Printing press

Printing press

A screw press with movable type
Inventor	Johannes Gutenberg (in Europe)
Date	c. 1440
Key innovation	Reusable movable metal type
Landmark work	The Gutenberg Bible, c. 1455

The printing press is a mechanical device that presses inked type onto paper. The version developed by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz around 1440 combined several existing technologies into a system that made books cheap enough to change who could own one.

Printing itself was old: woodblock printing had been practised in China since at least the seventh century, and movable type of clay and later metal was in use in China and Korea centuries before Gutenberg. His contribution was an integrated production process suited to an alphabetic script:

• a hand mould that cast individual letters in a lead-tin-antimony alloy quickly, cheaply and to a consistent height, so thousands of identical pieces of type could be made and reused;
• an oil-based ink that adhered to metal type, where the water-based inks used for woodblocks beaded and slipped;
• a screw press, adapted from wine and olive presses, giving even pressure across a full page.

With movable type, the cost of a book divided into a large fixed cost of setting a page and a small marginal cost per copy. Producing five hundred copies became far cheaper per copy than producing one, which is the economic fact behind everything that followed.

Printing spread rapidly: by 1500 there were presses in more than 250 European towns and some twenty million volumes had been produced, in a continent of perhaps eighty million people. By 1600 the figure was in the hundreds of millions.

The consequences were not only in volume. Elizabeth Eisenstein's account emphasises standardisation and fixity: every copy of a printed edition was identical, so a scholar could cite a page number and be understood elsewhere, errors could be corrected in a known edition rather than multiplying with each copy, and mathematical tables, maps and anatomical diagrams could be reproduced exactly.^[1]

The Reformation is the clearest political case. Luther's ninety-five theses of 1517 were reprinted and distributed across German-speaking Europe within weeks, at a speed no earlier dissent could achieve; his German Bible then made the text available to readers who had no Latin. Printing did not cause the Reformation, but it removed the Church's practical control over which arguments could circulate.

Printing also fixed vernacular languages in a way manuscript culture had not. Printers chose one dialect to set in and standardised its spelling for a market, and that dialect tended to become the national written standard.

The iron press replaced wood around 1800, allowing a single pull to print a full sheet. Steam-driven cylinder presses from 1814 pushed output from hundreds of sheets per hour into the thousands, making the mass-circulation newspaper possible. Linotype machines from the 1880s mechanised typesetting itself. Offset lithography and, from the late twentieth century, digital printing and electronic distribution then displaced letterpress almost entirely.

The pattern that began with Gutenberg — a fall in the cost of copying, followed by an argument over who may publish — recurs with the Internet and the World Wide Web, where the marginal cost of a copy fell effectively to zero.

• Encyclopedia
• Library of Alexandria
• World Wide Web

1. ^ Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge University Press, 1979.