Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Did Gutenburg Really Invent the Printing Press?

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

The printing press is considered to be one of, if not the greatest invention in history. The printing press allowed for an explosion in information and it ushered in the renaissance, the enlightenment, and the scientific and industrial revolutions. As such, Johannes Gutenberg is often considered one of the most important people in history. But did Gutenberg actually invent the printing press? Should he be given credit for this important invention? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The printing press is considered to be one of, if not the greatest invention in history. The printing press allowed for an explosion of information, and it ushered in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the scientific industrial revolutions. As such, Johannes Gutenberg is often considered one of the most important people in history. But did Gutenberg actually invent the printing press? Should he be given credit for this important invention? Learn more about Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This is Chris Christensen from the Amateur Traveler podcast. If you've enjoyed some of Gary's anecdotes about different travel destinations, you may enjoy the Amateur Traveler podcast, which is one of the longest running award-waying travel podcasts. Listen to Gary and other travel writers, travel bloggers, and travelers talk about their favorite travel destinations all around the world on Amateur Traveler.

Search your podcast player for Amateur Traveler or go to Amateur Traveler.com. Whether you're ready for a trip or still stuck at home, If we haven't talked about it on amateur traveler, it may just not be worth going there. The answer to the question of if Gutenberg invented the printing press requires a bit more nuance than a simple yes or no. There are some inventions that might be that simple, but the printing press is not one of them. So let's break the question down into several other questions that will help clarify what happened. The starting point for this discussion will be the creation of the first Gutenberg Bible, which was printed in the year 1455 in Germany.

With that, was Gutenberg the first person ever to create and use a printing press? The answer to this is an unequivocal no. Several centuries before Gutenberg, they were using printing presses in China. The earliest known printed work is a Buddhist text known as the Diamond Sutra. The Diamond Sutra dates back to the year 868 during the Tang Dynasty. There are other documents from the same time period, including calendars, mathematical tables, funeral and wedding guides as well as educational materials. The difference between the Tang Dynasty printing and Gutenberg is that the Chinese of the time were using what is known as block printing. Block printing is basically what you do with a rubber stamp. You have to carve an entire wooden block that has the text of the page you want to print in reverse every time you want to print something.

It's a very laborious and time-consuming process. It's fine if you have one thing that you want to make a bunch of copies of, but it doesn't work well if you want to print many different things. Gutenberg used a system called movable type. Each letter and character was a separate object, and they would be assembled together to form whatever text you wanted to create. Movable type was a much more efficient system than block printing. After you had all your characters built, you could create an infinite number of pages relatively quickly, whereas with block printing, it required the carving of a unique block of text every single time. So with that was Gutenberg the first person to use movable type? And the answer here is an emphatic, no.

Once again, this innovation was first used in China, centuries before it was used in Europe. A Chinese artist and inventor B. Sheng created the first movable type press somewhere between the years of 1041 and 1048. The story of his movable type was written about in a book from 1086 by a scientist known as Shenku. Shenku noted that Bisheng's type characters were made out of hardened clay instead of wood, because wood was too soft, absorbed too much ink,

and would stick to the page. B. Shang realized a major problem with movable type, the material used for the characters. However, his clay characters were far from perfect. They were very fragile and could only be used a limited number of times before they fell apart. Gutenberg used metal characters, which made a huge difference. So, let's ask another question. Was Gutenberg the first person to use metal movable type? And here the answer is, no, once again. There's evidence of the Chinese using bronze movable type in the 12th century and copper and tin movable type in the 13th century. The first full books created with metallic movable type were created in Korea in the 13th century

during the Korean Goryo dynasty. These books, while mentioned, didn't survive. Yield a surviving metal movable type book dates to the 14th century and it's also Korean. It's known as the Jikji and is a collection of Buddhist teachings. The book was printed with bronze type. So things are looking so good for Gutenberg. Let's ask why. final question. Can the system of printing that the world uses today be traced back to Gutenberg? The answer here is yes. And if that sounds counterintuitive to everything I've just said, that is why I said at the beginning that the answers to these questions require some nuance. The systems developed in China and Korea, unquestionably predated Gutenberg. However, they were

never put into widespread use. The reason for this are many. They're cultural, linguistic, and technical. First, let's look at the linguistic reasons. Chinese has a lot of characters. To put it into perspective, you might need to know 2,000 to 3,000 characters to read a newspaper in Chinese. There might be 20,000 characters in a Chinese dictionary. If you include more obscure characters, the number can reach 50,000 and by some estimates, over 100,000. The Latin alphabet only has 26 characters. And with special characters and punctuation, you may only need about 50 different characters.

