The printing press was invented by

Johannes Gutenberg is usually cited as the inventor of the printing press. Indeed, the German goldsmith's 15th-century contribution to the technology was revolutionary — enabling the mass production of books and the rapid dissemination of knowledge throughout Europe. However, the history of printing begins long before Gutenberg's time.

Nearly 600 years before Gutenberg, Chinese monks were setting ink to paper using a method known as block printing, in which wooden blocks are coated with ink and pressed to sheets of paper. One of the earliest surviving books printed in this fashion — an ancient Buddhist text known as "The Diamond Sutra" — was created in 868 during the Tang (T'ang) Dynasty (618-909) in China. The book, which was sealed inside a cave near the city of Dunhuang, China, for nearly a thousand years before its discovery in 1900, is now housed in the British Library in London.

The carved wooden blocks used for this early method of printing were also used in Japan and Korea as early as the eighth century. Private printers in these places used both wood and metal blocks to produce Buddhist and Taoist treatises and histories in the centuries before movable type was invented.

An important advancement to woodblock printing came in the early eleventh century, when a Chinese peasant named Bi Sheng (Pi Sheng) developed the world's first movable type. Though Sheng himself was a commoner and didn't leave much of a historical trail, his ingenious method of printing, which involved the production of hundreds of individual characters, was well-documented by his contemporary, a scholar and scientist named Shen Kuo.

In his 11th-century work, "Dream Pool Essays," Kuo explains that Sheng's movable characters were made out of baked clay. The ink he used was a mix of pine resin, wax and paper ashes, and as Kuo tells it, Sheng's method could be used to print thousands of copies of a document fairly quickly.

While earthenware movable type was used by several other Chinese printers throughout the 12th and 13th centuries, Sheng's movable type didn't go mainstream in China or elsewhere until many centuries later.

In the 14th century, Wang Chen, a Chinese government official of the Yuan Dynasty, independently created his own set of movable characters out of wood. His motivation for developing this new method of printing was the publication of a voluminous series of books on agriculture, titled "Nung Shu."

"Nung Shu" was eventually printed in 1313 using tried-and-true woodblock methods, not movable type. But Chen's printing method did catch on, albeit slowly, and was used for reproducing documents in the centuries that followed. Metal type — made from bronze and perhaps tin — was also used in China for the printing of books and paper money until at least the 18th century.

Historical evidence suggests that metal movable type was also developed independently in Korea in the late 14th century. In 1377, a Korean monk named Baegun is credited with printing a compilation of Buddhist sayings using movable metal type. The two-volume book, known as "Jikji," is believed to be the oldest book in the world printed with metal type. One volume of the work is held at the National Library of France.

Despite early successes with movable type, this method of printing didn't catch on as quickly in Asia as it did in Europe. This lukewarm reception was most likely due to the complexities of Asian writing systems. Unlike the concise, alphabetic script of many Western languages, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are made up of thousands of characters, which would each have to be cast individually for printing using movable type. Such a daunting task may have made woodblocks seem like a more efficient option for printing in these languages.

Europeans, however, took to movable type quickly. Before the invention of the printing press — sometime between 1440 and 1450 — most European texts were printed using xylography, a form of woodblock printing similar to the Chinese method used to print "The Diamond Sutra" in 868. Manuscripts not printed with woodblocks were painstakingly copied by hand. Both processes were extremely labor intensive and, as a result, books in Europe were very expensive and few could afford to buy them.

But all that changed in the middle of the 15th century, when Johannes Gutenberg established himself as a goldsmith and craftsman in Strasbourg, Germany. In Strasbourg, Gutenberg first began experimenting with both xylography and the development of a more efficient method of printing.

Gutenberg printing press

Like Bi Sheng, Wang Chen and Baegun before him, Gutenberg determined that to speed up the printing process, he would need to break the conventional wooden blocks down into their individual components — lower- and upper-case letters, punctuation marks, etc. He cast these movable blocks of letters and symbols out of various metals, including lead, antimony and tin. He also created his own ink using linseed oil and soot — a development that represented a major improvement over the water-based inks used in China.

But what really set Gutenberg apart from his predecessors in Asia was his development of a press that mechanized the transfer of ink from movable type to paper. Adapting the screw mechanisms found in wine presses, papermakers' presses and linen presses, Gutenberg developed a press perfectly suited for printing. The first printing press allowed for an assembly line-style production process that was much more efficient than pressing paper to ink by hand. For the first time in history, books could be mass-produced — and at a fraction of the cost of conventional printing methods.

((ImgTag|http://www.livescience.com/images/i/000/062/954/i02/movable-type.jpg?1393311417|null|Examples of movable type, which uses separate components for each letter, number and punctuation mark.|

Photo courtesy of The International Print Museum

Most of us tend to take printed materials for granted, but imagine life today if the printing press had never been invented. We would not have books, magazines or newspapers. Posters, flyers, pamphlets and mailers would not exist. The printing press allows us to share large amounts of information quickly and in huge numbers.

