In addition, Korean writing, then based closely on Chinese, used a large number of different characters, which made creating the metal pieces and assembling them into pages a slow process. Most importantly, Goryeo rulers intended most of its printing projects for the use of the nobility alone.
Nonetheless, it is possible that printing technology spread from East to West. Kublai Khan had access to Korean and Chinese printing technology, and he may have shared this knowledge with another grandson of Genghis Khan, Hulegu, who was then ruling the Persian part of the Mongol empire.
This could have moved printing technologies from East Asia westward by thousands of miles. In the middle of that route lay the homeland of the Uyghur people, a Turkic ethnic group that had been recruited into the Mongol army long before. This is because, in the 13th century, Uyghurs were considered distinguished, learned people—the sort for whom printing might be a welcome innovation.
They had also something no one else in printing had had up till then: an alphabet, a simple group of relatively few letters for writing every word one wished to say. There was no explosion of printing in the Western Mongol empire. Nonetheless, movable-type Uyghur-language prints have been discovered in the area, indicating the technology was used there.
Furthermore, the Mongols may have carried the technology not only through Uyghur and Persian territory, but into Europe, including Germany. The Mongol empire repeatedly invaded Europe from roughly to AD; that period saw the entry of enough Western Asian recruits and captives to bring the loanword horde from their Turkic languages into European ones.
That business took decades of his life to bring to fruition, forced him into bankruptcy, and led to court filings by investors who repeatedly sued him to get their money back.
The stories we tell about the man, and how the Bibles came to be, have been cobbled together from a fistful of legal and financial records, and centuries of dogged scholarly fill-in-the-blank. Indeed, the entire history of the printing press is riddled with gaps.
Gutenberg did not tell his own story in documents created on the printing presses he built; to the best of modern knowledge, he did not leave any notes on his work at all.
Because these processes were so labor-intensive, books were very expensive, and only the rich could afford them. He was trained as a goldsmith, gem cutter, and metallurgist. For some time he lived in Strasbourg, most likely in the late s to early s. By then, he had been losing money in his business and began looking for a way to make money to pay off his debts. He started working on a device that would make it possible to print texts using movable blocks of letters and graphics.
These blocks, used with paper, ink, and a press, would make it possible to print books much faster and more cheaply than ever before. He used metals that he was familiar with — lead, antimony, and tin — to cast blocks of letters and symbols, and he created a linseed- and soot-based ink of the consistency he believed to be ideal for printing on handmade paper.
He adapted a wine press that allowed him to slide paper in and out of it and to squeeze water from the paper after printing. Wang Chen devised a process to make the wood more durable and precise. He then created a revolving table for typesetters to organize with more efficiency, which led to greater speed in printing. It was exported to Europe and, coincidentally, documented many Chinese inventions that have been traditionally attributed to Europeans. Goldsmith and inventor Johannes Gutenberg was a political exile from Mainz, Germany when he began experimenting with printing in Strasbourg, France in He returned to Mainz several years later and by , had a printing machine perfected and ready to use commercially: The Gutenberg press.
In order to make the type available in large quantities and to different stages of printing, Gutenberg applied the concept of replica casting, which saw letters created in reverse in brass and then replicas made from these molds by pouring molten lead.
Researchers have speculated that Gutenberg actually used a sand-casting system that uses carved sand to create the metal molds. The letters were fashioned to fit together uniformly to create level lines of letters and consistent columns on flat media. Gutenberg was also able to perfect a method for flattening printing paper for use by using a winepress, traditionally used to press grapes for wine and olives for oil, retrofitted into his printing press design.
Gutenberg borrowed money from Johannes Fust to fund his project and in , Fust joined Gutenberg as a partner to create books. They set about printing calendars, pamphlets and other ephemera. In , Gutenberg produced the one book to come out of his shop: a Bible. Each page of the Bible contained 42 lines of text in Gothic type, with double columns and featuring some letters in color.
For the Bible, Gutenberg used separate molded letter blocks and 50, sheets of paper. Many fragments of the books survive. There are 21 complete copies of the Gutenberg Bible, and four complete copies of the vellum version. In , Fust foreclosed on Gutenberg.
Gutenberg is believed to have continued printing, probably producing an edition of the Catholicon , a Latin dictionary, in But Gutenberg ceased any efforts at printing after , possibly due to impaired vision.
He died in In , while still living in Strasbourg, Gutenberg is believed to have revealed his printing press secret in a book oddly titled "Aventur und Kunst"—Enterprise and Art. It is not known whether he had actually attempted or succeeded in printing from movable type at the time. By , Gutenberg had moved back to Mainz, where with the help of a loan from his brother-in-law Arnold Gelthus, he began assembling a working printing press.
To get his new printing business off the ground, Gutenberg borrowed guilders from a wealthy moneylender named Johann Fust. By , Gutenberg entered into a business partnership with Fust in order to continue funding his printing experiments. Gutenberg continued to refine his printing process and by had printed several copies of the Bible. Consisting of three volumes of text in Latin, the Gutenberg Bible featured 42 lines of type per page with color illustrations.
This ease of readability proved especially popular among the church clergy. Unfortunately, Gutenberg didn't get to enjoy his innovation for long. In , his financial backer and partner Johann Fust accused Gutenberg of misusing the money he had loaned him in and demanded repayment.
When Gutenberg refused or was unable to repay the loan, Fust sued him in the archbishop's court. When the court ruled against Gutenberg, Fust was allowed to seize the printing press as collateral.
Fust continued printing the Gutenberg line Bibles, eventually publishing about copies, of which only 22 exist today. Virtually bankrupt, Gutenberg is believed to have started a smaller printing shop in the town of Bamberg around The oldest surviving manuscript from the early Gutenberg press is that of a fragment of the poem "The Sibyl's Prophecy," which was made using Gutenberg's earliest typeface between — The page, which includes a planetary table for astrologers, was found in the late 19th century and donated to the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz in While printers had been using movable type made of ceramic or wood blocks for centuries, Gutenberg is generally credited with the invention of practical movable metal type printing.
Instead of individually hand-carved blocks of wood, Gutenberg made metal molds of each letter or symbol into which he could pour molten metal, such as copper or lead. Great quantities of each molded metal letter could be produced far more quickly than carved wood letters.
The printer could thus arrange and rearrange the individual metal letter slugs as often as needed to print several different pages using the same letters. For most books, setting up individual pages for printing with movable metal type proved far faster and economical than woodblock printing. The high quality and relative affordability of the Gutenberg Bible introduced movable metal type to Europe and established it as the preferred method of printing.
Although historians can't pinpoint when the first book was created, the oldest known book in existence was printed in China in CE.
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