Gutenberg

’s Printing Press Essay, Research Paper

Gutenberg’s Press and the Transition from Medieval to Modern

There are many ideas and concepts that facilitated the transition from the Medieval Era to a more modern, Renaissance society, but it can be argued that Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press was the most important factor to this change in Europe. The creation of the press was no easy task for Gutenberg; he was faced with many obstacles. However, once created, the press benefited people around the world for centuries and continues to be a fundamental part of our society today.

Before the invention of the printing press, books were extremely expensive, limiting education to the very wealthy. Because only the upper class could afford to purchase books, education was a means of separating the aristocracy from the lower classes. It was nearly impossible for the less fortunate to move up in society since they could not educate themselves.

The reason books were so pricey was due to the methods employed to create each page individually. For a scribe to copy an entire novel by hand would take much patience and many hours. A common method of producing copies was for one man to read the original word by word, and a group of scribes would write each word as the reader said them. “By this method,” describes John Fontana in his work Mankind’s Greatest Invention, “one manuscript served as the source of reproduction for many copies when the scribes finished writing the last of the reader’s orally presented words” (13). Not only was this time consuming, but the more copies that were made, the more errors were made.

Eventually, a method of creating copies without such a high margin of error came about. People would hand carve blocks of wood with raised letters and cover the blocks with ink. Then they would place a sheet of paper on the block to make a copy. To make the process even more difficult, they had to carve the letters and words backwards so they would print correctly, and they had to make these letters look normal when reversed. Albert Kapr, in his book Johann Gutenberg: The Man and his Invention, describes how “a calligrapher had first to write out this text, which was traced as a mirror-image reversal on to a planed limewood plank and then cut out with a knife in such a way that the lettering was left as a raised surface” (21). This method is called xylography, and while it was an improvement in that it reduced mistakes, carving a block of wood for each page to be printed was even more time consuming than writing the words by hand, and books remained as expensive as ever.

Johann Gensfleisch Gutenberg, a goldsmith from Mainz, Germany, wanted to change all this. His idea was to replace the wood blocks with separate letters made of metal. One would be able to move the letters around to make words and sentences, and then reuse them. “The key to this new method was not as is generally believed, the discovery of the value of movable type, for movable letters had been known and used for centuries,” explains Fontana. “It was the mechanism for making the types” (28). This type of printing press was, in fact, already being used in China, but the technology to create such a machine was yet to be discovered in Europe.

In working to build this machine, Gutenberg was faced with obstacle after obstacle. Just when he would think he might have mastered it, he would encounter another problem to solve. “The invention of typography was not,” noted Theo DeVinne in his work The Invention of Printing, “the result of a happy thought or of a flash of inspiration. It was not born in a day . . . it was thought out and wrought out” (376). To begin with, he had two main concerns: finding a device that would keep the letters in place, and making a press that would print clearly.

Gutenberg soon came up with a solution to the first of the two issues. He paid a carpenter for the use of his winepress, so as to have “a suitable bed for a page of metal letters to rest on,” and arranged the letters on one side of it (Fontana 22). He wanted to come up with a frame to hold the paper; then when one was ready to print, they could twist a screw to press the paper up against the letters. The letters were to be created by pouring melted metal into a mold.

Then Gutenberg came across several more problems. The first was the question of how to make all of the letters exactly the same thickness so that when they were pressed against the paper, they would print evenly. Also, he needed a solution for putting narrow letters on narrow metal bases and wide letters on wide bases. Using the same base for all letters would not only be impractical in that it would waste space, it would also make the words look uneven, with different sized spaces between letters. Regardless of the width of the character, each metal piece had to be the same height so the lines would not be crooked. DeVinne made the point that “if the types of one character, as of the letter a, should be made the merest trifle larger or smaller than its fellows of the same font, all the types, when composed, will show the consequences of the defect” (52).

Gutenberg came up with two brilliant ideas to solve the problems. In order to make all of the letters the same thickness, he made the mold the desired height and added extensions on the sides to catch any overflowing metal. That way