Printing History And Development Essay Research Paper

Printing: History And Development Essay, Research Paper

Printing: History and Development

Overview

Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the

printing press is widely thought of as the origin of mass communication–

it marked Western culture’s first viable method of disseminating ideas and

information from a single source to a large and far-ranging audience. A

closer look at the history of print, however, shows that the invention of

the printing press depended on a confluence of both cultural and technological

forces that had been unfolding for several centuries. Print culture and

technology also needed to go through centuries of change after Gutenberg’s

time before the "massification" of audiences could fully crystallize.

The story of print is a long and complex one. It may be too much to claim

that print was the single cause of the massive social, political and psychological

changes it is associated with. However, print did wield enormous influence

on every aspect of European culture. Some historians suggest that print

was instrumental in bringing about all the major shifts in science, religion,

politics and the modes of thought that are commonly associated with modern

Western culture.

The key technological, cultural and psychological issues associated with

the emergence of the printing press can be organized into the following

areas:

China: The Technological Roots

rag

paper

paper’s

migration to Europe

ideographic

alphabet

Gutenberg and the Historical Moment in Western

Europe

scribal

hand-copying

Church

indulgences

movable

metal type

Gutenberg

Bibles

the

Protestant Reformation

William

Caxton and print in England

Print and Modern Thought

scientific

thinking

the

scientific community

the

rise of an intellectual class

transformations:

oral, written and print cultures

privacy

and individual rights

Print in the U.S.

first

colonial press in Cambridge

the

penny press: news for all

Advances in Print Technology

innovations

since the Linotype

innovations

in contemporary print culture

China: The Technological Roots

The invention of the printing press depended on the invention and refinement

of paper in China over

several centuries. The Chinese had developed "rag" paper, a

cheap cloth-scrap and plant-fiber substitute for cumbersome bark

and bamboo strips and for precious silk paper, by A.D. 105. Chinese

prisoners passed a mature technology on to their Arab captors in the eighth

century. The secrets of the craft that were revealed to Europeans

in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were substantially the same techniques

the Chinese had passed to the Arabs several centuries earlier.

Long before the Gutenberg press, Chinese innovations in ink, block printing

and movable clay type all fed the technological push toward expanding

the written word’s range of influence. Althought the European innovations

came much later, European culture certainly felt the impact of print more

dramatically than the Chinese did. Because their alphabet employs thousands

of visually specific ideograms, the use of movable type was much more

labor-intensive for the Chinese. Consequently, it did not change production

efficiency as dramatically as it did for Europeans. Some historians will

also assert that the sequential, linear and standardized character of

the printed word especially suited Western impulses toward progress and

conquest– a disposition that favors quick and intense change.

Gutenberg and the Historical

Moment in Western Europe

In the early 1450’s rapid cultural change in Europe fueled a growing

need for the rapid and cheap production of written documents. Johannes

Gutenberg, a goldsmith and businessman from the mining town of Mainz

in southern Germany, borrowed money to develop a technology that could

address this serious economic bottleneck. From its European debut in the

12th century, paper gradually proved to be a viable alternative to the

animal-skin vellum and parchment that had been the standard means of carrying

written communication. Rag paper became increasingly cheap and plentiful

while literacy expanded; the two processes accelerated, in part, by stimulating

each other. The need for documentation continued to increase with expansions

in trade and in governmental scope and complexity. Scribal monks sanctioned

by the Church had overseen the maintenance and hand-copying of sacred

texts for centuries, but the secular world began to foster its own version

of the scribal copyist profession. The many new scriptoria, or