Gutenberg launched a printing revolution with mechanical movable type, the first technology of mass media, which decentralized control of knowledge and enabled an intellectual awakening throughout Europe and the world
JOHANNES GUTENBERG
(c. 1400–1468)
Invention is not synonymous with disruption. Gutenberg did not invent printing. Woodblock printing—printing of words and images carved onto a block of wood—is known to have been used as far back as the Han Dynasty of China, which puts its origin before CE 220. But Gutenberg was also not the first to introduce movable-type printing, the invention with which he is most widely credited. The earliest known movable-type system also came from China, using porcelain type, about 1040, during the Song Dynasty. Two centuries later, in Korea, a system using movable metal type was introduced, and the Jikji, a volume of Zen Buddhist teachings, is the first known book printed using movable type.
Indeed, printing in which each page of text was carved from a wood block did not appear in Europe until the early fourteenth century, when it was used to print patterns on cloth. About a hundred years later, block printing was used for books. It was regarded as a cheap—and not altogether desirable—alternative to hand-copied manuscripts.
Johannes Gutenberg was born in Mainz, Germany, during this early period of European woodblock printing, the youngest son of a prosperous family. His father, Friele Gensfleisch zur Laden, was an engraver for the ecclesiastic mint, a hereditary position. Young Gutenberg—he adopted his surname from the house his father and his paternal ancestors inhabited, zu Gutenberg—learned the goldsmithing trade, which included engraving, from his father. Although his family was not royalty, they were patrician and, as such, it is likely that Johannes Gutenberg was well educated at a grammar school and continued his studies at the University of Erfurt. Preparation for the printer’s trade required a high degree of literacy, including a thorough knowledge of Latin and some Greek. Beyond this highly credible speculation regarding his education, almost nothing is known about Gutenberg’s early life. What is known is that in 1411 a popular uprising in Mainz drove out of the city more than a hundred patrician families, including Gutenberg’s.
For the next fifteen years, there is no sign of either the Gensfleisches or the Gutenbergs. Then, in 1434, Johannes sent a letter from Strasbourg, saying that he was living there as a goldsmith. In or about 1439, Gutenberg became involved in an apparently unsavory enterprise in which he polished and peddled metal mirrors, claiming that they could be used to capture holy light from religious relics. The following year, 1440, writing again from Strasbourg, Gutenberg claimed to have perfected what he called “Aventur und Kunst” (Enterprise and Art)—that is, the secret of printing. Whether this “secret” was a movable type system or some variation on traditional block printing is unknown, and four years passed before the historical record concerning Gutenberg resumes. The year 1448 finds him back in Mainz, where he borrowed money from his brother-in-law and may have used it to advance his experiments with movable type. In any case, by 1450 the new movable-type press was in operation.
Working from Hof Humbrecht, a building owned by a relative, Gutenberg was enjoying a lucrative business printing a variety of books. We know that he invented some method of rather quickly producing movable type intended for use on a wooden printing press with an oil-based ink. It was a system in which every component was intended to speed the near-mass production of books. This said, nothing of Gutenberg’s press or other paraphernalia survives or was ever illustrated. The details of Gutenberg’s technique for making the movable type are unknown. What is abundantly clear from specimens of Gutenberg’s work, especially his famed Bible of 1455, is that the typeface he created reproduced the characters standard in manuscripts of the period. Gutenberg produced two different forms of each letter. In one, the letter was separated. In the other, the letter was linked, so that it could be closely joined to the adjacent type, thereby avoiding gaps in the printed page.
Historians of printing technology speculate that the individual pieces of type were created by engraving their letter into hard steel and then punching it into a softer metal to build a mold in which multiple copies of each character could be cast. The cast type was arranged into a wooden tray called (in modern English) a galley. When all the type was set into the galley, the raised letters were inked with leather-covered ink balls, and a sheet of paper or parchment was placed on top of the galley. The inked galley, with the paper on top of it, was then slid under a pad and into the press. The screw-threaded press plate was lowered down onto the sandwiched pad, paper, and galley, the resulting pressure creating the impression that became the printed page. We know that Gutenberg prepared a special ink for this process—a sticky, very black ink, which, unlike traditional water-based woodblock ink, used a combination of linseed oil, resin, and soot.
Gutenberg was already enjoying a brisk business when he took on as partner a wealthy burgher named Johann Fust. Gutenberg borrowed 8,000 guilders from him to finance a series of books, and then another 8,000 to finance the creation of the 42-line Bible of 1455. This, the so-called Gutenberg Bible, is considered the first book of true merit printed in Europe with movable type. In Gutenberg’s own time, it was recognized for what it is universally considered today—not only his masterpiece of printing, but one of the most beautiful printed books ever produced. It is monumental. Printed in two volumes, it consists of a total of 1,282 pages and was the work of Gutenberg directing a staff of twenty skilled printers. The 1455 Bible employed a font of 290 different cast letters and symbols. This 1455 edition consisted of 180 copies—150 on paper and 30 on vellum parchment. The price for the paper version was 30 florins each—a lordly sum, representing perhaps three years’ wages for a skilled worker, such as a clerk.
Alas for Johannes Gutenberg, the Bible turned out to be the high-water mark of his career. He fell into a bitter financial dispute with his partner, Fust, who sued him in the archbishop’s court for misusing the funds he had loaned him. When the decision went against Gutenberg, he forfeited control over the printing establishment to Fust, and he relinquished to him half of the printed Bibles. Bankrupt, Gutenberg subsequently opened another print shop and continued as a printer in Mainz, but he never succeeded in replicating his earlier success. He struggled until 1465, when the Archbishop Adolph von Nassau conferred upon him the title of Hofmann (court gentleman) in recognition of his movable-type printing system. The honor carried with it a generous stipend, which saw Gutenberg through his final few years. He died in 1468.
• • •
While Gutenberg himself died in some degree of obscurity—living chiefly on his stipend—the printing system he created spread very rapidly. Unlike the much earlier Chinese and Korean inventions, Gutenberg’s press was a truly transformative technology. Thanks to the mass production of books, knowledge and news spread rapidly throughout Europe. The new technology propelled the Renaissance with redoubled force and consequence. Printing spawned the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution. No longer was written knowledge confined to a small circle of individuals and institutions wealthy enough to own manuscripts. The written word had become the printed word, and what people thought and read could no longer be controlled exclusively by governments, churches, and individual rulers. Like the Internet of today, movable-type printing presses, which quickly appeared in all the major cities of Europe, became a kind of political, cultural, religious, and scientific network—a nervous system, if you will, of a civilization now capable of continually challenging and renewing itself.
As for the basic technology of movable type and the Gutenberg press, it remained remarkably unchanged until the nineteenth century, when steam and electric power exponentially increased the speed, volume, and reach of the printed word. Still, the basics of cast movable type remained the principal technology underlying the production of all books until the early 1960s, with the perfection and spread of photographically based offset printing. Today, the digital revolution has finally disrupted printing on paper—but it has yet to replace it and does not seem likely to do so.