How fast did the printing press spread

The printing press is a device that allows for the mass production of uniform printed matter, mainly text in the form of books, pamphlets and newspapers. Created in China, the printing press revolutionized society there before being further developed in Europe in the 15th Century by Johannes Gutenberg and his invention of the Gutenberg press.

No one knows when the first printing press was invented or who invented it, but the oldest known printed text originated in China during the first millennium A. The Diamond Sutra was created with a method known as block printing, which utilized panels of hand-carved wood blocks in reverse. Some other texts have survived from Dunhuang as well, including a printed calendar from around A.

It was during this period of early printing that rolled-up scrolls began to be replaced by book-formatted texts. Woodblock printing was also used in Japan and Korea at the time, and metal block printing was also developed at some point during that period, typically for Buddhist and Taoist texts.

Moveable type, which replaced panels of printing blocks with moveable individual letters that could be reused, was developed by Bi Sheng, from Yingshan, Hubei, China, who lived roughly from to A.

The first moveable type was carved into clay and baked into hard blocks that were then arranged onto an iron frame that was pressed against an iron plate. Shen Kuo explained that Bi Sheng did not use wood because the texture is inconsistent and absorbs moisture too easily, and also presents a problem of sticking in the ink. The baked clay cleaned-up better for reuse. By the time of the Southern Song Dynasty, which ruled from to A.

Massive printed book collections also became a status symbol for the wealthy class. Woodtype made a comeback in when Ching-te magistrate Wang Chen printed a treatise on agriculture and farming practices called Nung Shu. Wang Chen devised a process to make the wood more durable and precise. He then created a revolving table for typesetters to organize with more efficiency, which led to greater speed in printing. It was exported to Europe and, coincidentally, documented many Chinese inventions that have been traditionally attributed to Europeans.

Goldsmith and inventor Johannes Gutenberg was a political exile from Mainz, Germany when he began experimenting with printing in Strasbourg, France in He returned to Mainz several years later and by , had a printing machine perfected and ready to use commercially: The Gutenberg press.

In order to make the type available in large quantities and to different stages of printing, Gutenberg applied the concept of replica casting, which saw letters created in reverse in brass and then replicas made from these molds by pouring molten lead.

Photo courtesy of The International Print Museum. Most of us tend to take printed materials for granted, but imagine life today if the printing press had never been invented. We would not have books, magazines or newspapers. Posters, flyers, pamphlets and mailers would not exist. The printing press allows us to share large amounts of information quickly and in huge numbers.

In fact, the printing press is so significant that it has come to be known as one of the most important inventions of our time. It drastically changed the way society evolved. In this article, we will explore how the printing press was invented, as well as how it affected culture. Before the printing press was invented, any writings and drawings had to be completed painstakingly by hand.

The monasteries had a special room called a "scriptorium. Later, the illuminator would take over to add designs and embellishments to the pages. In the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, books were usually only owned by monasteries, educational institutions or extremely rich people.

Most books were religious in nature. In some cases, a family might be lucky enough to own a book, in which case it would be a copy of the Bible. Around the late s, a German man named Johann Gutenberg was quite desperate to find a way to make money. The mirrors themselves were not significant, but Gutenberg quietly noted how lucrative it was to create mass amounts of a cheap product.

During the s to s, people had developed a very basic form of printing. It involved letters or images cut on blocks of wood. His greatest accomplishment was the first print run of the Bible in Latin, which took three years to print around copies, a miraculously speedy achievement in the day of hand-copied manuscripts. Palmer, a professor of early modern European history at the University of Chicago, compares early printed books like the Gutenberg Bible to how e-books struggled to find a market before Amazon introduced the Kindle.

Gutenberg died penniless, his presses impounded by his creditors. Other German printers fled for greener pastures, eventually arriving in Venice, which was the central shipping hub of the Mediterranean in the late 15th century.

The ships left Venice carrying religious texts and literature, but also breaking news from across the known world. Printers in Venice sold four-page news pamphlets to sailors, and when their ships arrived in distant ports, local printers would copy the pamphlets and hand them off to riders who would race them off to dozens of towns.

Since literacy rates were still very low in the s, locals would gather at the pub to hear a paid reader recite the latest news, which was everything from bawdy scandals to war reports. Sketch of a printing press taken from a notebook by Leonardo Da Vinci. The Italian Renaissance began nearly a century before Gutenberg invented his printing press when 14th-century political leaders in Italian city-states like Rome and Florence set out to revive the Ancient Roman educational system that had produced giants like Caesar, Cicero and Seneca.

One of the chief projects of the early Renaissance was to find long-lost works by figures like Plato and Aristotle and republish them. Wealthy patrons funded expensive expeditions across the Alps in search of isolated monasteries. Italian emissaries spent years in the Ottoman Empire learning enough Ancient Greek and Arabic to translate and copy rare texts into Latin.

The operation to retrieve classic texts was in action long before the printing press, but publishing the texts had been arduously slow and prohibitively expensive for anyone other than the richest of the rich. The Printing Revolution Learning Objective Synthesize the impacts of the printing press on distribution of ideas and mass communication. Key Points In Johannes Gutenberg began work on the invention of a new printing press that allowed precise molding of new type blocks from a uniform template and allowed for the creation of high-quality printed books.

Gutenberg is also credited with the introduction of an oil-based ink that was more durable than the previously used water-based inks. He tested colored inks in his Gutenberg Bible. The printing press was a factor in the establishment of a community of scientists who could easily communicate their discoveries through widely disseminated scholarly journals, helping to bring on the scientific revolution.

Because the printing process ensured that the same information fell on the same pages, page numbering, tables of contents, and indices became common. The arrival of mechanical movable type printing introduced the era of mass communication, which permanently altered the structure of society.