From Gutenberg to Google

by Tom Wheeler

  It was the vicar of Croydon who most truthfully encapsulated the Establishment’s concern with his warning: “We must root out printing or printing will root out us.”50

  But the rooting had already begun. The raucous reproduction of ideas continued unabated. The rules about prepublication clearance did nothing to stop the dissemination of Luther’s writings. While the number of banned books continued to grow, and the secular state soon joined the Church in policing publications, the bureaucracies of the enforcers were no match for the printers’ economic imperative. The cavalcade of printed ideas continued.

  Concern about the impact of printing did not recede with time. Almost a hundred years after Gutenberg’s breakthrough, the Swiss scholar Conrad Gesner set out to catalog all the books that had been published. Amazingly, in his preface to Bibliotheca universalis (1545), Gesner warned that something had to be done about the “confusing and harmful abundance of books.”51

  After another hundred years, concern about the effect of unfettered information still had not abated. As the French scholar Adrien Baillet warned in 1685, “We have reason to fear that the magnitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.”52

  The printing revolution demonstrated a reality that persists today: a new network technology produces upheaval long before it produces stability.

  The effect of the new technology on jobs also set a pattern that would echo in subsequent network revolutions.

  The employment in question this time was that of the monastic scribes. The abbot of Sponheim, Johannes Trithemius, came to the tradition’s defense in De laude scriptorum (“In Praise of Scribes”) in 1492. Trithemius contrasted the virtuous culture of scribes with the soulless printing technology. “In no other business of the active life does the monk come closer to perfection than when caritas drives him to keep watch in the night copying the divine scriptures.”53 Brother Trithemius also warned about the practical aspects of printing. Text printed on paper could survive, he calculated, for 200 years, while a monk’s script on vellum would last at least a thousand years. He also argued that the scribes were more conscientious about spelling and textual correctness, thus making their product more reliable than the work of printers.

  Trithemius’s “In Praise of Scribes” was a tour-de-force defense of his monks and the practices displaced by the printing press. He was apparently so proud of his work that to ensure its widest circulation, Brother Trithemius had his paean to scribes set in type and printed!

  Creating Today

  If, observing the entire course of human history, one were to draw a line between “then” and “now,” the line would pass through the printing shop of Johannes Gutenberg.

  Of course, there were earlier networks. The Phoenicians’ development of a written alphabet meant information could be both stored and moved. The Egyptians created a rudimentary postal system. The networks of roads the Romans built to connect the empire remain important pathways today. The activities of Western scriptoria painstakingly reproduced and preserved knowledge, while Eastern cultures aggressively explored its production at scale.

  But the Mainz printing shop is a fulcrum of history.

  What made Gutenberg’s innovation so decisive were its multiple consequences. The original information network was the seed that permitted new ideas to germinate. Breaking information into its smallest unit structured the relationship between information and technology for subsequent centuries. And its redirection of information from sheltered silos to an outward surge recast the nature of inquiry, economics, and social structures.

  Gutenberg himself was an example of how fifteenth-century society and economic activity were starting to flatten. The new middle class into which he had been born was squeezing into the social and economic space between the nobles and their serfs. Gutenberg’s discovery continued that pattern with a similar flattening of the information hierarchy.

  Modern economists describe this as a period of “interim technologies” that contributed to the explosion in the number of middle-class workshops.54 Gutenberg’s mechanization of the output of scribes was arguably the first such mechanical transformation of a handicraft.55 Printing was also a precursor to the capital-intensive production models that followed, in which development, component inventory, and mechanical fabrication devoured capital before producing any return. “Making Bibles in Mainz did not differ fundamentally from making Fords in Detroit,” it has been observed.56

  But Gutenberg’s press was not just turning out fenders; it was the platform on which discovery and innovation rested. It was a networked technology that begat a cumulative process of innovation that redirected the course of human events. For this reason, the narrative of how networks define who we are begins its modern journey with the network created by the movable-type printing press.

  The vision of decomposing information to create it anew would become the foundation for subsequent information revolutions. We will see Gutenberg’s disaggregation-reassembly idea reappear as the underpinning of the telegraph, then of the digital computer, then of the internet.

  The Mainz workshop was also the beginning of a directional trend in the flow and use of information. Printing began a new pattern for the organization of information on a dispersed basis. Although rudimentary, the propagation and portability of printed information began the trajectory that manifests today in diverse information repositories connected by a pervasive network.

  Gutenberg’s discovery also demonstrates how connectivity alters the structures of authority. As the merchant printers’ distributed authority began to destroy controlled-access information silos, the disaggregation of centralized authority over ideas and institutions followed.

