Gutenberg's Printing Press One of the most important inventions of the Renaissance was the movable printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1450. Johannes lived in Mainz, Germany. It was responsible for an easier spread of information and knowledge, for an affordable cost. Before the printing press, making books was a laborious process. Books were copied by hand and sometimes took years to finish. They were immensely expensive so only the wealthy and intellectually elite could own them. The printing press required very little labor.
Gutenberg's invention made possible the access of books to the general public. It could print up to 1,000 pages per day versus 40-50 hand-written pages. More books were printed in the vernacular instead of previously preferred Latin tongue. This led to a more educated and current public. It was the first time the Bible was mass produced and available for anyone outside the church. Some of these Bibles are held in modern museums. Only 21 complete Bibles exist today, and one of these would sell for approximately $30 million. Back when it was first printed, it cost approximately 30 florins, roughly equivalent to 3 years of a clerk's wages.Each bible weighed 14 pounds, or about 6 kilograms. The press had moving wooden inter-changeable letter "stamps" (type heads) that allowed paper to be quickly and efficiently pressed with letters. The metal type heads were then affixed to the top of movable, rectangular bars. The bars could then be arranged in order to create words and sentences within a rectangular container, before the screw press then clamped a paper sheet on top of the type heads, pressing their ink onto the sheet. An interesting fact about the process of printing was that the Chinese already had a primitive form of the printing press far before the Renaissance, with evidence of being used in 206-220 BC (Hans Dynasty). They printed on cloth with a technique called "woodblock printing". The idea of paper making also came from China. |