Stuff You Should Know - Printing press? Big deal!

Episode Date: October 8, 2020

Was the printing press a big deal? You bet it was. One of the biggest. Learn all about the early history of printing today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I am Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there.

There's Jerry out there, our ethereal ephemeral producer. And this is Stuff You Should Know, which for this edition, I feel like we should be playing like Harpsichord or something like that in the background when we start. You wanna do that? Should we gussy it up a little? Yeah, Jerry knows what she's,

she knows her way around an old Harpsichord, so maybe she can do that for us. I wonder if we have a message break stinger that's Harpsichord. Oh, that's a great question. Cause we've been getting, I mean, we've gotten great ones all along, but sometimes they're just showing up.

I'm like, where did this come from? I don't even recognize this one. It's great stuff. Yeah, and to, you know, for those of you that don't know, those are made by listeners. Yeah, submitted out of the goodness of their hearts for, Always happen. Yep, just say, here you go guys.

I hope you enjoy it. You can use it all you want. It's very sweet. It is. So we're talking about the printing press and we're talking about the invention of the printing press and the printing press itself is basically synonymous with a man named Johann Gutenberg.

Johannes, how would you, God, right out of the gate, man. I'm going with Johann Gutenberg or as the rest of us in the world call him Gutenberg. Sure, let's call him Steve Gutenberg. Gut buck. Okay. Okay. So Gutenberg is traditionally credited

with inventing the printing press. And for all intents and purposes, he did invent the printing press. But as our friend, Ed Grabinowski, goes to great pains to point out, he did not invent it out a whole cloth as apparently some people believe that it was just a pile of lumber and an idea for him

that he put together. Like every inventor who ever invented anything, he built on different concepts that had been worked out over centuries. The thing is, is like, that's not to detract from his accomplishment or anything like that. Like what he did literally changed the world,

as we'll see in some amazing ways. But he helped provide the first information age and got really kind of screwed over in the bargain. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of a familiar story at this point, right? Sadly, yes, man. And I'm kind of sick of that. I wish so.

Of which one? Of stealing, of building on others or of dying a pauper. Yeah, the second one. No, I understand building on the work of others. That's the other thing too, is I don't think Gutenberg ever said like, no, I invented all of this without any help.

We don't have any indication he was like that at all. It just kind of got hung on him over the years by sixth graders. We built on the work of Adam Curry. We did. Right? He's still at it. Did you know that?

He's still podcasting? I'm almost a million percent sure, which is really sure. And did he really have the first one? I don't know if he had the first, but he's credited with having the first. Very interesting. He's definitely still active on social media for sure.

So, for the printing press, if we jump back in the old way back machine and we breeze past Adam Curry there. Hi, Adam. Hey, Adam. Oh, look at his hair just waving that very nice. We would go back and see people carving up these things into wood.

And then they would sort of like a stamp you would get for a kid these days. Or if you go to a stamp shop and you want to get a stamp with your address or whatever. For an adult? Yeah, like we got a stamp made, Emily got a stamp made of our house when we finally finished renovating her house.

Cute. Which we've never used. Our friend, so you haven't used, so is it a picture of your house? Yeah, it looks like a little woodcut, but it's not like we send people letters and stamp that or anything. Oh man, I gotta tell you.

We just sort of have one. I would like to see that on a Christmas card envelope, you know? You know what she did give me? And boy, I'm gonna use it one day as you know how they would melt wax and seal the envelope with a little stamp. Yes.

She got me one of those little kits for Christmas couple years ago. Very nice. And you still haven't used it? No, you know what? I'm gonna write you a letter on some vellum. Thank you. I'm gonna stamp my house on it.

I'm gonna wax seal it with and then put on some red lipstick. And then tinkle on the whole thing. Give it a kiss and then pee on it. We have a stamp too, but it has our address stamped on our friends Laurel and Brayden gave it to us. Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. Right, and we have used that one before, but I wanna see this stamp.

This whole Christmas card with tinkle on it and vellum and wax, I can't wait to see it. All right, it's gonna happen. So a woodcut and a long way of saying it looks sort of like one of these stamps. It's cut out out of wood block and then you take paper or vellum or something or whatever you wanna print it on.

Rub it down with some ink and then press it down. And they had a thing back in the day in Europe in the 1400s called block books. That were made from these woodcuts. They were 10 to 25, 30 pages long. And they kinda look like comic books if you look them up. They have a little bit of artwork, a little bit of text. Yeah, medieval comic books.

Yeah, it's like comic books without any of the fun because they had some sort of moral message attached to it usually. Right, it was like a jack ship tract or something. But they were a big deal in Europe in the 1400s and they thought that they invented something, but of course the Chinese were like, excuse me, we've been doing this stuff for hundreds of years.

Yeah, and I think as far back as 971, no, 868 CE, which is a while ago, more than a thousand years, about 1100 plus, the diamond sutra, which was a Buddhist text, was the first known printed book. And they printed it like you just described, where each page was a wood carving. In negative, Chuck, in negative. Yeah, that's how you gotta do it.