In fact, the printing press is so significant that it has come to be known as one of the most important inventions of our time. It drastically changed the way society evolved. In this article, we will explore how the printing press was invented, as well as how it affected culture.

Before the printing press was invented, any writings and drawings had to be completed painstakingly by hand. Several ]]> different materials ]]> were used to transcribe books: clay and papyrus, wax, and parchment. It wasn’t just anyone who was allowed to do this; such work was usually reserved for scribes who lived and worked in monasteries.

The monasteries had a special room called a "scriptorium." There, the scribe would work in silence, first measuring and outlining the page layouts and then carefully copying the text from another book. Later, the illuminator would take over to add designs and embellishments to the pages.

Around the late 1430s, a German man named Johann Gutenberg was quite desperate to find a way to make money. At the time, there was a trend in attaching small mirrors to one’s hat or clothes in order to soak up healing powers when visiting holy places or icons. The mirrors themselves were not significant, but Gutenberg quietly noted how lucrative it was to create mass amounts of a cheap product.

During the 1300s to 1400s, people had developed a very basic form of printing. It involved letters or images cut on blocks of wood. The block would be dipped in ink and then stamped onto paper.

Gutenberg already had previous experience working at a mint, and he realized that if he could use cut blocks within a machine, he could make the printing process a lot faster. Even better, he would be able to reproduce texts in great numbers.

Instead of using wood blocks, Gutenberg used metal instead. This became known as a "movable type machine," since the metal block letters could be moved around to create new words and sentences.

With this machine, Gutenberg made the very first printed book, which was naturally a reproduction of the Bible. Today the Gutenberg Bible is an incredibly valuable, treasured item for its historical legacy.

With the original printing press, a frame is used to set groups of type blocks. Together, these blocks make words and sentences; however, they are all in reverse. The blocks are all inked and then a sheet of paper is laid on the blocks. All of this passes through a roller to ensure that the ink is transferred to the paper. Finally, the paper is lifted, and the reader can see the inked letters that now appear normally as a result of the reversed blocks.

These printing presses were operated by hand. Later, towards the 19th century, other inventors created steam-powered printing presses that did not require a hand operator. In comparison, today’s printing presses are electronic and automated, and can print much faster than ever before!

Today, there are multiple types of printing presses, each best for a specific type of printing. They include:

Letterpress:

Similar in concept to Gutenberg’s press, letterpresses require an operator to set movable type, ink it, and press paper against it. The entire process is done by hand. The letterpress is often used by small, boutique printers, and offers a beautiful handmade look. However, it’s also inefficient and expensive compared to other printing presses.

The offset press revolutionized the printing industry, making it possible to print enormous quantities efficiently and cost-effectively. In a nutshell, modern offset printing involves using a computer to create a plate, which is then placed on a cylinder. Ink is applied to the plate cylinder, which rolls against a rubber cylinder, which in turn rolls the ink onto sheets of paper fed through the press. Offset presses are used to mass produce newspapers, magazines, books, and other printed materials.

One of the few drawbacks to offset printing is that it’s not economical in low volumes, primarily because plates can cost several hundred dollars to produce. That’s insignificant when printing hundreds or thousands of the same item, but it can be costly when printing a few dozen or even a single copy. Digital presses make low-volume printing affordable, and have similarly revolutionized the printing industry, because they do not require plates. Instead, they use advanced inkjet or laser jet technology to transfer ink to paper.

Though these are the most popular types of printing presses, other types exist for specialized purposes. For example, engravers are often used to create the raised logos often seen on letterhead.

Gutenberg’s invention made a dramatic impact when it reached the public. At first, the noble classes looked down on it. To them, hand-inked books were a sign of luxury and grandeur, and it was no match for the cheaper, mass-produced books.

Thus, press-printed materials were at first more popular with the lower classes. When word spread about the printing press, other print shops opened and soon it developed into an entirely new trade. Printed texts became a new way to spread information to vast audiences quickly and cheaply. Academics benefited from this dissemination of scholarly ideas and even politicians found that they could garner the public’s interest through printed pamphlets.

An important side effect was that people could read and increase their knowledge more easily now, whereas in the past it was common for people to be quite uneducated. This increased the discussion and development of new ideas.

Another significant effect was that the printing press was largely responsible for Latin’s decline as other regional languages became the norm in locally printed materials. The printing press also helped standardize language, grammar, and spelling.

The printing press played a major role in shaping the Renaissance, which has ]]> interesting correlations ]]> to today’s Information Age.

Modern print technology has made printing more affordable and accessible than ever, whether you’re printing thousands of booklets or a single short run poster. The industry has even embraced the Digital Age, which has given rise to online printing companies that make it easy for anyone to design, print, and mail printed materials without leaving their computers.