The Greatest Invention in the World. Marshall High School Mr. Cline Western Civilization II Unit TWO JA

Transcription

1 The Greatest Invention in the World Marshall High School Mr. Cline Western Civilization II Unit TWO JA

2 The State of Literacy in Medieval Europe The rise of Christianity in the West was terrible news for books. The early Church joyfully burned thousands of books, lest anything be allowed to distract men from the pure contemplation of the divine. There was just one book that mattered: the Bible - and most of the population was illiterate, so they couldn't even read that. Luckily for the Europeans, and the rest of us, their Muslim neighbors were much more fond of reading books than burning them. Islamic scholars carefully preserved the wisdom that Europe had discarded. As Islam spread, Europe was reintroduced to its own glorious past. This influx of classical texts sparked Europe's Renaissance, as Westerners once more grappled with ideas of philosophy, science, art and politics.

3 The State of Literacy in Medieval Europe With the start of the Renaissance, Europe finally became aware of how much it had lost. Suddenly, one book was not enough for everyone. Universities wanted to build libraries to rival their ancient predecessors. Monarchs wanted to publish laws for their realms. Individuals wanted their own copy of Aristotle. So clearly, there was a huge demand for information - and a lot of money to be made. But how to meet this sudden demand? Information that was readily available in classical times was now scarce and rare. This was partly because the Church had been so proactive in burning anything it regarded as blasphemous (which was pretty much everything).

4 The State of Literacy in Medieval Europe The Limits of Literacy But it was also because there simply weren't enough literate people to keep up with the sheer volume of writing. Throughout the Dark Ages, holy men and monarchs had attempted to reverse the decline of literacy in Europe. In the 4th century, monasteries were established for the teaching of literacy. Four hundred years later, in the 8th century, Charlemagne opened schools specifically for the training of scribes in reading and writing. He even came up with his own standardized font, Carolingian Miniscule. However, even if those leaders had been able to raise an army of scribes like the one that had maintained the library of Alexandria, none of them would have been able to overcome the underlying limitations of writing itself.

5 The Limits of Literacy Block Printing With writing, every copy must be written by hand. Since books wear out eventually and are vulnerable to the elements, it takes a large number of literate scribes simply to maintain a sizable collection. And since scribes are just people, mistakes are made when copying - and these mistakes get passed on to the next copy, and on to the next, each adding their own mistakes. Then, in the early 1400s, some European got a clever idea. What if we carved text into a block of wood and then just printed it on the paper? They called this process block printing.

6 Block Printing This was hardly a new idea. Europeans had been using woodcuts to stamp pictures on fabric for the better part of a century. It did not take a huge leap to go from using this method for copying art to copy words. It is worth noting that this development still put the West more than a thousand years behind the Chinese, who'd been printing with wood blocks since the 2nd century. We're not certain if this idea traveled from China to Europe, but it certainly had enough time to get there - and with the Mongolians effectively connecting the East and West for the first time around the late 13th century, it certainly seems likely. Block printing overcame all of the limitations of writing. No longer would each copy of a text need to be handwritten. Instead, a single craftsman could create a block, and that block could make as many copies as necessary.

7 Block Printing With a potentially infinite number of copies, it does not matter if one copy is lost, burned or destroyed, because there are plenty of backup copies. And with this method, mistakes are far less likely because there's only one actual composition - the guy carving into the wood. The rest of the copies are made mechanically, instead of manually, thereby greatly reducing the potential for human error. Thus, with the labor-saving invention of block printing, the West could finally match the literary production of their classical predecessors. Indeed, they could surpass them. Yet, there were limitations to block printing as well. First of all, carving legible letters into wood is hard. It requires a skilled craftsman. It takes much longer to carve a woodblock than it does to write.

8 Block Printing Another problem is that fonts varied greatly, as each letter is individually crafted. Moreover, a mistake or misspelling means you need to create the whole block over again. Printing blocks wear down over time, even when cast in bronze, so when a block broke or wore down, it would need to be laboriously recreated. And since every page requires its own block, a block was only useful for a single page of text. As these blocks were bigger and heavier than sheets of paper, storing a library's worth of printing blocks would take up an incredible amount of space. These limitations meant that a great amount of effort had to be invested into block printing a book, and that effort would often be thrown away after the first publishing run.

