Printing Press
From Medieval Wiki
By Giulia Iaconi-Stewart
Contents |
Johannes Gutenberg: Childhood/Adolescence
Johannes Gutenberg was born in the wealthy riverside mining town of Mainz, Germany in the year 1398. At that time, the city of Mainz was ruled by the Holy Roman Empire. Johannes was brought up in a wealthy patrician family. His father, Friele Gensfleisch was part of the wealthy aristocracy who owned a lot of land and ruled over the town. His mother, Else Wirich Gutenberg was also a well known land owner; the house Johannes lived in with his parents and his older brother and sister was in fact once owned by Else's family. As a little kid, Johannes would climb up the walls of his town to watch all the boats go by in the river. The boats he watched were carried cargo and trade items from the interactions that Mainz had with other cities within the Roman Empire. Because of the fact that there was no passed on family name in Europe at that time, Johannes and the other citizens of Mainz used the name of the property they lived in as their last name. Johannes's last name became Gutenberg, the name of his mother's family's house. Because Johannes's father was a patrician, it was his job to collect taxes. Because of that, many of the poorer people hated him, his family and the other patricians. So, in 1411 when Johannes was 13, he and his family were told that they must flee Mainz and go to the country. When Johannes was 16, his family moved back to the city at a time when the rich and the poor had come to good terms. Johannes and his father went to work in the mint to make the city's gold coins. In order to make the coins properly, Johannes had to learn the science of metals which was called metallurgy. That craft would later come in handy when he began his world changing business of movable type. At around the age 21, Gutenberg began to go to university to study many subjects, one of which was Latin. It was lucky that he studied that language because he would later use it in his printing business! Many shops in Mainz were beginning to sell paper, which made a little lightbulb go off in Johannes's head. He was beginning to think about the idea of printing onto paper!
Writing Before Gutenberg
"Adam, my scribe, if you ever undertake to make a new copy of my Boethius or Troilus-may the scalp under your long locks turn scurfy [flaky] unless you faithfully write what I have composed! Scraping and rubbing the parchment to make corrections --- all owing to your negligence and haste! -Geoffry Chaucer writing to his scribe Adam by hand, before Gutenberg's inventions, circa 1385.
Before Gutenberg's inventions, people had to write every thing by hand, which I can imagine was extremely labor intensive. Though Gutenberg did invent the first movable type printing press, there were some cultures that experimented with the idea before Johannes's time. In the year 770, Empress Shotoku of Asia demanded that one million copies of the prayers be written for her. At that time, no one had started to play around with the idea of movable type. Handwriting these one million copies took six years and 157 people! In the eleventh century, a Chinese man named Pi Sheng began to carve Chinese characters into wooden and clay blocks. His idea was to spread ink over these characters and then put pressure over them when a piece of cloth or paper was laid on top of the inked blocks. Unfortunately, the Chinese alphabet consisted of tens of thousands of characters instead of the simple 26 letter Latin alphabet. So, the Chinese gave up their idea. A little while later, in 1234, the Koreans tried printing with movable type as well. They had 40,000 characters in their alphabet; not as many as the Chinese but still too many for the execution of movable type.
In the early medieval times and when Gutenberg was a kid, the guilds were the ones who hand wrote all the books. Those guilds were called scribes. The scribes would make beautifully decorated pages with mini scenes of animals, people and nature. Because their work took a very long time, the books were gathered in a large library and chained to many desks so nothing happened to them. As the years went by, the scribes were asked to work harder and harder, faster and faster. In order to get the work done on time, the scribes would rush and in turn, the book pages would be sloppy, hard to read, inn-accurate and/or the words would be misspelled.
The Gutenberg Printing Press
Though Gutenberg began scheming about his "secret project" (AKA the printing press) in about 1438, he officially started inventing his press in around 1440. Since he had so much experience in metallurgy, he did not even bother thinking about wether he should try carving the letters from wood and clay first. Gutenberg got his idea for a printing press from a traditional Medieval wine press. The "grape crusher" had a bucket or barrel where the fruit was kept and a long horizontal pole that was turned to make a press put pressure on the grapes. Once he had designed his printing press, a man named Conrad Saspach built it for him. The next thing he had to accomplish was making a mold for each letter. The process was definitely an intricate one: the first step was to carve a relief of a backwards letter on a steel rod called a punch. The end of the punch with the letter on it was then pounded into a copper plate called a matrix in order to make an indentation. A square mold was placed over the matrix to surround it. The indentation of the showed through because of a deep hole in the mold. Molten metal was poured into the mold, seeping into the crevices of the indentation. Once the molten metal had dried, the mold was taken away and the final product was a metal bar with a letter on the bottom! The ink that Johannes used was one made out of lampblack soot and linseed oil. It was the perfect recipe; not to thin or too thick. The last thing to do was to print a page (or 1280 pages if you were printing the Bible) which happened a little like this: the letters were put in order on the press according to how they were supposed to read. The ink was spread over them and then a piece of paper was set on top. The surface on which all of this took place was then pushed underneath the giant screw of the press. The screw was twisted down, and the long wooden pole was twisted to make sure everything was tight. This process put pressure on the paper, which made the ink stay. It was like a giant stamp. The surface was rolled back out and voila! a whole page of type was created.
Click on this link to see a video of how a printing press works! Printing Press Video
This link shows a bunch of milestones related to printing before, at the time of and after Gutenberg's inventions. Milestones
The Gutenberg Bible
The very first mass produced book was the Gutenberg Bible. Printed between the years of 1452 and 1455, this remains to be one of the most well crafted and beautifully made books in all of history. This enormous Bible, consisting of 1280 pages was mostly printed by Johannes Gutenberg himself, but the final pages were printed by his friends Johann Faust and Peter Schoffer after Gutengberg ran out of money and they took the press away from him. The words that make up the 42 lines on every page of the Bible are written in a black German Gothic type face. The headers, on the other hand, are also in the popular Gothic style of that era, but they are colored red and blue instead. Out of the 180 total copies that were printed, about 59 of them are still in tact today; they reside in: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Switzerland and the United States.
"All that has been written to me about that marvelous man seen at Frankfurt is true. I have not seen complete Bibles but only a number of [pages].... The script was very legible, not at all difficult to follow --- your grace would be able to read it without effort, and indeed without glasses." -Bishop Aeneas Piccolomini writing about the Gutenberg Bible, March 1455.
Glossary
- Guild = A craftsman in the medieval times.
- Stand Up Relief = The initial carving of the letter that would stand up above the surface of the punch.
- Punch = The steel bar that Gutenberg would carve the stand up reliefs of the letters on.
- Matrix = The brass square that the stand up relief would be pounded into to make an indentation.
- Metallurgy = The science of metals.
Bibliography
Websites:
- http://inventors.about.com/od/gstartinventors/a/Gutenberg.htm
- http://www.ideafinder.com/features/everwonder/won-printbook.htm
- http://clausenbooks.com/gutenbergcensus.htm Click on this link to see where all the remaining copies of the Gutenberg Bible are today.
Books:
- Rees, Fran. Johannes Gutenberg Inventor of the Printing Press. Minneapolis: Compass Point Books, 2006.
-Childress, Diana. Johannes Gutenberg and the Printing Press. Minneapolis: Twenty First Century Books, 2008.
Online Article:
- "Gutenberg Invents Movable Type Printing Press, c. 1450." DISCovering World History. Online Edition. Gale, 2003. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale.
