by Tom Wheeler
What had previously passed for “printing” from woodcuts was actually more like blotting. Sharp images, however, required pressure. The technology of the screw press may not have been new, but its application to printing created new problems. A grape on the outside of a wine press doesn’t need to be squeezed at exactly the same pressure as a grape closer to the center of the press—but the last letter on the last line of a printed text must receive the same amount of pressure as all other letters or else its imprinted image will be lighter or darker, crisper or fuzzier. Similarly, while it makes no difference if the plate pressing down on a grape slides a bit laterally, even the slightest such movement on a printing press will smear the type.
Gutenberg’s tinkering with the pressing mechanism resulted in an upper plate that descended evenly with equal pressure throughout. It was yet another trial-and-error improvement on an existing technology.
None of the aforementioned challenges were trivial. The technique for reproducing identical pieces of type and holding them together to make a page, however, was Gutenberg’s greatest challenge.
The contraction of metal as it cooled had prevented the production of identical type and was solved by adding the element antimony to the molten mixture of tin and lead.31 Antimony expands as it cools; pressing against the walls of the matrix rather than contracting produces a uniform result from each pouring. But antimony is highly toxic. Not only was Gutenberg working with molten metals heated to over 600 degrees Fahrenheit, but the vapors coming from the liquid were also poisonous.
While each letter was now identical to the others of its kind, there remained the challenge of the differing widths of letters, as well as producing a consistent-length base on which the letters stood. As anyone who has tried to shorten the leg of a table can attest, trying to file the stem on which each letter stood to a common length was an impossible undertaking. Infinitesimal variation in the height of a letter would produce an impression different from that of the letter next to it.
Gutenberg found the solution to both these problems in a four-piece handheld mold. Two L-shaped molded pieces fit together and the matrix with the letter’s impression would slide into a slot in the bottom. The width of the stalk of the letter could be adjusted to the characteristics of the letter based on the width of the matrix. The pieces were held together by a metal loop, the molten metal was poured, the loop was released, the two L-shaped sides fell apart, and there stood a uniform piece of type. Recalling the lawsuit testimony about “four pieces” held together by “two screws,” Gutenberg’s effort appears to have been an early attempt at a typeface mold.
With expanding metal, a constant impression of the letter being cast, and a four-part mold to ensure standard size, Gutenberg had solved one of his most vexing problems. The problems that remained, however, were equally aggravating. Having successfully created the smallest unit of information on the page, he now had to reassemble the pieces and hold them together as a single unit.
The 1439 court testimony also discussed something called “formes.” The type had to be fitted into a frame that tightly bound the letters together. This wooden frame was solid on three sides while the fourth side opened to allow the type to slide in. Blanks of differing widths were used to align the ends of the lines. When the form was filled, the fourth side was attached, and small thin pieces of wood were inserted to act like shims and hold the pieces tight. The result was a solid mass—the equivalent of a woodblock—from which to print. Unlike the woodblock, however, the plate was a solid mass only in its effect; in reality the plate was the temporary assembly of the smallest usable components of information.
Around 1450, Gutenberg’s presses began producing finished products.32 The first commercial product was probably a schoolbook, the twenty-eight-page Latin text Ars grammatica by Aelius Donatus.
Success!
It is worthwhile pausing at this point to savor Gutenberg’s success.
Imagine the exultation and celebration that must have gripped Johannes Gutenberg as his first printed book was bound!
More than a decade in development, Gutenberg’s understanding that a page of information was the sum of its parts had required a “secret art” to both discover a revolutionary new process and find the means of adjusting a seemingly endless number of variables into harmonious production.
Now it was done. Success had been achieved in twenty-eight pages of Latin grammar instruction.
The Western world had never before seen the rapid production of hundreds of perfect-quality pages, each one identical to the others. It was a moment to be savored, a decade-long quest with a transformative result.
Unfortunately, the exultation would be short-lived.
Other mass-market documents flowed from Gutenberg’s printing shop. The earliest dated work was a papal indulgence of 1454.33 Having spent more than a decade perfecting his technique, however, Gutenberg, it would appear, was not satisfied with such run-of-the-mill products. He wanted a monument. Today we call that monument the Gutenberg Bible.
It would be his downfall.
Economically, printing was a capital-intensive undertaking. Large amounts of raw materials had to be purchased and held in inventory awaiting processing into a finished product, which then waited to be sold. This was especially true of the proposed Bible, a voluminous 1,275 pages. For a production run of around 175 copies (135 on paper, 40 on calfskin vellum), the project would require 5,000 calfskins for the vellum copies and more than 250,000 sheets of paper for the 135 less expensive versions.34 These investments were on top of the type that had to be produced (for which a new style was especially developed), ink that had to be bought, equipment that had to be built (a second printing shop was set up), and employees who had to be hired and trained.
To fund this undertaking Gutenberg turned to the Mainz businessman Johannes Fust. Fust had already lent him 800 gulden for the original printing shop. For a second 800-gulden loan to finance the Bible, Fust wanted increased security: Gutenberg’s Bible workshop and its equipment. If Gutenberg did not repay the loan, the printing shop would be Fust’s collateral.