  Gutenberg humbles our self-centered assumption that today’s information age is some kind of unique experience. In relative terms, Gutenberg’s discovery occurred not that long ago. In the early part of the twenty-first century, we are closer to Gutenberg’s success than the Mainz discovery was to the fifth-century beginning of the Middle Ages. Because of what the Gutenberg network launched, however, far greater revolutions have occurred in the past 550 years than in the preceding millennium. Gutenberg’s final legacy was the acceleration of the flow of information, and thus the acceleration of change. The networks that followed the original information network further increased the velocity of information and thus the velocity of change.

  Connections

  Alfred Vail, the often overlooked assistant of Samuel F. B. Morse, stood before a printer’s type box late in 1838 and linked Johannes Gutenberg to the world of electronic networks. Vail was in the printing shop to follow through on a Gutenberg-like inspiration about the most efficient means to transmit information electronically. While there is some historical debate as to whether Morse code was conceptualized by its namesake or actually by Vail, its core insight is indisputably Gutenberg’s: information must be broken into its smallest part before it can successfully interface with technology.57

  Later in this book we will explore the invention of the telegraph. That development would not have been one of the great transformational networks without its adoption of Gutenberg’s insight. Early efforts with telegraphy had taken an approach similar to the early efforts at printing. Just as wooden plates were cut to contain all the information on a page, Samuel Morse’s early concept of the telegraph was too broad to be practical. The original Morse design was an apparatus with a pencil attached to an electromagnet. As a paper tape moved under it, the pencil would make marks that spelled out numbers. Those numbers would then be referenced to a codebook in which each number corresponded to a specific word.

  “I am up early & late, yet its progress is slow,” Morse wrote about the “most tedious, never ending work” of compiling a dictionary that assigned a unique number to every word. In essence, Morse’s early effort was to de-invent the alphabet and replace the words
it spelled with unique numbers. The number 36, for instance, represented the word “abash,” 37 its past tense “abashed,” 38 “abashing,” 39 “abate,” and so on through the alphabet. The word “Wednesday,” for instance, was coded as 4030.58

  As in pre-Gutenberg printing, Morse was more focused on the final result—in his case, a message sent over distance—than on the productivity of the process to achieve that result. It was the same conceptual mistake made in early attempts at printing, which visualized information as a whole rather than as the sum of its parts.

  The insight that the telegraph should transmit the components of a word rather than the word itself was a Gutenberg-like moment. That insight transformed the telegraph from a cumbersome curiosity to a highly productive information technology. It was for the purpose of designing this code that Alfred Vail visited a local printing shop and counted the number of pieces of type in the type box for each individual letter. The simplest signal (a single dot) was assigned to the most frequently used letter (e), with increasingly complex combinations attributable to other letters based on the volume of each letter in the printer’s type box.

  The exceedingly simple but powerful concept of breaking information into its smallest part so that it can be subsequently manipulated is the root concept in information technology. The introduction of that concept into Western civilization is the legacy of Johannes Gutenberg.

  Gutenberg’s breakthrough continues its connections through today’s digital networks. The digital computing engine disassembles information into the smallest possible unit, the numbers zero and one. The fishnet-like digital network that is the internet does a Gutenberg-like disassembly of information into small packets and subsequently reassembles them at their destination, just as Gutenberg put disassembled pieces of type together to produce a new page.

  The decade-long quest of Johannes Gutenberg that reached its conclusion in 1450 is the foundational discovery on which our knowledge and inspiration stand today. We connect with the man from Mainz because he made human inquiry a networked activity. One result of that networked activity, the scientific method of hypothesis and debate, touched off an explosion of discovery that has continued unabated. The form of that activity, breaking information into its component parts, thrives today as the interface between information and technology.

  Gutenberg’s discovery not only brought us to today, it is also at the heart of what drives us forward to tomorrow.

  Three

  The First High-Speed Network and the Death of Distance

  The congressman arose in the hush of early morning darkness. Turning up the lamp, he gathered his effects. Abraham Lincoln had a 6:00 a.m. train to catch. He was heading home to Springfield, Illinois. The second session of the Thirteenth Congress had adjourned.

  The trip Representative Lincoln was beginning was one to be endured rather than enjoyed. It would consume eleven days and three different modes of transportation. The journey was a powerful manifestation of how the forces of geography ruled the still young nation.

  Early that morning, March 20, 1849, Lincoln boarded the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad for a daylong 178-mile ride to the end of the line at Cumberland, Maryland. There he transferred to a nine-passenger stagecoach for a rib-busting twenty-hour transit over the Appalachian Mountains to Wheeling on the Ohio River. Three days on a riverboat moved him 1,100 miles down the Ohio and then up the Mississippi River to St. Louis, where he alighted March 26. From there it was five more days aboard another bouncing stagecoach before he finally arrived home.1 The completion of such an arduous trip was newsworthy. “Honorable A. Lincoln arrived in this city on Saturday evening,” the Illinois Journal reported.2

  In the mid-nineteenth century, the nation was a united group of states in name only. Geographic distance and natural encumbrances broke the country into semiautonomous isolated regions. Commerce and communication were an exercise in overcoming the impediments imposed by nature.

