Why Does Gutenberg's Invention Encourage Reading and Learning?

Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, and the invention of the mechanical movable type printing printing helped disseminate cognition wider and faster than ever before.

German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is credited with inventing the press press around 1436, although he was far from the get-go to automate the book-printing process. Woodblock printing in China dates back to the 9th century and Korean bookmakers were press with moveable metallic blazon a century before Gutenberg.

But near historians believe Gutenberg's adaptation, which employed a screw-type wine press to clasp down evenly on the inked metal type, was the key to unlocking the modern age. With the newfound ability to inexpensively mass-produce books on every imaginable topic, revolutionary ideas and priceless aboriginal knowledge were placed in the easily 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 Eye Ages and advance man progress.

1. A Global News Network Was Launched

Johannes Gutenberg's first printing press.

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Gutenberg didn't alive to run across the immense impact of his invention. His greatest accomplishment was the offset impress run of the Bible in Latin, which took iii years to print around 200 copies, a miraculously speedy achievement in the day of hand-copied manuscripts.

Simply equally historian Ada Palmer explains, Gutenberg's invention wasn't profitable until at that place was a distribution network for books. Palmer, a professor of early modernistic European history at the University of Chicago, compares early printed books like the Gutenberg Bible to how e-books struggled to find a market place before Amazon introduced the Kindle.

"Congratulations, y'all've printed 200 copies of the Bible; at that place are about three people in your town who can read the Bible in Latin," says Palmer. "What are you lot going to do with the other 197 copies?"

Gutenberg died penniless, his presses impounded past his creditors. Other German printers fled for greener pastures, eventually arriving in Venice, which was the cardinal shipping hub of the Mediterranean in the late 15th century.

"If y'all printed 200 copies of a book in Venice, you could sell five to the captain of each ship leaving port," says Palmer, which created the starting time mass-distribution mechanism for printed books.

The ships left Venice conveying religious texts and literature, merely 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 paw them off to riders who would race them off to dozens of towns.

Since literacy rates were notwithstanding very depression in the 1490s, locals would gather at the pub to hear a paid reader recite the latest news, which was everything from bawdy scandals to war reports.

"This radically inverse the consumption of news," says Palmer. "It made information technology normal to go check the news every mean solar day."

two. The Renaissance Kicked Into High Gear

Sketch of a printing printing taken from a notebook by Leonardo Da Vinci.

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The Italian Renaissance began nearly a century before Gutenberg invented his printing press when 14th-century political leaders in Italian metropolis-states like Rome and Florence fix out to revive the Ancient Roman educational organisation that had produced giants like Caesar, Cicero and Seneca.

One of the chief projects of the early on 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. Italian emissaries spent years in the Ottoman Empire learning enough Ancient Greek and Arabic to translate and re-create rare texts into Latin.

The performance to retrieve classic texts was in action long before the printing press, merely publishing the texts had been arduously slow and prohibitively expensive for anyone other than the richest of the rich. Palmer says that ane hand-copied book in the 14th century cost as much equally a house and libraries price a small fortune. The largest European library in 1300 was the university library of Paris, which had 300 total manuscripts.

By the 1490s, when Venice was the book-printing upper-case letter of Europe, a printed copy of a great work past Cicero simply cost a month's bacon for a school teacher. The printing printing didn't launch the Renaissance, merely it vastly accelerated the rediscovery and sharing of knowledge.

"Suddenly, what had been a project to educate just the few wealthiest elite in this society could now go a projection to put a library in every medium-sized town, and a library in the house of every reasonably wealthy merchant family unit," says Palmer.

Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg castle church.

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There'south a famous quote attributed to High german religious reformer Martin Luther that sums upwardly the role of the printing press in the Protestant Reformation: "Press is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest i."

Luther wasn't the first theologian to question the Church, just he was the first to widely publish his message. Other "heretics" saw their movements quickly quashed past Church authorities and the few copies of their writings easily destroyed. Merely the timing of Luther'southward crusade confronting the selling of indulgences coincided with an explosion of printing presses across Europe.

As the fable goes, Luther nailed his "95 Theses" to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. Palmer says that broadsheet copies of Luther's certificate were beingness printed in London equally quickly as 17 days after.

Thank you to the printing printing and the timely power of his message, Luther became the world'south showtime best-selling author. Luther'due south translation of the New Testament into German sold 5,000 copies in but two weeks. From 1518 to 1525, Luther'southward writings accounted for a 3rd of all books sold in Germany and his German Bible went through more than 430 editions.

four. Printing Powers the Scientific Revolution

Tables from Shine astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus' pioneering text "De revolutionibus orbium caelestium" (On the revolution of heavenly spheres), 1543, which represents his complete work.

