Uyghurs were considered distinguished, learned people—the sort for whom printing might be a welcome innovation. They had also something no one else in printing had had up till then: an alphabet, a simple group of relatively few letters for writing every word one wished to say.
There was no explosion of printing in the Western Mongol empire. Nonetheless, movable-type Uyghur-language prints have been discovered in the area, indicating the technology was used there.
Furthermore, the Mongols may have carried the technology not only through Uyghur and Persian territory, but into Europe, including Germany. The Mongol empire repeatedly invaded Europe from roughly to AD; that period saw the entry of enough Western Asian recruits and captives to bring the loanword horde from their Turkic languages into European ones. That business took decades of his life to bring to fruition, forced him into bankruptcy, and led to court filings by investors who repeatedly sued him to get their money back.
The stories we tell about the man, and how the Bibles came to be, have been cobbled together from a fistful of legal and financial records, and centuries of dogged scholarly fill-in-the-blank. Indeed, the entire history of the printing press is riddled with gaps.
Gutenberg did not tell his own story in documents created on the printing presses he built; to the best of modern knowledge, he did not leave any notes on his work at all. And if Gutenberg was reticent, the Mongols, their Uyghur compatriots, and Eastern Asia government heads were even more so. His greatest accomplishment was the first print run of the Bible in Latin, which took three years to print around copies, a miraculously speedy achievement in the day of hand-copied manuscripts.
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. Gutenberg died penniless, his presses impounded by his creditors. Other German printers fled for greener pastures, eventually arriving in Venice, which was the central shipping hub of the Mediterranean in the late 15th century.
The ships left Venice carrying religious texts and literature, but also breaking news from across the known world. Printers in Venice sold four-page news pamphlets to sailors, and when their ships arrived in distant ports, local printers would copy the pamphlets and hand them off to riders who would race them off to dozens of towns. Since literacy rates were still very low in the s, locals would gather at the pub to hear a paid reader recite the latest news, which was everything from bawdy scandals to war reports.
Sketch of a printing press taken from a notebook by Leonardo Da Vinci. The Italian Renaissance began nearly 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, Cicero and Seneca. One of the chief projects of the early Renaissance was to find long-lost works by figures like Plato and Aristotle and republish them.
Wealthy patrons funded expensive expeditions across the Alps in search of isolated monasteries. Italian emissaries spent years in the Ottoman Empire learning enough Ancient Greek and Arabic to translate and copy rare texts into Latin. However, the history of printing begins long before Gutenberg's time. Nearly years before Gutenberg, Chinese monks were setting ink to paper using a method known as block printing, in which wooden blocks are coated with ink and pressed to sheets of paper.
One of the earliest surviving books printed in this fashion — an ancient Buddhist text known as "The Diamond Sutra" — was created in during the Tang T'ang Dynasty in China. The book, which was sealed inside a cave near the city of Dunhuang, China, for nearly a thousand years before its discovery in , is now housed in the British Library in London. The carved wooden blocks used for this early method of printing were also used in Japan and Korea as early as the eighth century. Private printers in these places used both wood and metal blocks to produce Buddhist and Taoist treatises and histories in the centuries before movable type was invented.
An important advancement to woodblock printing came in the early eleventh century, when a Chinese peasant named Bi Sheng Pi Sheng developed the world's first movable type. Though Sheng himself was a commoner and didn't leave much of a historical trail, his ingenious method of printing, which involved the production of hundreds of individual characters, was well-documented by his contemporary, a scholar and scientist named Shen Kuo.
In his 11th-century work, "Dream Pool Essays," Kuo explains that Sheng's movable characters were made out of baked clay. The ink he used was a mix of pine resin, wax and paper ashes, and as Kuo tells it, Sheng's method could be used to print thousands of copies of a document fairly quickly.
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