9 Block Printing A second edition would require the same laborious process to be repeated. The result was that while a single book could be copied many, many times, not many books were considered worthy of this monumental effort. A publisher would need to think a book would be either very important or very popular to exert such an effort. Gutenberg's Moveable Type Printing Press This was the state of Western literature for about half a century, until around 1450, when a German metallurgist named Johannes Gutenberg made the most important invention of the modern age: the moveable type printing press. Instead of having to carve or cast a whole page, moveable type meant that you could just make a little block for each letter, called a type piece.

10 Gutenberg's Moveable Type Printing Press An unskilled laborer could then move those type pieces to form sentences on a metal rack. All he had to do then was apply ink and press it onto the paper - and there's page one. Best yet, instead of having to carve a new block for page two, he'd just have to take those letters off and rearrange them to form new sentences. Bam! There's page two. This was a monumental discovery, and in all honesty, it doesn't fully belong to Gutenberg. The concept had already been invented by the Chinese centuries beforehand. Gutenberg's real invention was an alloy of lead and a casting process that made for fine, durable type pieces.

11 Gutenberg's Moveable Type Printing Press The moveable type printing press overcame all the limitations of block printing. Slipping type into place is easy. Anyone can learn to set type, and it's much faster than carving wood - and almost as fast as writing. Another benefit is that the font is now standardized. Since you're using type pieces cast from the same mold, every letter 'm' looks like all the other letter 'm's. Another benefit is that mistakes can be fixed easily. You just pull off the offending section and fix it, instead of having to recreate the whole page. Another benefit is that metal type pieces are more durable than wooden blocks, and if one wears down, you have a whole bucket full of them - because a single type piece can be reused for multiple texts, making them worth saving.

12 Gutenberg's Moveable Type Printing Press And since type pieces are small and durable, they were easy to save and store. So what does all this mean? Well, before Gutenberg, publishing a book required skilled craftsmen to work for months, and all that labor and material could only be used for a single book. This made publishing very expensive. After Gutenberg, a book could be published in a few days by unskilled laborers, and their materials could be used again and again. This made publishing incredibly cheap. Soon publishers started popping up all over Europe. Historical Implications of the Printing Press The result was the democratization of information.

13 Historical Implications of the Printing Press Because books were cheaper to buy, it was easier for people to access existing information. Because books were cheaper to publish, it was easier for people to share new information. The implications of these developments were huge. A single example should suffice. Before Gutenberg, very few people had Bibles. One of the first books Gutenberg published was a copy of the Bible. As the number of people who had access to the Bible increased, a funny thing happened. They started reading it! And a few people began to notice that the Church said all sorts of things that weren't in the Bible.

14 Historical Implications of the Printing Press One such fellow was named Martin Luther. Luther found this discrepancy rather upsetting, and so he thought everyone should know about it. So, Luther translated the Bible into German so his fellow Germans could read it. And, since publishing was so cheap, he easily got his vernacular Bible published. This allowed still more people to read the Bible, and even more people started noticing that the Church and the Bible did not necessarily agree. And before you knew it, the Protestant Reformation swept across Europe - shaking the Roman Catholic Church, Europe's longest established authority, to its very core. The printing revolution did not stop with the Protestant Reformation.

15 Historical Implications of the Printing Press Soon, the ready exchange of information would lead to further developments. As scientists began to publish their experiments, the Scientific Revolution swept across the West, bringing refined methods and new discoveries. As philosophers began to discuss ideas about morality that didn't involve Jesus, the Enlightenment soon followed, bringing with it new ideas of liberty and human dignity. As tradesmen began to share techniques for everything from weaving to harvesting, the Industrial Revolution transformed the West into the world we know today. All of these advancements would have been impossible without the quick and easy sharing of information made possible by Gutenberg's printing press.