Because if you made it in the positive, when you put the paper on it with the ink, it would be in reverse when you looked at it on the page. So you had to carve each page like that, in negative. So it was a really difficult process, but it worked, it was useful, it was a lot easier. Once you got those blocks carved for a page, then it was to transcribe entire books and texts by hand,

which is what they'd done up to that point, and still continue to do for a very long time. Yeah, so when I saw the diamond sutra, just obviously the word sutra stood out to me because of the comma sutra. Sure. And I realized I didn't even know what that word meant, and this just, it's a collection of observations, basically.

He said, oh, it means cookbook. Well, it could be. It's a collection of observations in a book or a pamphlet, and I think we really missed a diamond opportunity for our book title by not calling it like the stuff you should know sutra. Yeah, well, hey, if this one goes even passingly well, or sells passingly well, we'll probably have a second chance.

You can pre-order that thing, by the way. The stuff you should know sutra? No, boy, you could pre-pre-order that one. I'm getting limber as we speak to try and get that one done. Right, yeah, you can pre-order our book an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting stuff. Sutra. Thanks.

This should have just had comma. Comma sutra, get it? Right, yep, I like that. So that was one in 868 CE, like you said, then in 971 BCE, there was another one called, did you mention that one, the Trippie Taka? Not yet. That was another Buddhist text.

That was CE, CE. Oh, it is? Yeah, yeah. So they got it wrong here? Yeah. All right. So the whole thing starts about 1,100 years ago. Okay, well, that makes more sense.

Yeah, yeah. But that's the one that had, I think, 130,000 wood block carvings. Yeah, that's insane. That means not only that somebody carved that, but somebody kept that at their house. Imagine living around 130,000 wood block carvings and you would be like, I need to reprint page 832.

And then having to go find the wood block carving for page 832 and just, that just sounds like a nightmare. I'd be like, I don't care about reading or literacy or moving humanity forward at this point. Maybe it was the house. You just blew my mind right out of the top of my head. So there was some more experimentation going on after this in China and Korea and some big,

and they were using like little wood or ceramic or metal blocks to make individual characters for the first time. And this was a big kind of push forward toward what we all know as what would eventually be the Gutenberg press is individual letters or in their case, characters, instead of just doing each page as a separate wood cut.

Yeah, what's awesome is there's a commoner in China named B. Shang, who is thought to have come up with movable type where rather than carving a wood block for each page, you have letters, individual letters carved out and you can arrange them just so any way you want. And then once you print that page, you can arrange them in a different way

to print the next page. And that is a huge innovation for sure. And again, note that this guy came up with this in about 1041 CE. So a good 400 years before Gutenberg was working. Why does Ed keep saying BCE? I don't know. I think he really likes the sound of it.

All right, fair enough. It's definitely CE though. No, I'm not doubting that. I'm just, I was thinking too. I was like, gosh, what if he was right? What if all this had started a good 1,000 years early? Like how much further along would we be right now? As a world, as humanity?

If this had happened 3,000 years ago rather than 1,000 years ago. Yeah, because here's the little spoiler. Printing books is a big deal. Like some say that religion and democracy and I mean, just sort of the advancement of humanity was, it was key to advancing all those things. You know who says that?

Us. People who are right. Us. Yeah, I definitely am on board with that. Yeah, the best way you can put it, it was the first information age that got launched by Gutenberg, by Guttbuck. So that's, I keep saying that

because that's Steve Gutenberg's handle on Twitter. Oh, is it really? Okay. Steve Guttbuck. Is it really? He is the nicest guy too. Default. I haven't checked in on his feed for a very long time,

but years back he used to be like all up in our feed and he was just so nice. Happy Friday everybody kind of stuff. Like every Friday, just a super nice guy. So I'm assuming nothing's gone horribly wrong with him and that he's still just as nice as he was a few years ago. Well, I highly recommend, you know, I've always promoted the great, great

Stars TV show party down, one of my favorite shows of all time. Oh yeah. Gutt says a great, great, great episode. And it seems like that's who he is. And he's a super nice guy in that episode because he, you know, it's about a catering company. There were a bunch of like writers and actors

and stuff doing catering work. And he hires them to come over to his house for his birthday. They're there at the house when he pulls in and he's like, oh man, we ended up having a surprise party for me and I forgot. So he's just like, why don't you guys just come in and we'll be the party, right?

But you can really get the idea that that's who Gutt says as a person. You know, it's great as you've definitely, definitely told that story before on the podcast, which means like we've gotten to this point where we're amassing like, we're building a standalone universe where like when Steve Gutenberg appears, this story pops up as well around him.

You know what I'm saying? Like, oh, I knew I told that. I couldn't remember when though, what, when would he have come up? I don't remember, but I'm sure we talked also about what a great guy he is on Twitter and all sorts of stuff. Like we have a character like a simulacrum of,

or simulacrum of Steve Gutenberg that lives in our podcast universe. And he's very less multifaceted than I'm sure he is in real life. But in our universe, nice guy on Twitter had a great episode of party down. That's all you need to know about Steve Gutenberg. I know, we haven't even gotten into police caddy.