That means the number of Chinese movable type characters you would need would be 100 to a thousand times more than what you would need for the Latin alphabet. But what about Korean you might be asking? The Korean Hangul alphabet is about as simple as the Latin alphabet, and that is true. However, most of the development in Korean movable type occurred before the introduction of Hongul in 1443 when they were still using Chinese characters. Moreover, there was a great deal of resistance to Hongul amongst Korean aristocracy. so it wasn't widely adopted right away.

Also, you can't just have one block for each character. You need a bunch for each letter, and that also applies to Chinese characters. The next difference was culture. Ancient Chinese culture was very centralized. Confucian tradition placed the right to print in the hands of the emperor. There wasn't any widespread printing because the idea of independent printers working with independent clients wasn't legally allowed, and it wasn't part of their culture. Gutenberg, by contrast, was a business.

man. He got funding for his movable-type printing press with the intent to make a profit. When he went bankrupt, his equipment was acquired by Peter Schofer, who by all accounts was an even better printer than Gutenberg and improved on many of his techniques. The political situation was also very different in China and Europe. China and Korea were mostly monolithic political entities. You had one ruler who could control everything. Renaissance Europe was a hodgepodge of kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and republics. They were all competing with each other. Moreover, the rise of printing coincided with, and was partly the cause of the Protestant Reformation,

which meant that even the Pope couldn't control printing. All of the different states and religious factions were in competition, and the rapid rise of printing was part of an arms race between them. This competition facilitated the spread of printing, as well as the rapid technological evolution. Finally, the other big difference was technical. It's easy to make it sound like many of these technologies are binary. You either have movable type or you don't, but that isn't how it's a difference. works. There are a lot of tiny innovations that went into creating a practical movable type printing press. The Chinese system of clay and ceramic type didn't work very well. They were too fragile.

All metal is not the same. The way you make the metal type is huge. Gutenberg is usually attributed to the creation of a matrix and mold system for creating metallic type. This system allowed a molten metal to rapidly form into the type, and moreover, you could quickly make lots of them in a very short period of time. This was probably the biggest innovation that Gutenberg had, which didn't have any precedent in China or Korea. This allowed for the rapid creation of type, which could then be used to create an entire printing industry. Gutenberg also developed an oil-based ink, which was far easier to use with large-scale printing and metal type. If you remember back to my episode on the creation of the light bulb, Thomas Edison didn't invent

the idea of electric light. There were many people before him who had developed electric light, However, none of them were really practical and they couldn't be put into widespread use. The Chinese and Korean printing systems were like the pre-Edison electric lights. They got the basic concept down, but they weren't a practical system to allow for widespread publishing. If Chinese and Korean systems predated Gutenberg, might that technology have migrated from China to Germany? There's no evidence for it. It's highly unlikely that the technology used in Asia would have migrated all the way over to a landlocked European goldsmith who never traveled extensively without having left a trail of people adopting the technology

along the way. So if you want to be technical, you can and should say that the discovery of printing did occur in China. They were clearly first. However, the practical printing system, which eventually spread around the world, including back to Asia, can be traced to Johannes Gutenberg. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James Mackle. The associate producer is Thor Thompson. Remember to leave a five-star review to get your review read on the show.

They can be left at Apple Podcasts, Podcasts, Podcast Republic, or wherever you listen to the show. Also, you can help support the show over at patreon.com. Patrons can get merchandise like t-shirts and hoodies, as well as having direct access to provide suggestions for future episodes.