Which revolutionized the spread of information in europe

With the newfound ability to inexpensively mass-produce books on every imaginable topic, revolutionary ideas and priceless ancient knowledge were placed in the hands of every literate European, whose numbers doubled every century. Here are just some of the ways the printing press helped pull Europe out of the Middle Ages and accelerate human progress.

His greatest accomplishment was the first print run of the Bible in Latin, which took three years to print around copies, a miraculously speedy achievement in the day of hand-copied manuscripts. Palmer, a professor of early modern European history at the University of Chicago, compares early printed books like the Gutenberg Bible to how e-books struggled to find a market before Amazon introduced the Kindle.

Gutenberg died penniless, his presses impounded by his creditors. Other German printers fled for greener pastures, eventually arriving in Venice, which was the central shipping hub of the Mediterranean in the late 15th century. The ships left Venice carrying religious texts and literature, but also breaking news from across the known world. Printers in Venice sold four-page news pamphlets to sailors, and when their ships arrived in distant ports, local printers would copy the pamphlets and hand them off to riders who would race them off to dozens of towns.

Since literacy rates were still very low in the s, locals would gather at the pub to hear a paid reader recite the latest news, which was everything from bawdy scandals to war reports.

Sketch of a printing press taken from a notebook by Leonardo Da Vinci. The Italian Renaissance began nearly a century before Gutenberg invented his printing press when 14th-century political leaders in Italian city-states like Rome and Florence set out to revive the Ancient Roman educational system that had produced giants like Caesar, Cicero and Seneca. One of the chief projects of the early Renaissance was to find long-lost works by figures like Plato and Aristotle and republish them. Wealthy patrons funded expensive expeditions across the Alps in search of isolated monasteries.

Outbreaks of the plague, however, were still occurring. A new outbreak interrupted the pilgrimages, and the mirror business failed. Apparently, Gutenberg had spent most of his years in Strasburg experimenting with a method of using movable type to print books. With no knowledge of printing from China and no one else in Europe to help him, Gutenberg worked alone to invent a unique movable-type printing process.

This mold enabled him to mass-produce identical types for each letter of the Latin alphabet plus punctuation marks and symbols. He could reuse the types numerous times for different jobs. Gutenberg also experimented with ink and paper. He needed ink that dried quickly and did not smear. After trying numerous ingredients, he found the perfect ink by combining linseed oil and lampblack. He also discovered that paper had to be a certain thickness and slightly dampened for the ink to stick properly.

Finally, be built a press that applied the exact pressure needed to print words clearly from the types onto paper. By , Gutenberg was back in Mainz. He borrowed money again to set up a printing workshop. In , he printed his first book, a brief Latin grammar for students. In exchange, the church forgave their sins, assuring admission into Heaven. Gutenberg, however, had a much bigger project in mind. Gutenberg could supply many identical copies of these Bibles by printing them. But he needed more money to set up a second print shop.

Already in debt to a Mainz businessman, Johann Fust, Gutenberg turned to him again for another loan. This time, however, Fust demanded that Gutenberg make him a partner and promise to repay all he owed in five years.

Gutenberg hired craftsmen to make the Latin letter types, construct six presses, and manufacture the ink. He also purchased paper for printing most of the Bibles and vellum for a small, more expensive edition.

He passed on the secrets of his invention to his master printer, Peter Schoffer. Gutenberg took at least five years to manufacture the types and equipment and print nearly Bibles. He grew obsessed with printing Bibles that would equal or exceed in accuracy and beauty those copied by scribes. The Gutenberg Bible consists of two columns of print on more than 1, pages. Unlike copies made by scribes, both columns are justified, aligned in a straight edge at the left and right margins, like the column of print you are reading right now.

Gutenberg printed one page of the Bible before going on to the next. After page 10, he shifted from 40 to 42 lines of print per page. He was experimenting for ease of reading.

Gutenberg printed most of the letters in black ink but some in red, which required pressing a page two times. After the pages were printed, artists decorated large-sized letters and added colorful designs on the borders of certain pages.

Skilled workers then sewed the pages of each Bible together into two volumes with covers. The Gutenberg Bible was a work of art and a wonder of technology. Up to 75 complete and partial copies still exist today, mainly in libraries and museums. You can view paper and vellum copies at the British Library web site. When Gutenberg was completing the Bibles in , Fust, his partner and creditor, demanded full payment of his loans. Gutenberg had all his money tied up in printing the Bibles and could not repay Fust right away.

Fust sued. Winning the lawsuit, Fust took possession of the second print shop and finished printing the Bibles, which he sold.

Gutenberg borrowed more money and continued printing. Around , he printed a Bible with 36 lines per page. But he never got out of debt, never married, and was never acclaimed for his astounding invention during his lifetime. He died a poor and forgotten man in Mainz in Fust and Schoffer tried to hide the secret of movable-type printing. But the workers Gutenberg had trained spread knowledge of his invention throughout Europe.

Schoffer died rich and famous 37 years later. Joost Depuydt: Gutenberg was looking for a way to produce multiple copies of the same text in a much faster way than scribes could copy texts in the manuscript period. And in this he had a hidden advantage, the nature of the Latin alphabet. Brody Neuenschwander: The letters of the Latin alphabet are really very simple shapes, and when you write them in the way they would have been written at the time printing was invented, all the letters are very clearly separate.

Search for:. The Printing Revolution Learning Objective Synthesize the impacts of the printing press on distribution of ideas and mass communication.

Key Points In Johannes Gutenberg began work on the invention of a new printing press that allowed precise molding of new type blocks from a uniform template and allowed for the creation of high-quality printed books. Gutenberg is also credited with the introduction of an oil-based ink that was more durable than the previously used water-based inks. He tested colored inks in his Gutenberg Bible. The printing press was a factor in the establishment of a community of scientists who could easily communicate their discoveries through widely disseminated scholarly journals, helping to bring on the scientific revolution.

Because the printing process ensured that the same information fell on the same pages, page numbering, tables of contents, and indices became common.