Do we do a show on police academies? That probably would have made sense. I don't think we have. If we have, I must have been blacked out or something. All right, so printing press is advancing forward. Go to Korea in 1234, and you're going to find a man named Cho Young-Whee who was commissioned to do some more Buddhist texts.

A lot of this was Buddhist texts. Well, yeah, if you'll notice religious texts help push this whole thing forward from different religions even. Yeah, like that Bible that Gutenberg would make. Don't, sorry. So this one was really, really long and he was using this movable print

that had already been around. But this time he was making these letters for metal, kind of using what the technique they did for coin minting, which had been going on for a while, set them in a frame, lined them all up, coated them with ink and pressed them. And if you think, hey, that sounds like a printing press, you would be exactly right.

You're right, fella, for sure. That's basically what Gutenberg came up with. He had a couple of extra innovations for sure that are definitely credited to him directly. But that general idea had been around for a couple hundred years at least before he started printing his own stuff using this machine of his invention.

Now, again, this is not detract at all from Gutenberg. He put together a lot of disparate ideas and there's also a lot of debate whether he would have known about the Korean or Chinese advancements in printing if so. Maybe it was the Mongols that spread it west, but they're not entirely certain. There's no smoking gun.

So it's possible he also thought of it himself just by being involved in it and thinking about it. Or maybe he heard about some other stuff and refined it into his own thing. Regardless, he came up with a printing press and the Chinese and the Koreans are not credited with that. For actually a couple of reasons. And the upshot of all of it is that

it didn't ever really take off in China or Korea. Even though it was invented there, it didn't become widespread or widely used and it certainly didn't create an information age revolution. Well, how's this for a cliffhanger? We'll take a little break and we'll tell you a couple of more reasons why it never took off in Asia, right after this.

On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

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And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen.

So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, I can't take this any longer. Tell us, tell us why it never took off in Asia. Well, some, some reasons that just make a lot of sense. They are, they have very complex characters

with their language and they have, you know, up to tens of thousands of characters with different pronunciations, different phonems, different syllables. And you can't, you just can't do it. You can't have that many little tiny blocks, much less multiples of those if you wanna print a page. Right.

You know, because it's not like you can move them around. And then keeping up with all these was literally one of the big problems. Like they made these big, I think there was a man named Wang, Wang Zhen, who used these revolving tables to access these big racks of letters, but it was kind of like what you were talking about with the house made of wood blocks.

Exactly. Of 130,000 woodcuts. Right. It's like you just can't keep up with that many. So it wasn't practical. And then Gutenberg comes along, he's like, we only have 26 letters. So this is pretty, this is pretty dumb down

as the language goes. Yeah, cause I mean, even if you do, you know, capitals and lowercase, that's still just what, 52. Yeah, throw in some punctuation. Yeah, some punctuation, make some doubles, because you know, you're gonna use E a lot more times than one per page. So you need to make some backup copies of them.

How many did he, he made about 300 in the end, right? That's what I saw. Yeah, 300 different character spaces punctuation, uppercase, lowercase. And that's all he needed. So 300 versus tens of thousands. Number one, it's just easier to make, but number two, it's easier to keep up with too.

So Gutenberg just happened to be working in just the right language for a movable type printing press to really make sense. Should we talk about this guy? Yeah, cause I like him. He's, he's, he had a bit of a hustle to him. And I like him. I know.

And he's also one of history's kind of hard luck guys in a way, even though, I mean, you know, his name is legendary, so you can't put a price on that. I'm sure he would have liked to have put a price on that. So it, I just want to say from what I saw, it is very much up for debate whether he actually was financially ruined in the end, or if he was doing fine.

Because one thing we got to tell everybody Chuck, out of the gate is Gutenberg was born at a time where his father was a patrician. He was an aristocrat in Germany, Mainz. Is it Mainz? Mainz. Mainz, Germany. So he was, you know, notable,

but this wasn't a time where people of that class, you know, he wasn't like a king or anything like that. So there was not a lot of documentation of his birth. We're not entirely certain when he was born. His early life has kind of lost a history too, because he was just kind of a nobody until he invented the printing press. But the thing is, when he invented the printing press,

it was so revolutionary and so obvious how revolutionary it was out of the gate that within a decade or two of his death, historians were studying and documenting his life. So there is a surprising amount of stuff that was documented about him that's preserved still, but the stuff that we do have is almost entirely his work and then court records when he was

dragged into court by creditors and investors. Yeah, so you said he had a little bit of a hustle. I think Ed says they refer to him charitably as having entrepreneurial flair. It's another word of saying he had a bit of a hustle to him and he would get in, he was always trying to make a buck, always had some sort of scheme in the works and which means he had investors a lot of times

and a lot of times he might not come through. So as a result, he was taken to court a lot, like you said. And it's kind of funny to build this guy's life out of court records, but we are able to construct a little bit of it because of him being hauled in there and being sued time and time again. And most notably we're able to kind of piece together the printing press that he invented, what he invented,

what he knew when from these court records because all of these lawsuits basically were over his work. They were between investors in his work and him. And the thing is is like, I don't have the impression that he was a hustler in the sense that he was a con man or a shark or anything like that. He had very high aspirations. He also had the smarts to figure out

how to achieve these aspirations. He just didn't have the money to achieve these aspirations. So he needed outside help. His big problem as far as investors go from what I can tell is that he was a perfectionist. So rather than just figure out how to invent the movable type printing press, which he did, he also tried to figure out one that could also print

in red on a different set or using copper engraving to create different types of type. Some stuff that like details that were like kind of unnecessary but made this transform this thing from, you know, an amazing piece of work to a masterpiece. And the time it took to be that much of a perfectionist, it made him run into creditors and investors that were not that patient.

