PRINTING PRESS
A printing press is a device for evenly printing ink onto a print medium (substrate) such as paper or cloth. The device applies pressure to a print medium that rests on an inked surface made of movable type, thereby transferring the ink. Typically used for texts, the invention and spread of the printing press are widely regarded as among the most influential events in human history, revolutionizing the way people conceive and describe the world they live in, and ushering in the period of modernity.
The world's first movable type printing was invented and developed in China by theHan Chinese printer Bi Sheng between the years 1041 and 1048. His contemporaryShen Kuo wrote extensively about the movable type printing technology developed by Bi Sheng in his scientific book, the Dream Pool Essays, which was published in 1088. This technology was transmitted to Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty, where the Korean inventors subsequently made many new technological improvements and innovations upon the original technology and in 1234 created the world's first metalmovable-type printing technology for printing paper books 216 years before Gutenberg's printing press. This led to the printing of a Korean book, using the ancient Chinese writing system, known in Korean as the Jikji in 1377; it is the oldest extant movable metal printed book. This form of metal movable type technology has been described by the French scholar Henri-Jean Martin as similar to Gutenberg's.
The mechanical movable type printing press was developed in Europe by roughly 1450 and is credited to the German printer Johannes Gutenberg. The exact date of Gutenberg's press is debated based on existing screw presses that were an essential component of the printing press device. Gutenberg, a goldsmith by profession, developed a printing system by both adapting existing technologies and making inventions of his own. His newly devisedhand mould made possible the rapid creation of metal movable type in large quantities. The printing press displaced earlier methods of printing and led to the first assembly line-style mass production of books. A single Renaissance printing press could produce 3,600 pages per workday, compared to about 2,000 by typographic block-printing prevalent in East Asia, and a few by hand-copying. Books of bestselling authors such as Luther andErasmus were sold by the hundreds of thousands in their lifetime.
Printing soon spread from Mainz, Germany to over two hundred cities in a dozen European countries. However the first book printed in English was not published until 1475, some 20 years later. By 1500, printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million volumes. In the 16th century, with presses spreading further afield, their output rose tenfold to an estimated 150 to 200 million copies. The operation of a press became so synonymous with the enterprise of printing that, by metonymy, it lent its name to a new branch of media, the press. The importance of printing as an emblem of modern achievement and of the ability of so-called Moderns to rival the Ancients, in whose teachings much of Renaissance learning was grounded, was enhanced by the frequent juxtaposition of the recent invention of printing to those of firearms and the nautical compass. In 1620, the English philosopher Francis Bacon indeed wrote that these three inventions "changed the whole face and state of the world".
In Renaissance Europe, the arrival of mechanical movable type printing introduced the era of mass communication which permanently altered the structure of society. The relatively unrestricted circulation of information and (revolutionary) ideas transcended borders, captured the masses in the Reformation and threatened the power of political and religious authorities; the sharp increase in literacy broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education and learning and bolstered the emerging middle class. Across Europe, the increasing cultural self-awareness of its people led to the rise of proto-nationalism, accelerated by the flowering of the European vernacular languages to the detriment ofLatin's status as lingua franca. In the 19th century, the replacement of the hand-operated Gutenberg-style press by steam-powered rotary presses allowed printing on anindustrial scale, while Western-style printing was adopted all over the world, becoming practically the sole medium for modern bulk printing.
