Gutenberg

Johannes knew metals.  His father had been goldsmith for the Bishop of Mainz.  And Johannes knew that if you took a fine punch to a sheet of copper and pounded an intricate image in it, treated with some oil, you could then pour tin solder (tin, antimony and lead) into the negative of the mold design and get a positive that was durable, yet melted at lower temperatures, making the replication process easier. Using the copper mold repeatedly, you could replicate cast images which could be used to press a stamp onto other things. And what did Johannes want to cast? Small backwards letters.

            His last name was Gensfleisch which in German means “goose flesh”.  Johannes was embarrassed by the name so he used the name of their house, Gutenberg, “mountain estate”.  Many of his childhood years were spent in Strasbourg, France as a result of the family being political refugees. His father read Latin and derived much peace from reading the Bible.  That’s what Gutenberg wanted to replicate in an inexpensive way.  None of his techniques were entirely new.  Typography, printing with moveable type, had been used as early as 1041 in China.  In 1314 Wang Chen used 60,000 moveable wooden type characters to print a book on agriculture. He even experimented with metal type.  But with a language of no alphabet, there was no advantage to moveable type. Chinese newspapers today have 45,000 characters for which a typesetter must locate with each new word.   Laurens Coster of Haarlem, Netherlands is said to have printed with metal type in 1430 but it didn’t hold ink well.  Gutenberg found an oil-based ink, invented a rack to retain the letters, and hooked them to a press that farmers used to press grapes or olives.  Bingo, the printing press.  Yet we don’t know much about his Strasbourg trials and errors.  Were his first copies made with some other clamping method since early letters were so crooked? After moving back to Mainz, he secured a loan from the wealthy Johann Fust.  A German poem was printed in 1450 and indulgences in 1451. In 1455, Fust sued and bankrupted Gutenberg and slyly took control of his business.  Then in 1456, Gutenberg set up another shop and printed his dream, 4000 copies of The Gutenberg Bible. Several are still in existence, two in British museums. It has no chapters, verses, or paragraphs. There were no copyrights and making money was very difficult, but the printing press changed the world forever. 

            Before printing, the Church held closely to education.  Hand copied books were costly and full of errors. Authors could not reach a wide audience.  Europe’s largest libraries were about 300 books.  But monasteries began to increasingly record trial-and-error derived methods to improve life in the 1300s, schools multiplied and literacy rose. Businesses wanted literate bookkeepers and wealthy women loved stories of chivalry and romance. Demand drove the market.  Muslims brought Chinese paper-making methods to Europe, and linen rags were found to provide good fibers. Doubtless, the printing industry would have arisen even without Gutenberg, but his genius was to put methods together in a device and a commercial process.  Authorship thereupon became lucrative and influential.  Books were a cheap education. Scholars could work in concert in remote places by referencing specific pages of certain editions. Printing made the Bible a common possession and paved the way for Luther’s appeals. Finally it promoted writing in native languages rather than Latin because most readers could not speak the dead tongue.  But on a personal note, books were the magic that unlocked the world to this deaf ranch kid who couldn’t hear birds sing or make out adult conversations.  And by the way, I have far more than 300 books and need to clean house one of these days.