Yeah, and his first sort of tinkering with pressing anything, it seems because of again, a lawsuit was in Strasbourg when he lived there and around 1438, is that CE? And he had this plan to produce these trinkets for people going on religious pilgrimage. Yeah. Is.

Right. More than one. Yeah. So he had these tools that he could stamp out these trinkets and press these things. And so he sort of had an idea at least of how this kind of technology worked as far as cutting something, stamping and pressing it.

And there's some indication Chuck that he was already figuring out the rough contours, if not more detailed than that, of his printing press in Strasbourg because that first court case was by the family of some creditors who took him to court because they wanted in on some secret work he was keeping from them and being investors in him,

they were saying, well, you know, if you're doing work on the side, we should have a piece of that too. And that's where some historians are like, this actually what they're describing here is part of the printing press. Yeah. Because it's up for debate still.

Well, I mean, it was 10 years later, if that was in around 1438. And by the time he got back to Mainz in 1448, he borrowed some money from his cousin to do like a real printing business. So it's, I mean, I think you could be right. It's very likely those people knew that he was in the back room

with this plan to print books. Right. That's the outcome of that action. Right. But he's like, no, dude, you invested on the ground floor of the trinket business. This is a whole different world changing business. You're gonna have to cough up some more dough.

And they said, nine. Yeah, they did say nine. And he said, all right, well, I'm gonna invent this thing or I'm gonna cobble together a bunch of other people's work in a way that makes sense that you can, you know, make massive amounts of books that look good and that you can sell and make money on. And the Bible was a pretty obvious choice

for the first big, big project. But he was like, the Bible is a lot to undertake. And if you've ever seen a Gutenberg Bible, they're huge. They're not... There's two volumes. Yeah, there's not like these little handheld Bibles. They're very large. And I didn't get an exact measurement,

but you can see when someone holds it. It's a big, big book. It's like a big, fat coffee table book. Let's say 11 by 18. They seem a little wider than that, but... 36 by 99. That's as high as I'm going. So he said, $1.

He said that I'm gonna not start with the Bible. Too much to bite off. It's a little dull. So I'm gonna start out with some other stuff. I'm gonna print some pamphlets. I'm gonna see if I can sell these things. I'm gonna see how good they look. And he did.

He printed a grammar book, was one of the first things. This is from another lawsuit by a Roman writer. And it was a popular book, which was, again, it's the smart thing that he did, is basically taking what would be a bestseller at the time and seeing if he could mass produce it instead of a block book as a regular printed book. Right.

So he was also doing broadsheets which are kind of like early newspapers, which they had a pretty... We should do one on newspapers. Because the early newspapers were these broadsheets and sailors would buy them, read them, and then take them into town at the next port. And they would be sold to those people

who most people weren't literate at the time. So they would hire somebody who could read in town to read the news out at like the local tavern or something. And we both have experience with newspapers. Sure, man. I would like to do newspapers one day. Let's do it. I would totally.

That sounds like a two-parter to me. Okay. So he basically the upshot of all this. I think that's the second time I've said that. I never say that. I always want to like deliberately make everything much slower than that. The upshot of something like...

You say upshot all the time. ...some arrives at, do I? Yeah. Just like you say it as much as we talk about Gutenberg and party down. You know what's sad? I'm an unreliable narrator in my own life. Oh man, what a great quote.

So the overall general point of what we've been saying up to this moment is that he kind of broke his teeth on some slightly easier projects to kind of figure out the ins and outs and everything. And then when he was finally ready to do the Bible, he apparently was well aware that this was going to be a masterpiece. He had figured it out and he was ready to bite it off.

And he started work on the Gutenberg Bible, also known as the Gutenberg Bible, and also known as the 42 line Bible because that's how many lines he had per page. And even at 42 lines per page, which was more lines, because he lowered the space in between lines to fit more lines per page,

it was still something like 1,286 pages over two volumes. That's a lot, but that kind of bear that in mind. What we're talking about when we talk about this project eventually is that he was creating 1,286 page Bibles, okay? Yeah. One at a time. One page at a time, that is.

So which we'll figure in here in a second. So he starts to work, he knows that, I mean, before he starts, he knows that he's going to be able to charge a lot for these things. And he knows he's going to need to crank them out as quickly as he can. So he's going to need more space.

