Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, and the invention of the mechanical
movable type printing press helped disseminate knowledge wider 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. Woodblock
printing in China dates back to the 9th century and Korean bookmakers
were printing with moveable metal type a century before Gutenberg.
But
most historians believe Gutenberg’s adaptation, which employed a
screw-type wine press to squeeze down evenly on the inked metal type,
was the key to unlocking the modern age. With the newfound ability to
inexpensively mass-produce books on every imaginable topic,
revolutionary ideas and priceless ancient knowledge were placed in the
hands of every literate European, whose numbers doubled every century.
Here are just some of the ways the printing press helped pull Europe out of the Dark Ages and accelerate human progress.
1. A Global News Network Was Launched
Johannes Gutenberg’s first printing press.
Gutenberg didn’t live to see the immense impact of his invention. His greatest accomplishment was the first print run of the Bible
in Latin, which took three years to print around 200 copies, a
miraculously speedy achievement in the day of hand-copied manuscripts.
But
as historian Ada Palmer explains, 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.
“Congratulations,
you’ve printed 200 copies of the Bible; there are about three people in
your town who can read the Bible in Latin,” says Palmer. “What are you
going to do with the other 197 copies?”
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.
“If
you printed 200 copies of a book in Venice, you could sell five to the
captain of each ship leaving port,” says Palmer, which created the first
mass-distribution mechanism for printed books.
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 1490s, locals would gather at the pub to hear a
paid reader recite the latest news, which was everything from bawdy
scandals to war reports.
“This radically changed the consumption of news,” says Palmer. “It made it normal to go check the news every day.”
2. The Renaissance Kicked Into High Gear
Sketch of a printing press taken from a notebook by Leonardo Da Vinci.
SSPL/Getty Images
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.
The
operation to retrieve classic texts was in action long before the
printing press, but publishing the texts had been arduously slow and
prohibitively expensive for anyone other than the richest of the rich.
Palmer says that one hand-copied book in the 14th century cost as much
as a house and libraries cost a small fortune. The largest European
library in 1300 was the university library of Paris, which had 300 total
manuscripts.
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 printing press didn’t launch
the Renaissance, but it vastly accelerated the rediscovery and sharing
of knowledge.
“Suddenly, what had been a project to educate only
the few wealthiest elite in this society could now become a project to
put a library in every medium-sized town, and a library in the house of
every reasonably wealthy merchant family,” says Palmer.
3. Martin Luther Becomes the First Best-Selling Author
Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg castle church.
Ipsumpix/Corbis/Getty Images
There’s a famous quote attributed to German religious reformer Martin Luther
that sums up the role of the printing press in the Protestant
Reformation: “Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest
one.”
Luther wasn’t the first theologian to question the Church,
but he was the first to widely publish his message. Other “heretics” saw
their movements quickly quashed by Church authorities and the few
copies of their writings easily destroyed. But the timing of Luther’s
crusade against the selling of indulgences coincided with an explosion
of printing presses across Europe.
As the legend
goes, Luther nailed his “95 Theses” to the church door in Wittenberg on
October 31, 1517. Palmer says that broadsheet copies of Luther’s
document were being printed in London as quickly as 17 days later.
Thanks
to the printing press and the timely power of his message, Luther
became the world’s first best-selling author. Luther’s translation of
the New Testament into German sold 5,000 copies in just two weeks. From
1518 to 1525, Luther’s writings accounted for a third of all books sold
in Germany and his German Bible went through more than 430 editions.
4. Printing Powers the Scientific Revolution
Tables
from Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus' pioneering text “De
revolutionibus orbium caelestium” (On the revolution of heavenly
spheres), 1543, which represents his complete work.
SSPL/Getty Images
The
English philosopher Francis Bacon, who’s credited with developing the
scientific method, wrote in 1620 that the three inventions that forever
changed the world were gunpowder, the nautical compass and the printing press.
For
millennia, science was a largely solitary pursuit. Great mathematicians
and natural philosophers were separated by geography, language and the
sloth-like pace of hand-written publishing. Not only were handwritten
copies of scientific data expensive and hard to come by, they were also
prone to human error.
With the newfound ability to publish and
share scientific findings and experimental data with a wide audience,
science took great leaps forward in the 16th and 17th centuries. When
developing his sun-centric model of the galaxy in the early 1500s, for
example, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus relied not only on his own heavenly observations, but on printed astronomical tables of planetary movements.
When historian Elizabeth Eisenstein wrote her 1980 book
about the impact of the printing press, she said that its biggest gift
to science wasn’t necessarily the speed at which ideas could spread with
printed books, but 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.
5. Fringe Voices Get a Platform
A printing press being used to make books during the 16th century.
“Whenever
a new information technology comes along, and this includes the
printing press, among the very first groups to be ‘loud’ in it are the
people who were silenced in the earlier system, which means radical
voices,” says Palmer.
It takes effort to adopt a new information
technology, whether it’s the ham radio, an internet bulletin board, or
Instagram. The people most willing to take risks and make the effort to
be early adopters are those who had no voice before that technology
existed.
“In the print revolution, that meant radical heresies,
radical Christian splinter groups, radical egalitarian groups, critics
of the government,” says Palmer. “The Protestant Reformation is only one of many symptoms of print enabling these voices to be heard.”
As
critical and alternative opinions entered the public discourse, those
in power tried to censor it. Before the printing press, censorship was
easy. All it required was killing the “heretic” and burning his or her
handful of notebooks.
But after the printing press, Palmer says
it became nearly impossible to destroy all copies of a dangerous idea.
And the more dangerous a book was claimed to be, the more the people
wanted to read it. Every time the Church published a list of banned
books, the booksellers knew exactly what they should print next.
6. From Public Opinion to Popular Revolution
"Common Sense" by Thomas Paine at the Museum of the American Revolution.
Joy of Museums/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0
During the Enlightenment era, philosophers like John Locke, Voltaire
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were widely read among an increasingly
literate populace. Their elevation of critical reasoning above custom
and tradition encouraged people to question religious authority and
prize personal liberty.
Increasing democratization of knowledge in the Enlightenment
era led to the development of public opinion and its power to topple
the ruling elite. Writing in pre-Revolution France, Louis-Sebástien
Mercier declared:
“A great and momentous revolution in our ideas
has taken place within the last thirty years. Public opinion has now
become a preponderant power in Europe, one that cannot be resisted… 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.”
“[Printing]
is the most beautiful gift from heaven,” continues Mercier. “It soon
will change the countenance of the universe… Printing was only born a
short while ago, and already everything is heading toward perfection…
Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world! Tremble before the virtuous
writer!”
Even the illiterate couldn’t resist the attraction of revolutionary Enlightenment authors, Palmer says. When Thomas Paine published “Common Sense” 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 of the colonies.
7. Machines ‘Steal Jobs’ From Workers
Benjamin Franklin and associates at Franklin's printing press in 1732.
GraphicaArtis/Getty Images
The Industrial Revolution
didn’t get into full swing in Europe until the mid-18th century, but
you can make the argument that the printing press introduced the world
to the idea of machines “stealing jobs” from workers.
Before
Gutenberg’s paradigm-shifting invention, scribes were in high demand.
Bookmakers would employ dozens of trained artisans to painstakingly
hand-copy and illuminate manuscripts. But by the late 15th century, the
printing press had rendered their unique skillset all but obsolete.
On
the flip side, the huge demand for printed material spawned the
creation of an entirely new industry of printers, brick-and-mortar
booksellers and enterprising street peddlers. Among those who got his
start as a printer's apprentice was future Founding Father, Benjamin
Franklin.
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