Bill Nye - Printing Press

Before written language was invented, stories in history were passed down orally. One generation told the next who then told the next. Spoken language is less precise than written accounts, but writing long documents by hand was painstaking and took time. Lots of time. That's why this next invention changed everything. Newspapers magazines maps, books, and other printed materials can be found just about anywhere. But this wasn't always the case. Books used to be rare because they were expensive to duplicate. And the materials needed to make them were in short supply. The invention of the printing press made the mass production of books and newspapers possible. The earliest known printed book dates back to AD 8 68. Found in a cave in China, the diamond sutra was made of individual pieces of paper glued together to make a scroll more than 15 feet long. It was produced using block printing, the first known method of printing. Block printing required a woodcut or an image carved in reverse into a block of wood. To print the image, a printer applied into the woodcut, put a piece of paper on top of the block and applied even pressure with a brush. This created a printed image, although time consuming and labor intensive, this process allowed the Chinese to reproduce multiple printed copies of the same document. In a sense, the Chinese created a rudimentary coffee machine. Sometime between AD ten 41 and ten 48, pi Shang invented a printing process that would later become known as movable type. Instead of a single large block, movable type used smaller cutouts for each individual character. These reusable cutouts were moved around to create unique pages of text. This meant that whole blocks did not have to be carved for each new document. In Europe, educated men called scribes, tediously copied books by hand. A large number of scribes toiled in monasteries, copying thousands of documents for the Catholic Church. It reportedly took an entire year for one scribe to transcribe one copy of the Bible. All that changed in 1436, when Johann Gutenberg, a German craftsman, introduced movable type to Europe. His printing press changed the world. Gutenberg developed metal movable type. The advantage was that after the initial carving of a mold, many identical type pieces could be cast quickly. Gutenberg began the laborious process of printing the Bible in 1450. Each page required about 300 different pieces of type. Three years later, Gutenberg had printed about 180 copies of his Bible. That's not a large number by today's standards, but it was a breakthrough in the mass production of books. Gutenberg's innovation referred to as the art of multiplying books spread quickly throughout Germany in the rest of Europe. The Gutenberg press was so efficient and effective that it remained virtually unchanged for about 300 years until the dawn of the industrial revolution. Today, some high-speed laser printers output 45 pages per minute. This type of printer could duplicate Gutenberg's 1286 page Bible in less than 30 minutes. Within 50 years of Gutenberg's invention, thousands of inexpensive books were in print. Access to books increased literacy throughout Europe. The widespread availability of printed materials allowed people to share knowledge more readily, leading Europe into a period of scientific, religious, political, and artistic enlightenment. Centuries later, the learning and sharing of ideas continues. Thanks in large part to Johann Gutenberg.