He's going to need more presses. He's going to need a lot of ink and other little dude ads and spawn divots that it takes to make one of these. And he's going to need people. You know, he's going to need some assistance. He can't do it all by himself because here's where that comes back.

You can only, it's not like he would print out a Bible and he's like, I got one, go sell this thing. And we can continue to fund our little project here. You got to print out one page at a time over and over and over and over. And then print out page two over and over and over or two and whatever the reverse side is. And eventually you're going to be able to start

putting them together in bound form. And only then can you start actually making money. Right, right. So he was also, that was another thing that he doesn't get credited for enough, I think, is that he figured out like how to do a rough primitive version of an assembly line, basically, that he was mass producing these books out of the gate.

That was the point. You're mass producing it, not doing it one page at a time. Like you were saying, like the old block books used to be. Right. So he gets four presses going at a time, later went up to I think six. And because of all this upfront money that he needs to keep this going until he can sell them

and turn a profit was he needed, like always, he needed some dough. He wasn't just, he didn't have his pockets lined with money, so he had to go to a guy. And that's, this guy's name was Johann Foost. And because he had calculated, he would need about two years and because- Before he could start selling?

Yeah, the whole project he figured out was going to be about two years. This print run of Bibles is going to take him two years to do. So he needed to be able to pay everybody. He needed money for all the supplies, all the materials. He needed to be able to survive for two years because he would not be able to sell one single Bible until all of them were done.

None of them were going to be done until all of them were done. That's just the way the process worked out. Right. So Foost, I think, saw the writing on the wall, knew it was going to be expensive, but knew that he was going to probably be able to make a lot of money.

And who knows, I don't know this Foost guy from Adam, but maybe in the back of his head, he also thought, you know what, I might also be able to just sue this guy at some point and take control of these printing presses because this guy didn't have a pot to urinate in. And he's not going to have any money. And that's exactly what happened.

He ended up having no assets other than these presses. And when he got sued and lost, and I don't even know what he got sued for, was it for taking too long? Yes. Really? Yes, that makes the whole thing that much worse, that he was sued basically like I was saying

for being a perfectionist. Wow. And technically Gutenberg could have gotten the Bible out before Foost sued him. Like a dumb down version? He was, yeah, just a slightly less masterful version that would have just knocked everyone's sock off, had just the same amount of an impact on the world.

I don't think the world would have been changed. Really any, had he gotten them out in a time when Foost was willing to not sue him, but he wasn't prepared to do that. He was an artist. He was an artist. He had the soul of an artist. So he just kept going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole

to try to make this thing more and more perfect and elaborate and Foost said enough. And the court actually sided with Foost. So Foost lent him 800 Gilden or Golden, which at the time was about the price of... It's a lot of money. Eight houses. That's what we're going with.

We'll see in a second. It'll make sense. But let's say eight average cost houses. That's how much he lent them. Then he did it again. He lent them another 800 Golden. And so he was into them for 1600 Golden. Would have easily been able to pay that back.

When Foost sued him, the court said, not only do you owe him 1600 Golden, you owe him an interest we're going to say too. Get this, about 2020 Golden is what he ended up having to pay Foost. Now, did he sue him because he was that far over schedule? The only thing that I've seen- Because he told him it would take two years.

Did it take like six or something? I saw that from the court records, they believe that he was done by 1455. And I believe he started in 1453. So he was probably right on schedule. I have the impression that Foost was a bit of an impatient jerquad. Well, and also get the feeling that Gutenberg

probably didn't dot his eyes and cross his T's contractually. Maybe not. Maybe not. I could see that too. Cause you gotta bake in a little bit of overtime there. For sure. But I think he may have been roughly on schedule. Cause by 1452, he had created the Bible.

And here's the other thing. Here's the other reason why Foost suing him was a bit of a screw job or a huge screw job. And by screw job, I mean like the act of a screwdriver screwing a screw into a slab of wood that the screw doesn't want to go into that wood. It wants to stay free, like that kind of thing, right? So the reason why it really stunk,

that Foost sued him is because he got the Bibles done. The Bible run was completed and Foost still sued him and still won. If I had been Foost and the investor, I would have been like, okay, fine, you finished, maybe pay me more or something like that. But that was not the case. Yeah. And who knows what's going on back then.

He could have bribed a judge who got a piece of the action. Right. Exactly. I mean, not speculation, but I'm just saying it's not like today when our court system is just so perfect in every way. Right. Well, let's run exclusively by artificial intelligence. So Ed was kind enough to cobble together

a few just sort of fun facts about that Bible run. He printed 180 of these things initially, sold all of them, of course. Today, there are 49 of them still around, which Ed points out, and I agree, is a really great survival percentage for something that old. Yeah.

49 out of 180. And that just sort of pin points or just puts a point in the fact that puts a pin in. What am I trying to say? Really drives home the fact that these things were very cherished and taken care of from the beginning. I went to see how much you could buy one of these for. Oh yeah, what'd you find?

Well, 87 was the last one I saw at auction. There may be one since then, but in 1987 it went for 5.4 million. So that was one volume. A complete set hasn't been auctioned since 1978. Oh really? That went for 2.2 million in 1978 dollars. Wow.

