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The printing press is a mechanical device for printing many copies of a text on rectangular sheets of paper. First invented in China in 1041, the printing press was changed and institutionalized in the West by German craftsman and printer Johann Gutenberg. Apart from Gutenberg, the Dutch Laurens Janszoon Coster has also been credited with this invention.
Seals and signet rings preceded printing. Nobles would carve a seal or a ring to press onto documents as official verification. This technique dates back to ancient times.
The original method of printing was block printing, pressing sheets of paper into individually carved wooden blocks. It was invented in China; the Diamond Sutra of AD 868, a Buddhist scripture, is the first dated example of block printing. The technique was also known in Europe, where it was mostly used to print Bibles. Since it was impractical to carve massive quantities of minute text for every block and since most Europeans were illiterate anyway, the "Pauper's Bibles" emphasized illustrations and used words sparsely (arguably the first comic books). And since a new block had to be carved for each page, a variety of books could not be printed.
Moveable clay and metal type are processes much more efficient than hand copying. The use of movable type in printing was invented in 1041 AD by Bi Sheng in China. Bi used clay type, which broke easily, but eventually China and Korea sponsored the production of metal type (a type foundry was established by the Korean government in the early 15th century). Since there are thousands of Chinese characters, the benefit of the technique is not as obvious as in European languages. The movable type did spur additional scholarly pursuits in Song China and facilitated more creative modes of printing, but it did not replace block printing until modern Western printing systems were introduced.
Although probably unaware of the Chinese printing methods (with substantial evidence for both sides of argument), Gutenberg refined the technique with the first widespread use of movable type, where the characters are separate parts that are inserted to make the text. Gutenberg is also credited with the first use of an oil-based ink, and using "rag" paper introduced into Europe from China by way of Muslims.
Previously, books were copied mainly in monasteries, where monks wrote them out by hand. Obviously, books were therefore a scarce resource. While it might take someone a year to hand copy a Bible, with the Gutenberg press it was possible to create several hundred copies a year, with two or three people that could read, and a few people to support the effort. Each sheet still had to be fed manually, which limited the reproduction speed, and the type had to be set manually for each page, which limited the number of different pages created per day. Books produced in this period, between the first work of Johann Gutenberg and the year 1500, are collectively referred to as incunabula.
Gutenberg's findings not only allowed a much broader audience to read Martin Luther's German translation of Bible, it also helped spread Luther's other writings, greatly accelerating the pace of Protestant Reformation. They also led to the establishment of a community of scientists (previously scientists were mostly isolated) that could easily communicate their discoveries, bringing on the Scientific Revolution. Also, although early texts were printed in Latin, books were soon produced in common European vernacular, leading to the decline of the Latin language.
In China, there were no texts similar to the Bible which could guarantee a printer return on the high capital investment of a printing press, and so the primary form of printing was wood block printing which was more suited for short runs of texts for which the return was uncertain.
Some credit the printing press with giving Europe the technological and communication edge over Eastern countries in the end, one of the major questions in world history.
While the Gutenberg press was much more efficient than manual copying, the Industrial Revolution and the invention of the steam powered press by Friedrich Gottlob Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer in 1812 made it possible to print tens of thousands of copies of a page in a day. Koenig and Bauer sold one of their first models to The Times of London, in 1814 and went on to perfect the early model so that it could print on both sides of a sheet at once. This made newspapers available to a mass audience, and from the 1820s changed the nature of book production, forcing a greater standardization in titles and other metadata. Later on in the middle of the 19th century the rotary press (invented in the United States by Richard M. Hoe) allowed millions of copies of a page in a single day. Mass production of printed works flourished after the transition to rolled paper, as continuous feed allowed the presses to run at a much faster pace.
Therefore, the movable type has been credited as the single most important invention of the millennium.
Later inventions in this field include:
Fontaine, Jean-Paul. L'aventure du livre: Du manuscrit medieval a nos jours. Paris: Bibliotheque de l'image, 1999.
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