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The English philosopher Francis Bacon, who's credited with developing the scientific method, wrote in 1620 that the iii inventions that forever changed the earth were gunpowder, the nautical compass and the press press.

For millennia, scientific discipline was a largely lonely pursuit. Dandy mathematicians and natural philosophers were separated by geography, language and the sloth-like step of manus-written publishing. Not only were handwritten copies of scientific information expensive and hard to come up past, they were likewise decumbent to human mistake.

With the newfound ability to publish and share scientific findings and experimental data with a broad audience, science took smashing leaps forwards in the 16th and 17th centuries. When developing his sunday-centric model of the galaxy in the early 1500s, for case, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus relied not only on his own heavenly observations, but on printed astronomical tables of planetary movements.

When historian Elizabeth Eisenstein wrote her 1980 book near the impact of the printing press, she said that its biggest souvenir to science wasn't necessarily the speed at which ideas could spread with printed books, but the accuracy with which the original data were copied. With printed formulas and mathematical tables in hand, scientists could trust the fidelity of existing information and devote more energy to breaking new basis.

5. Fringe Voices Get a Platform

A printing press being used to make books during the 16th century.

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"Whenever a new information engineering science comes along, and this includes the printing press, among the very first groups to exist 'loud' in information technology are the people who were silenced in the before organization, which means radical voices," says Palmer.

It takes attempt to prefer a new information technology, whether it's the ham radio, an internet bulletin board, or Instagram. The people near willing to have risks and make the endeavor to be early adopters are those who had no vocalisation before that technology existed.

"In the print revolution, that meant radical heresies, radical Christian splinter groups, radical egalitarian groups, critics of the government," says Palmer. "The Protestant Reformation is but one of many symptoms of print enabling these voices to be heard."

As disquisitional and alternative opinions entered the public discourse, those in power tried to conscience information technology. Before the printing printing, censorship was piece of cake. All it required was killing the "heretic" and burning his or her handful of notebooks.

Just after the printing press, Palmer says it became well-nigh impossible to destroy all copies of a unsafe idea. And the more dangerous a book was claimed to be, the more the people wanted to read it. Every time the Church published a listing of banned books, the booksellers knew exactly what they should print next.

6. From Public Opinion to Popular Revolution

"Mutual Sense" by Thomas Paine at the Museum of the American Revolution.

Joy of Museums/Wikimedia Commons/CC Past-SA 4.0

During the Enlightenment era, philosophers like John Locke, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were widely read amongst an increasingly literate populace. Their peak of critical reasoning to a higher place custom and tradition encouraged people to question religious authority and prize personal freedom.

Increasing democratization of noesis in the Enlightenment era led to the evolution of public stance and its power to topple the ruling elite. Writing in pre-Revolution France, Louis-Sebástien Mercier declared:

"A great and momentous revolution in our ideas has taken identify within the last thirty years. Public opinion has now become a preponderant ability in Europe, ane that cannot be resisted… one may promise that aware ideas will bring about the greatest adept on Earth and that tyrants of all kinds will tremble before the universal cry that echoes everywhere, enkindling Europe from its slumbers."

"[Printing] is the near beautiful gift from heaven," continues Mercier. "It soon will modify the countenance of the universe… Press was only built-in a short while ago, and already everything is heading toward perfection… Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world! Tremble before the virtuous writer!"

Even the illiterate couldn't resist the attraction of revolutionary Enlightenment authors, Palmer says. When Thomas Paine published "Common Sense" in 1776, the literacy rate in the American colonies was around fifteen percentage, nonetheless there were more copies printed and sold of the revolutionary tract than the entire population of the colonies.

7. Machines 'Steal Jobs' From Workers

Benjamin Franklin and associates at Franklin's printing press in 1732.

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The Industrial Revolution didn't get into full swing in Europe until the mid-18th century, but y'all can make the statement that the press press introduced the world to the thought of machines "stealing jobs" from workers.

Earlier Gutenberg's paradigm-shifting invention, scribes were in high demand. Bookmakers would apply dozens of trained artisans to painstakingly hand-copy and illuminate manuscripts. Only by the late 15th century, the press press had rendered their unique skillset all but obsolete.

On the flip side, the huge demand for printed material spawned the creation of an entirely new industry of printers, brick-and-mortar booksellers and enterprising street peddlers. Among those who got his starting time as a printer'south amateur was hereafter Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin.

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/printing-press-renaissance

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