From what I saw, if you were going to- So you get half a Bible, you get the New Old Testament only or something? If you're lucky, but if the complete copy they think would be 35 million today. Yeah, that makes sense. If it went to auction. That makes sense, that's about right.

But so he made two versions. He made one like a regular version on paper, and it sold for 20 golden. And he made a vellum one on calf skin for 50 golden. He made 45 of those. So allow me to figure these calculations real quick, okay? Boy, here we go. So remember.

Maths on with Josh. I'm going to get this right, Chuck. So there's this historian named Andrew Pedigree who says that a house in Mainz, Mainz, would have cost up to 100 golden, a house. So the total that he could have made selling this is these Bibles, this 180 print run of Bibles is 4950 golden.

That's a lot of houses. It is. Let's say at 100 golden apiece, that's 49 and a half houses. Don't ask about the half of a house. But let's say in today's dollars that we're saying that a house is $200,000 per house, okay? Yeah.

So $200,000 times 49 and a half houses means that he made off of these 180 Bibles almost 10 million dollars. Oh, I can't wait for the correction. It's right, dude. I am definitely right. And so here's the other thing too. So when Fust Susan and gets that judgment

of 2000 golden against him, a lot of people say, well, that ruined Gutenberg and he died a pauper. If that Bible run sold out, he still would have had more than half of that nearly $10 million left over after paying Fust. So it's very much unclear that he was a pauper or not. The overall point of what I've been saying

up to this moment is this. The upshot. It's that, that was the word you could have used earlier too. When you were looking for a word, upshot what it worked. Oh yeah, you're right. I wasn't going to encourage the use of that though. But the upshot of is that Fust got his hands on Gutenberg's printing press.

Right. Right after that run of Bibles was made. Or his six printing presses rather. Yeah, and his printing assistant who was actually Fust's son-in-law, he got the whole, the whole shebang, all of his plates, everything. You know what my favorite thing about your math stuff is?

What? I know the second that you start, that there are thousands of people, math busters if you will, that just immediately get out their pencil and pad and to see if they can prove you're wrong. That is fantastic. It's like a game.

I'm fine with that. Yeah, it is a game and I always win. All right, so we're going to take another break. Okay. We're going to tally up your math wins and losses. All right. And we're going to talk about how this thing actually worked right after this.

Come on, let's do it. Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

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But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're gonna get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention.

Because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology,

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Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I think we came up, Chuck, with the, that I've won every math contest I've initiated. Everyone. Okay. All right, so shall we talk about the Gutenberg Press? Yes. Well, you got your individual letters.

Okay, all right. So if you're gonna, we said he ended up making 300 of these things. So you're gonna need all these little individual letters carved. They're carved into steel using these little files. And these are the master letters. And then they punch those into soft metal,

most likely copper. And then the impression in the copper is formed into a mold. And then you're gonna pour molten metal. And what I saw was that one thing that Gutenberg definitely invented was this hand casting instrument, where they actually,

where you would actually pour this molten metal, I think you use lead tin and antimony, whatever that is. That was an alloy that he invented even, like add that to his list. Yeah, so he invented some stuff, but this is how you would actually make the individual letters was by this early process. Right, so the one thing that's still up for debate

supposedly is whether he invented or used that punch matrix thing where you punch the letter into a softer metal. It's, they're not entirely certain, but yes, he definitely was casting letters with alloy of his own making. And apparently it cooled like the moment, like you just poured it in,

closed the mold and opened it. And it would be cool enough to jump out on the table and start filing down. Cause that was the other thing too, you had to file down every letter to make sure that they were uniform. And he even went, this is an example of how detailed he got.

He even was like, oh, well this F has a lot of space between, you know, on either side of it. So he filed down the sides of all the Fs after testing it a few times to make basically kerning. He was, he figured out kerning right out of the gate. The first time anyone had ever really created the printing press, there was also kerning. Which is awesome.

Which is the spacing between letters. Like if you've ever seen a bunch of letters strung far apart, it looks really weird. Kerning is, that's a high kerning value, low kerning value is where they're tighter together, which is what you want. Yeah, so the long and short of these little blocks though, is that you only needed to carve each one one time.

You had to pour a bunch of molds if you wanted a bunch of E's or A's or other vowels and stuff. But that was nothing. But yeah, that was nothing. You only had to do that carving once, file these things down until they're all uniform. And then it moves on to someone known as the compositor.