  Yet the nation’s future lay in the vastness of the land beyond the Eastern Seaboard. Some called it “Manifest Destiny.” Whether those distributed parts of the nation could ever be linked would define that destiny.

  Twelve years after the arduous trip home, the president-elect of the United States proceeded in the opposite direction. Starting on February 11, 1861, Abraham Lincoln’s trip from Springfield to Washington was a triumphal tour of eleven of the nation’s major cities. The entire 1,900-mile journey was completed by rail, much, if not most, of it over rails that had not existed at the time of his earlier journey. Had Lincoln chosen to go directly to the capital, the route that took him eleven days and cost much discomfort only a dozen years earlier could have been made entirely by rail in only two days.

  With amazing speed, the railroad had begun to connect the nation. At the time of Lincoln’s earlier trip there were approximately 8,000 miles of track in the United States; in February 1861 more than 30,000 miles of steel ribbon crisscrossed the nation.3 By abolishing the absolute control of geography and the dictates of distance, those ever-extending steel ribbons created the interconnected reality we today take for granted.

  As he gazed out the train car window on his journey back to the nation’s capital, the stark contrast between his trips could not have been lost on Lincoln. The old world of isolated geographic sections of the country, each with its own customs, mores, and “peculiar institutions,” was becoming interconnected. The question of whether the union would survive the changes that resulted from such interconnection would define the coming trials of the sixteenth president of the United States.

  The Death of Distance

  At the dawn of the American experiment, geography ruled the new nation. Statesmen of the day pondered whether the geographically vast but poorly interconnected nation could be held together.

  The founding fathers’ republican concept had never been attempted outside compact geographic areas such as Greek city-states or Swiss cantons. The question of whether a democratic republic could be held together in a large and poorly interconnected geography weighed heavily. When the First United States Congress convened in New York City in 1789, this fear was visibly clear. The time required to travel to the meeting from the thirteen states meant that it took weeks before there was a quorum to conduct business. From the relatively close city of Boston, for instance, a stagecoach traveling eighteen hours a day still took six days to reach New York.4

  Two-thirds of the country’s population was hemmed in by the Appalachian Mountains along little more than a fifty-mile-wide strip hugging the Atlantic Ocean. Coastal shipping moved passengers and freight up and down the Atlantic Seaboard. Inland, the waterways were the highways of commerce, but because they typically flowed north to south, these paths were not that helpful in efficiently uniting the nation’s westward expansion from the eastern coast.

  In 1810 the mayor of New York City, DeWitt Clinton, soon to be the governor of the state, proposed that man should do what nature had not: construct an east-west waterway. Clinton’s state had two major advantages that made this possible. First, the river that Henry Hudson had thought might be the Northwest Passage and that bears his name stretched from the Port of New York 315 miles inland to Albany, providing the foundation for the westward push. Even more important, however, was that at Albany, the Mohawk Valley provided one of the only breaks in the 2,500-mile Appalachian chain. Through that gap Clinton proposed digging a canal to link Albany with Buffalo on Lake Erie and from there to the nation’s interior via the Great Lakes.

  The 364-mile Erie Canal took eight years and $8 million to build before it began operation in 1825. A human-engineered surrogate for nature’s pathways, the canal was the greatest engineering project the continent had ever seen. Using picks and shovels, gangs of men dug a forty-foot-wide, four-foot-deep ditch through the wilderness. Eighty-three locks were constructed to handle the gradient of the land.

  The resulting pathway reduced the cost of transporting bulk cargo from 20–30 cents per ton-mile to 2–3 cents. It cut
the Buffalo–New York trip from a month of hard travel over bad roads to only ten days.5 The result supercharged the Port of New York, making it the nation’s most active and building the city into the country’s largest.

  It is not hard to imagine the reaction of the residents of the other Atlantic coast ports as they watched New York’s canal-driven success. Prior to the canal, Philadelphia had been a busier port and thus a bigger city. Likewise, the competitive port cities of Baltimore, Boston, and Charleston all feared the impact of the New York canal and sought solutions to their geographically impaired access to the West.

  The obvious answer was to copy New York’s ditch. The problem for the other cities, however, was the absence of a similar low-level passage through the mountains. The Pennsylvania legislature, in an effort to return the Port of Philadelphia to supremacy, funded the Main Line of Public Works, almost 350 miles of canals and inclines. When the Main Line confronted an obstacle, the goods were off-loaded onto inclined planes, dragged over the obstruction, and reloaded onto another barge on the other side. The enormous cost to build and operate such a process, however, assured it would neither be profitable nor successfully replace New York’s canal.6

  In the same year that Governor Clinton’s canal was completed, however, the first scheduled steam railroad began operation in England. It didn’t take long for the technology to leap the Atlantic.