In 1455, just as the Bibles approached completion—and the generation of revenue—Fust called his notes. Together with interest they totaled 2,026 gulden. Of course, Gutenberg could not pay; his assets were tied up in the about-to-be-sold books and the innovative technology to which he had devoted more than a decade of his life.
Johannes Fust became the new owner of the world’s largest inventory of Bibles and the revolutionary technology by which they were produced. He and his son-in-law (Gutenberg’s assistant, Peter Schöffer) took over the business.
After such shrewd—some might say dastardly—behavior, Fust perhaps got his due. There is an often repeated (perhaps apocryphal) story about Fust’s efforts to sell his Bibles. The best market for his product was the city with more universities and more students than any other in Europe. Off to Paris went Fust and his ill-won gains. He reportedly sold one vellum copy to the king and another to the archbishop of Paris. Paper editions were sold to the lesser clergy and common folk.
Apparently, however, Fust did not disclose how his Bibles had been created. When the archbishop, proud of his purchase, showed it to the king, they discovered to their amazement that except for the hand-painted illuminations, every page of their two books was identical. The Confrérie des Libraries, Relieurs, Elumineurs, Escrivans et Parcheminiers—the book producers’ guild—was called to give its opinion.
Professional inspection confirmed the books were not the work of scribes. The craftsmen whose skills were threatened by the new technology opined that such perfection could not have been achieved other than by dubious means. The Church declared such perfect copies could only be the work of the Devil.
Johannes Fust was accused of being a heretic. Threatened with being burned at the stake, he fled.35
The Original Information Revolution
The marvel of Johannes Gutenberg’s persistent pursuit of his vision is exceede
d only by its impact. By unlocking the free flow of information, Gutenberg’s breakthrough was the open sesame to discovery, innovation, and the expansion of knowledge that enabled every scientific and technological advance that followed. As ideas flourished, they began to procreate and produce even newer ideas and innovations.
For centuries, the priestly and the powerful had had a Janus-like impact on the flow of information. While the monks and friars in scriptoria reproduced and preserved knowledge, access to such information was largely confined to the libraries of abbeys and castles, there to serve the purposes of its owners. Such a monopoly on information helped the nobility and the priesthood protect their positions, a reality that was challenged by the network of printing press operators that sprang up across Europe.
Because the cost of reproducing information was dramatically lowered, information became more plentiful. By one estimate, a printed book was 300 times less expensive to produce than a scribe’s manuscript.36 As access to ideas became more open, competition among ideas flourished and more minds were stimulated. The newly engaged then challenged one another with debate and dissent, which produced additional volumes. It was a self-perpetuating cycle that continually expanded the breadth of knowledge.
As a result of printing, Western civilization emerged into a golden era of discovery, innovation, and expansion.
Information traveled. Books, pamphlets, and flyers in backpacks and saddlebags spread ideas wherever people wandered. As the information moved about, the books of one printer provisioned the presses of others. When a printer in one town reprinted the books of a printer from afar to supply his unquenchable thirst for new items to sell, the cycle of innovation and new ideas expanded even further.
Knowledge gained permanence. When a single book is hand-copied, its information is fragile and potentially fleeting. The frequency of disasters such as war, disease, and famine both destroyed the hard copy of the knowledge and decimated those generations that might pass on the knowledge. Hundreds or thousands of copies of the same product, dispersed across the landscape, increased the probability the ideas would endure—they became resilient.
Gutenberg’s gift to history is exemplified in the Renaissance.37
When Rome fell in 476, the trade-based economies within its dominion collapsed. Even the great city of Rome itself atrophied. As the commercial activity of cities shrank, so did the literacy and inquiry such activity supported.
It was the monks, friars, and their noble benefactors who preserved knowledge through their scriptoria and libraries. Little wonder, then, that the ideas that were hand-copied into vellum-paged books were ideas that seldom rocked the boat for those who supported the monks’ activities. Printing upset that stability by creating a private economic incentive to seek out new ideas as the basis for the production and sale of new printed products. The pursuit of profit transformed those who reproduced information from gatekeepers that controlled access to it to widespread disseminators of it.
The result was the original information revolution. As a printer’s run of hundreds of copies of the same book increased the odds of survival for that information, it also scattered the thoughts as seeds.
The printing press created a world that encouraged dissemination, discourse, and debate, and became an idea-generating process in and of itself. What we know as the scientific method—the formulation of a hypothesis and its empirical testing—spread to a wider constituency, as printing emerged as an argumentative and discursive platform.
Within half a century of Gutenberg’s breakthrough, printing establishments had been founded in every major European city. Printing spread like a virus, slowly at first and then at an accelerating pace. It was an information explosion. For more than a thousand years, scribes had labored to produce manuscripts; in the first fifty years after the discovery in Mainz, more books were printed than had been produced in a millennium.38 There was an insurgency of ideas as information and the knowledge it created spread across all aspects of life.
The Renaissance, which had its first stirrings in Northern Italy in the mid-fourteenth century, was spread by Gutenberg’s mid-fifteenth-century invention. Lost and decayed Latin manuscripts were rescued and reintroduced. The humanistic teachings of Greece and Rome spurred further intellectual exchange.