Yes, the compositor, not to be confused with the eradicator from Kids in the Hall. The compositor was the person who sat there with like the manuscript, right? And read each line. And as they were reading each line, they were gathering the letters they needed and putting the letters together

in like a handheld little rack to basically make each line. And they would slide each line into a frame called the form. And you would do that just line by line until the whole form, the whole frame is filled up with the lines that you're going to print a page with. Yeah, basically what they did in Korea 200 years earlier. Except with far fewer characters. Yeah, and you get the idea that if you were a compositor

working for Gutenberg, the perfectionist, it was probably a pretty nervy job because you're reading that manuscript. Any misspelling, any misuse of punctuation, that would have, I'm sure there would have been heck to pay from here Gutenberg. So I imagine that job was just sort of high tension. And Gutenberg very famously was super passive aggressive

in his managerial style. So he would just kind of wander out in the shop with his coffee and say, Oh, you're going to print it that way, huh? I'm going to need you to work Sunday as well. Yeah. Yeah. And it was, it was like you try to avoid him

or whatever, but he had the sixth sense to like pop up exactly right as you were trying to leave for the day. Right. And he would ask about your stapler. And he would say, this is my red stapler that I always keep in my days. That was one of the press men.

Right, of course. They kept in the basement. It was a weird time for printing. It was. Another weird time is going to be right now when I ask you if you understand this gobbledygook about folios. Yeah.

So what they figured out was- Cause it's a little confusing to me. Right. So it's way easier to print. Yes. A logistical nightmare is another way to put it. Yeah. But if you take, you know, one large page

that's actually two pages of a book wide and fold it, you have a folio. Sure. And supposedly Gutenberg printed these things in folios of five, so that each little, I guess, thing that they did was like 20 pages. They would do 20 pages at a time. For remember, something like 1,286 pages

they were doing this in total per Bible. And I mean, that was that. The key was this. I know, to answer your question, no, I didn't fully understand the folios. I think there was a lot made of folios when there didn't necessarily need to be a lot made of folios.

The point was that when you printed this stuff, this was very, very tricky. You had to dampen the paper. Oh, okay. Because if you didn't, did you like that? I was leaping ahead. Just got a breeze right on by that. Yeah.

When you print on paper using the kind of ink that he created, another thing he created, which we'll talk about, the paper can stick very easily unless you dampen the paper. The problem is, is you got to print on the backside too, but you can't dampen the paper again, my friend, or else you're going to smear the ink on the other side,

or it's going to run or whatever. So they would print, they would dampen the paper, print one side, and then have to print the other side, like after the ink on the one side was dried, but before the paper had dried fully. Right. Which is, that's got to be tricky. You talk about nerviness and high stress.

I mean, especially when you're on like a, if it's 180 Bibles in a $10 million project, I mean, each page is rather expensive and valuable. So you don't want to screw up any of them, you know? So if you want to look at a press, again, I would go to YouTube and see the video, but actually being done. But the press has two sections.

You've got this frame that allows the plates and the paper to align themselves, the carriage, and then the actual press part of the press. And you set these plates onto the carriage and they're facing up, and then you apply ink using these. And when you see it on the video, it kind of looks like these big giant gourds. They have a handle and then this big round,

sort of a drum head looking body. Right. And then you roll this thing all around in the ink and then roll them around on each other to make sure that all the ink is really, really even. And it's actually goose skin. These pads are. And then you just go around and stamp these four plates.

And from the looks of the way this guy did it, it took about maybe a minute and a half to fully ink them for a good page. And these things are kind of heavy. He's kind of, he doesn't roll them because if you roll them, you end up smearing. So he's just sort of pounding them on there. And it's a lot of work and all of this

looks like a lot of work. Even the pressing part takes like a lot of manual strength. Well, yeah, I mean, again, two years to just print 180 Bibles. Yeah, so I mean, it's a physical workout. He uses this ink, you mentioned, it's an oil-based varnish. Previously, for many, many hundreds of years,

they use water-based, which is just no good. Water-based ink is not what you wanna do when you're printing a book. No, and that was actually another reason why it didn't catch on, printing didn't catch on in China and Korea too, is they were using water-based inks exclusively and it runs, it smears, it doesn't stay in place.

It's just a bad jam. And that was another innovation of Gutenberg's, which was to use oil-based ink. There was somebody, I can't remember, we've talked about it in a podcast before, but they were talking about how some inventor just knocked something out of the park his first time out. And they said that it was akin to invent,

like it had the Wright brothers invented their airplane complete with airline miles and food trays that came down off the back of the seam front. It was just like this complete thing. And that's kind of what Gutenberg did with the printing press. He solved all the problems all at once in his initial invention.

Like he figured it all out. And as we'll see, it stayed the same for hundreds of years as a result. Yeah, so to hold the paper in place, because you know, this frame is upright and then you end up folding it down. It's held in by these pins. These little, look like little nail heads sticking,

or not nail heads, but nail pointy parts. Yeah. The opposite of the head. The ouchy part. And that way, when you flip it over, because you're gonna have to print that other side, it's exactly in the same spot that it was before. Another nice little very rudimentary way of making something perfect.

Right. And then you mentioned earlier, he made certain parts red, this rubrication. And I'm not sure what he did for the Gutenberg Bible, but in the King James version, if I'm not mistaken, Jesus's words are all in red. Oh yeah, that makes sense. I think I remember that being the case,

but I think he just used it here for certain parts and maybe flourishes of art. And there was some hand-drawn art and stuff like that as well. Well, yeah, they went to hand-drawn because he had so much trouble with the red. Like going back and printing after the black was printed, printing on the same page with just the red text.

