The first thing to come out of Gutenberg's print shop was the Bible. When rotated, it would apply downward pressure onto the paper which was laid on top of the type and wood platen. So, how did the Gutenberg press work? The crux of the invention was a heavy wooden screen with a long handle used to turn it. Gutenberg developed his own ink that stuck to metal, and he repurposed wine and olive presses-something used to press grapes for wine and olives for oil-into a means of flattening paper. There were other aspects of the Gutenberg press that made it one of the world’s most successful innovations. They fit together in a way that the lines of the letters were consistent and appeared uniform on paper. To replicate the type in such quantities, brass molds were created and then had molten lead poured in them. Additionally, each letter was its own block, and those blocks were produced on a large scale. The most notable is that the formerly wooden blocks were now made of metal. The Gutenberg printing press had several innovations on Chen’s machine. By 1450, he had returned to his Mainz home and developed the famous Gutenberg press. Gutenberg was a political exile from Germany and began experimenting with printing while living in France. But his invention didn’t appear until 150 years after Chen and 78 years after Baekun. Johannes Gutenberg is considered the father of the printing press-there’s even one named after him. Photo: Gutenberg Taking an Impression (Public domain) These advancements made Nung Shu the first mass-produced book that the world had ever seen. He also made it easier for typesetters (the people placing the blocks) to do so in an efficient manner. Wang Chen and the World’s First Mass-Produced BookĪlthough wooden typography had a reputation for absorbing too much ink and not being made to last, it reemerged in 1297 thanks to Wang Chen and his publication on agriculture and farming called Nung Shu.Ĭhen improved on wooden text by developing a process that made the blocks more durable. Although it was easier to produce than the block printing method, the process was expensive-making mass printing reserved for the upper class. When inked, they were pressed against paper. He carved individual letterforms into clay and baked them into hard blocks. Moveable letters, also called moveable type, was developed by Bi Sheng in China shortly into the second millennium. The blocks were cut specifically for a project, and they couldn’t be reused for another one. While this printed text marked the reproduction of text (that wasn’t done by hand), the type of printing it used was block printing, which involves hand-carved woodblocks cut in reverse. Called The Diamond Sutra, it’s a Buddhist scroll that was published around 868 CE. It’s unknown who invented the initial printing press, but the oldest known printed text came from China. The most common iteration of the printing press is the Gutenberg press-but it wasn’t the first.
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