gutenberg and the printing press

THE Printing Press

THE MOST IMPORTANT INVENTION IN HISTORY

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THINK JUST FOR FIVE SECONDS IN THIS PRODUCTS

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NONE OF THE PRINTED ITEMS WE ENJOY TODAY

WOULD BE AROUND WITHOUT ONE MAN.

Johann Gutenberg

The inventor of the Printing Press

in 1450

He was a GOLDSMITHING

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Before the printing press in 1450, books were written out by hand, mainly by monks in monasteries.

It could take one person six months or longer to write out a book, word for

word and page by page.

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Books were expensive to produce. If a book was to survive, it had to be copied over and over, every generation.

This is a page

from

“CANTERBURY

TALES” by

Geoffrey Chaucer.

It was handwritten

about 1400.

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This printing press had pieces of metal type that could be used over and over again to print pages of text.

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Johann Gutenberg mixed oil and soap together to make ink. In 1456, he made 180 copies of the first printed book: a Bible.

Only 49 copies of these Bibles survive today. The last time a Gutenberg Bible sold, it went for $2.4 million.

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Before the Printing Press, woodblock printing was common. A

sheet of paper was laid over an inked piece of wood and an

impression was taken by rubbing.

Gutenberg broke up the text into lower and upper case letters and

punctuation marks.

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IMAGINE WHAT THIS KNOWLEDGE MEANT TO THE COMMON PEOPLE. INSTEAD OF

HAVING TO TAKE THE CHURCH’S OR THE KING’S WORD ON SOMETHING, THEY

COULD LEARN TO READ AND FORM THEIR OWN OPINION.

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RENAISSANCE ALL OVER EUROPE.

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The importance of Gutenberg’s invention caused him to be

named the most influential person in the past 1,000 years

by the Biography Channel.

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