It's pretty advanced stuff for back then. Right, but they said, yeah, I'll just go do the hand lettering, like traditionally it's done, nobody will be mad at us for it. Right, like what do you call it when the first letter is big? Drop cap?

Yeah, drop cap. They did those in red for sure. Yeah. And then you've got your screw. The screw press he used, he kind of ganked from wine and grape presses. And once you have this thing inked up, you move it over to the press

and it's just a big, big armed lever. It's not like something that moves in a circle. You just kind of pull it really tough, kind of one or maybe two times, and then boom, you've got your printed page. You do, and Ed points out something that I think is overlooked, but one of the other problems with Chinese

and Korean printing or any kind of printing using like wood blocks or something like that is you're going to get uneven pressure. So you're going to get an uneven transfer of ink. One of the genius things about the press, about it using basically a wine press for printing is that it applies even slow pressure at increasing pressure and then decreasing pressure

as you unscrew the screw. So the- At the same rate, like over the whole plate. Right. So there was a nice even amount of pressure that was increasingly introduced and decreasingly reduced that really kind of made this beautiful outcome

for the on the printed page. Yeah, you get, when this guy in this video holds up the little printed page at the end, there's a little moment of ooh and ah going on in that room. Right, and like a little trickle of blood comes out of his ears. He's just gazing into the camera. Oh man, I was worried about that guy for a minute.

I gotta go see that. Yeah, you should check him out. So that's, I mean, that's the printing press. We should say after Gutenberg printed those Bibles, Fuss got his hands on those presses almost immediately. And in very short order, I think like less than two years, released a Psalter,

which is also considered a masterpiece. But Fuss put his name on it, even though Gutenberg had basically created the whole thing. He also made a business for himself, creating these Bibles using Gutenberg's old plates because he got his hands on all those through the court. But again, Gutenberg was certainly not lost to history. Everybody knew what he did

and very quickly revered him as a hero extraordinaire. But we were talking about what the Gutenberg press did for the world. And it's really tough to overstate the impact that it had on things. Yeah, I mean, just think about, like you said, the first information age, getting out information on government and politics

and democracy and I mean, just little things like how-to's and you know, how to, there might have been a how-to on how to make those nails that we talked about in the blacksmithing episode. Although I think a lot of that has passed down, but all of a sudden you can get this out en masse and that's the whole thing. It's like all of a sudden hundreds and thousands

of people could read information. Right, and they could learn to read too because books were now way more affordable than they had been before. And actually, ironically enough, I ran across a history.com article called Seven Ways the Printing Press Changed the World by our own Dave Ruse.

And he went to, he points out this, and I thought this was really important. With the printing press, it made it way easier to make way more copies of something than ever before, which also made it harder to stamp out new ideas. Whereas before, if you had some heretic who had this new idea about, you know, the earth revolving around the sun

rather than the other way around, all you'd do is kill that person, burn them at the stake, and then burn their copies of their notes along with them and idea gone, right? Now, that person could make a bunch of copies and disseminate them, and so this idea would be out there.

You could kill that person, but their idea was going to survive because there were too many copies for you to get your hands on and stamp out, and that led to things like the Enlightenment, like the revolution in America and in France and the birth of democracy in the West. Like all of this stuff came from that,

the ability to disseminate things like never before. In the legal system, it allowed judges to throw the book at people? Yeah, before it was just a one book. Yeah, they wouldn't throw that one thing. No, it could work. Might not get it back. That's right.

So, wow, that was a good one. I think on that one, we should end this episode on the Gutenberg printing press, don't you? Yes. Well, since I said don't you, everybody, it's time for Listener Mail. All right, I'm gonna call this Sweepstakes Winner. Nice.

This is from Devin Johns. Hey guys, just listened to the Sweepstakes podcast. Wanted to share one of my wins as a sweeper. In 2016, I saw Sweepstakes from Interstate Battery and Firestone, where they were giving away two trucks and a bunch of gift cards. All you had to do was get a free battery check at any Firestone and enter with your invoice.

I thought I need an oil change, so I might as well get that battery checked and enter. Less than three months later, I was contacted by a third party company who facilitates the Sweepstakes. Almost didn't answer. They told me I didn't win. And he won a gift card.

No, he won a truck. He won one of those two trucks. 2017 Chevy Silverado. Wow. He said, I loved having a truck, but as you guys said, you got to pay taxes on winnings, which counts as income, so I ended up selling it, buying a nice used car and paying off debt.

I've won a bunch of stuff and have learned how to spot real and fake giveaways, but they do exist, so keep entering. And that is Devin Johns. And he included a picture of himself with his La Car. It's great. It looks good still. Oh yeah.

Thanks Devin, congratulations. And that is a fantastic story. That's a perfect listener mail response to the Sweepstakes episode, if you ask me. Yeah, and a smart, responsible thing you did by getting a cheaper thing and then paying off debt. Good for you. Yeah.

Well, if you want us to give you a pat on the head for something you did, email to us. You can send it off to stuffpodcasts.ihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.