Printing—producing identical copies of a picture or piece of writing by pressing an inked block onto a surface — was introduced by the Chinese over a thousand years ago. However, the breakthrough of movable type, which meant that a new block could be made up from existing pieces of type, without having to carve it from scratch, was developed in 1438 by Johannes Gutenberg, in Germany. This was still a fairly slow, manual method, although much faster than the alternative of writing documents out by hand. It was not until the invention of steam and, later, electrical machinery to power the presses that documents could be printed rapidly on a large scale.
Nearly 600 years before Gutenberg, Chinese monks were setting ink to paper using a method known as block printing, in which wooden blocks are coated with ink and pressed to sheets of paper. One of the earliest surviving books printed in this fashion — an ancient Buddhist text known as “The Diamond Sutra” — was created in 868 during the Tang (T’ang) Dynasty (618-909) in China. The book, which was sealed inside a cave near the city of Dunhuang, China, for nearly a thousand years before its discovery in 1900, is now housed in the British Library in London.
The carved wooden blocks used for this early method of printing were also used in Japan and Korea as early as the eighth century. Private printers in these places used both wood and metal blocks to produce Buddhist and Taoist treatises and histories in the centuries before movable type was invented.
An important advancement to woodblock printing came in the early eleventh century, when a Chinese peasant named Bi Sheng (Pi Sheng) developed the world’s first movable type. Though Sheng himself was a commoner and didn’t leave much of a historical trail, his ingenious method of printing, which involved the production of hundreds of individual characters, was well-documented by his contemporary, a scholar and scientist named Shen Kuo.
But all that changed in the middle of the 15th century, when Johannes Gutenberg established himself as a goldsmith and craftsman in Strasbourg, Germany.
Like Bi Sheng, Wang Chen and Baegun before him, Gutenberg determined that to speed up the printing process, he would need to break the conventional wooden blocks down into their individual components — lower- and upper-case letters, punctuation marks, etc. He cast these movable blocks of letters and symbols out of various metals, including lead, antimony and tin. He also created his own ink using linseed oil and soot — a development that represented a major improvement over the water-based inks used in China.
But what really set Gutenberg apart from his predecessors in Asia was his development of a press that mechanized the transfer of ink from movable type to paper. Adapting the screw mechanisms found in wine presses, papermakers’ presses and linen presses, Gutenberg developed a press perfectly suited for printing. The first printing press allowed for an assembly line-style production process that was much more efficient than pressing paper to ink by hand. For the first time in history, books could be mass-produced — and at a fraction of the cost of conventional printing methods.
Picture Credit : Google