Inventor

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 402.

History records little about the life of German printer Johannes Gutenberg. Yet his remarkable achievement, the invention of modern printing, is often singled out as the feat that most changed the millennium. Gutenberg's innovation brought the printed word to a wide audience for the first time, altering history with its far-reaching impact on literacy and education.

People had been trying to devise printing methods for centuries before Gutenberg's 15th-century breakthrough. The Chinese and Koreans had much earlier pioneered block printing, in which different characters or images are carved on blocks of wood. This slow, laborious process was not adequate for rapid reproduction of text, however, and most books were still produced by even more laborious hand copying.

Gutenberg, who is described in historical accounts as a goldsmith, began experimenting with printing methods in the 1430s. His major breakthrough—the unique development that earns him such high millennial stature—was a system of movable type. It involved a mold that had the outlines of letters or other characters stamped in it. Letters of type could be produced rapidly by pouring liquid metal into the pre-made molds. These letters were then assembled to make up pages for printing.

Gutenberg is also credited with refinements in the hand-operated printing press and even in types of ink. The end result of these innovations was the Gutenberg Bible, completed sometime between 1450 and 1456, a work renowned for its beauty and elegance. This triumph did not save Gutenberg's business, however, as a lawsuit forced him to surrender the rights to his revolutionary technology. Ironically, his name does not appear on any of the works attributed to him.

With the printing press, reading and writing were no longer confined to religious orders and the rich. This altered the existing power structures: Radical ideas were more easily disseminated and people learned to question the authority of the ruling classes. Hoping to head off this movement, about 30 years after the printing press was perfected Pope Innocent VII established the doctrine of prior restraint, which required printers to submit unpublished manuscripts to the Catholic Church for review. Prior restraint, however, failed to stop the printing and widespread distribution of German theologian Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. The printing press thus largely made possible the Protestant Reformation, one of the most significant events of the millennium.

Within 100 years of Gutenberg's breakthrough the Americas were discovered, the authority and dominance of the Catholic Church were fractured, and scientists began asking questions that challenged long-held dogmas about creation and the nature of the universe. It is arguable that none of this would have happened without Gutenberg's printing press and the easy exchange of ideas it made possible. (For more on the printing press and other world-changing inventions, see the September 1999 Feature “Landmark Inventions of the Millennium.”)