Had it not been for the distributive powers of the printing press, however, this intellectual flowering might have remained isolated in Northern Italy, or at least slowed in its progression. As one observer has noted, the Renaissance was “a period of decompartmentalization: a period which broke down the barriers that kept things in order—but also apart—during the Middle Ages.”39 The inexpensive reproduction of information was the departitioning vehicle.
Far from today’s image of the Renaissance as an almost magical time, the period must have been anything but magical for those living through its changes. The discovery and rebirth that gave the period its name were, by their very nature, destabilizing to the patterns of everyday life. Gutenberg may have helped expand inquiry, but that inquiry undermined the stability and security of the status quo for everyone, regardless of their station.
For the first time, mass media appeared. Change—creating new ideas—became the bread and butter of printed media. In their search for new material, printers made the Greek and Roman classics more accessible. When Renaissance scholars explored the wisdom in the classics and propounded their own ideas, they stimulated a noisy, media-driven, humanistic debate about philosophy, science, and art.
As ideas built on ideas, they created further commercial opportunities, which in turn stimulated more debate. Printers in search of new content encouraged new texts containing new ideas that prompted not only a change in thinking about the humanities and science but also a reshaping of commerce.
Double-entry bookkeeping, a technique Venetian merchants and bankers had exploited to great advantage, became known to the rest of the world in 1494 when the Franciscan monk Luca Pacioli included it in his book, Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni, et proportionalita (Everything about Arithmetic, Geometry, and Proportions). By explaining money as a mathematical proposition (assets = liabilities + equity), Pacioli’s book explained to the world how money could be “created” on paper. The results financed exploration, innovation, and expansion.40
The printed word’s stabilizing and distributing effect—improvement by revision—advanced the tools of trade beyond bookkeeping. As ideas and experiences regarding ship construction were exchanged and revised in print, shipbuilders produced larger vessels capable of traveling greater distances. The same process captured and continually updated cartographic knowledge to expand the routes those ships could travel.
The masters of those great ships devoured the new information contained in printed texts. Shortly after he arrived in Spain, Christopher Columbus bought several new volumes on geography. His copy of the first printed edition of The Image of the World included theories about the extent of the oceans. When pressed by the royal court to justify his concepts, Columbus produced this and other printed volumes as corroborating evidence.41
Many of the items we take for granted today originated as products of the printed word. As shipbuilding and navigation improved, for instance, English woolens began to arrive in Italy to undercut the domestic market. Italian businesses, in response, looked to their specialized strengths to develop an alternative market of high-quality goods that continues today.
Consumers accessing the newly available books often discovered they were farsighted and needed glasses. This new demand for optical lenses in turn expanded experimentation in optical physics, which led to the development of the microscope and the discovery of cellular biology.42
Similarly, the kind of statistical analysis that permeates our lives, from television ratings to political polling and insurance premiums, began with the sixteenth-century publication of census information.43 Even Latin, formerly the domain of contracts and of the Church, began its trek toward the mortuary. As printer
s published in the vernacular to attract the widest audience, understanding Latin was no longer the prerequisite to accessing information in texts.44
The printed word also changed the relationship between the governing and the governed. The reality that any person could potentially access scientific fact inexorably led to the idea that people other than the king and his nobles could determine truth.45 And just as scientific debates in print spurred further investigation, publishing also spurred political discourse. But printing added a further component to political life: it made decisions precise, permanent, and pervasive. Laws printed in permanent volumes were distributed among and accessible by the governed, enabling a codified, precedent-based legal system. Even more important, such hard-copy records gave the people the ability to police the laws’ implementation, making the granting of rights virtually irrevocable.46
Down with the New!
Precisely because of the absence of an information tool such as the printing press, there was no universally accessible historical record to offer perspective on the experience of change. A natural result for its opponents, therefore, was to go after the force driving the change. The new technology and the flood of books it produced created for some a problem in need of a solution.
Early in the life of the printing press, the Establishment lauded its benefits. The archbishop of Gutenberg’s hometown proclaimed the printed Bible a “divine art.”47 Not only was the Good Book itself propagated by printing, but the presses also inexpensively churned out an endless supply of money-raising indulgences. The benefits of low-cost common texts also promised a new consistency in Church documents, replacing scribal errors in hand-copied manuscripts and local variations on doctrine with a uniform text.48 Poor and remote parishes would now have the same tools and rules as the great cathedrals.
The destabilizing impact of uncontrolled access to information soon began to challenge both Church and state. Troubled leaders in both institutions sought to protect their prerogatives against the insurgency of information. In 1475, just twenty-five years after Gutenberg’s first commercial product, the pope authorized the University of Cologne, located less than ninety miles from Mainz, to censor both books and their readers. Eleven years later the archbishop of Mainz, who had earlier praised printing, ordered the inspection of all books. Ultimately, he decreed that anyone who published a book without prior approval would be excommunicated. Similar strictures were imposed by other authorities throughout Europe. Finally, in 1515, Pope Leo X forbade the printing of any book without the prepublication consent of Church authorities.49
