Information about Printing Press

For the invention and technology of movable type, see Movable type.

A printing press is a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a medium (such as paper or cloth), thereby transferring an image. The systems involved were first assembled in Germany by the goldsmith Johann Gutenberg in the 1430s.^[1] Printing methods based on Gutenberg's printing press spread rapidly throughout first Europe and then the rest of the world, replacing most block printing and making it the sole progenitor of modern movable type printing. As a method of creating reproductions for mass consumption, the printing press has been superseded by the advent of offset printing.

In Europe, the printing press's ability to quickly and uniformly disseminate knowledge aided in the propagation of Luther's Ninety-Five Theses and other works of the Protestant Reformation, the European rediscovery of the Greek and Roman classics that helped stimulate the Renaissance, the decline of Latin and the ascent of the various vernaculars, and the development of scientific journals and their specialist vocabulary, or jargon. The level of importance of the printing press is rivaled by few other inventions, so much so that "the invention of the printing press" is often used as a reference to the social, political, and scientific change experienced by Europe after the press's introduction.

History

The invention of Gutenberg's printing press depended primarily upon a diffusion of technologies from Asia—paper and woodblock printing—in addition to a growing demand for books.^[1] By 1424, Cambridge University library owned only 122 books—each of which had a value equal to a farm or vineyard.^[1] The demand for these books was driven by rising literacy amongst the middle class and students in Europe.^[1] At this time, the Renaissance was still in its early stages and the populace was gradually removing the monopoly the clergy had held on literacy.^[1]

Before the invention of printing, multiple copies of a manuscript had to be made by hand, taking many years. Later books were produced by and for the Church using the process of wood engraving which required cutting away the background, leaving the area to be printed raised. This process applied to both text and illustrations and was extremely time-consuming. When a page was complete, it would be inked and a sheet of paper was then pressed over it for an imprint. ^[3]

While woodblock printing had arrived in Europe at approximately the same time paper did, this method was not as suitable for literary communication as it was in the east.^[1] Block printing is well-suited to Written Chinese because character alignment is not critical and the existence of over 5,000 basic characters made movable type an impractical technology.^[1] With the Latin alphabet, however, the need for precise alignment and a much simpler character set positioned movable type as a great advance for the west.^[1]

Technological differences also provided European inventors with advantages over their Chinese counterparts—the screw-based presses used in wine and olive oil production.^[1] Attaining mechanical sophistication in approximately the year 1000 CE,^[4] devices for applying pressure on a flat-plane were common in Europe.

Gutenberg's press

Johannes Gutenberg's work on the printing press began in approximately 1436 when he partnered with Andreas Dritzehan—a man he had previously instructed in gem-cutting—and Andreas Heilmann, owner of a paper mill.^[1] It was not until a 1439 lawsuit against Gutenberg that official record exists; witnesses testimony discussed type, an inventory of metals (including lead) and his type mold.^[1]

Others in Europe were developing movable type at this time, including goldsmith Procopius Waldfoghel of France and Laurens Janszoon Coster of the Netherlands.^[1] They are not known to have contributed specific advances to the printing press.^[1] While the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition had attributed the invention of the printing press to Coster, the company now states that is incorrect.^[5]

Having previously worked as a professional goldsmith, Gutenberg made skillful use of the knowledge of metals he had learned as a craftsman. He was the first to make type from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony, which was critical for producing durable type that produced high-quality printed books and proved to be more suitable for printing than the clay, wooden or bronze types invented in East Asia. To create these lead types, Gutenberg used what some considered his most ingenious invention, a special matrix enabling the quick and precise moulding of new type blocks from a uniform template.

Gutenberg is also credited with the introduction of an oil-based ink which was more durable than the previously used water-based inks. As printing material he used both vellum and paper, the latter having been introduced in Europe a few centuries earlier from China by way of the Arabs.

In the Gutenberg Bible, Gutenberg made a trial of coloured printing for a few of the page headings, present only in some copies.^[6] A later work, the Mainz Psalter of 1453, presumably designed by Gutenberg but published under the imprint of his successors Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer, had elaborate red and blue printed initials.^[7]

Life magazine called the Printing Press the greatest invention in the last 1000 years. It is important to note that it was the alphabet that made the success of the printing press possible. See Online Video: "The Code of da Vinci"for a discussion of the role of the Alphabet in the emergence of printing.

Impact of printing

In China and Korea, the impact of printing using movable type devices was limited due to the enormous amount of labour required to manipulate the over 100,000 porcelain tablets, or in the case of Korea, metal tablets, of written Chinese characters involved. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of books on subjects, ranging from Confucian Classics, to science and mathematics were printed in the form of paper books using the more ancient form of woodblock printing, which was more economically feasible.

In contrast, the impact of printing in Europe was comparable to the development of writing and the invention of the alphabet or the Internet as far as its effects on the society. Just as writing did not replace speaking, printing did not achieve a position of total dominance. Handwritten manuscripts continued to be produced, and the different graphic modes of communication continued to influence each other.

Printing, in Europe, also was a factor in the establishment of a community of scientists who could easily communicate their discoveries through the establishment of widely disseminated scholarly journals, helping to bring on the scientific revolution.

Because of the printing press, authorship became more meaningful and profitable. It was suddenly important who had said or written what, and what the precise formulation and time of composition was. This allowed the exact citing of references, producing the rule, "One Author, one work (title), one piece of information" (Giesecke, 1989; 325). Before, the author was less important, since a copy of Aristotle made in Paris would not be exactly identical to one made in Bologna. For many works prior to the printing press, the name of the author was entirely lost.

The printing press brought a standardized form of writing to books. The printing process ensured that the same information fell on the same pages, page numbering, tables of contents, and indices became common, though they previously had not been unknown. Punctuation and footnoting was all done the same. Bibliographies began to appear in the back of books.

The process of reading was also changed, gradually changing over several centuries from oral readings to silent, private reading. The wider availability of printed materials also led to a drastic rise in the adult literacy rate throughout Europe. New mediascape was available to anyone. New genres were formed along with new forms of literature such as newspapers and novels.

School curriculums were developed, standardizing education across countries. With this standardization, nationalism and globalism was changing.

Within fifty or sixty years of the invention of the printing press, the entire classical canon had been reprinted and widely promulgated throughout Europe (Eisenstein, 1969; 52). Now that more people had access to knowledge both new and old, more people could discuss these works. Furthermore, now that book production was a more commercial enterprise, the first copyright laws were passed to protect what we now would call intellectual property rights. A second outgrowth of this popularization of knowledge was the decline of Latin as the language of most published works, to be replaced by the vernacular language of each area, increasing the variety of published works. Paradoxically, the printing word also helped to unify and standardize the spelling and syntax of these vernaculars, in effect 'decreasing' their variability. This rise in importance of national languages as opposed to pan-European Latin is cited as one of the causes of the rise of nationalism in Europe.

Critiques

Neil Postman has many points to argue about the printing press. He says we have faith in reading and information, but the printing press has turned information into a form of garbage. He says printing has made information bland and too easy to access. He calls it "information overload" and says there is too much information for any one person to absorb, or that there is too much information that finding what you want can be impossible. But, it is also easy to say that before the printing press, there was a lack of information. Arguments can be made for either side, but society will still follow the media.

The art of book printing

For years, book printing was considered a true art form. Typesetting, or the placement of the characters on the page, including the use of ligatures, was passed down from master to apprentice. In Germany, the art of typesetting was termed the "black art," in allusion to the ink-covered printers. It has largely been replaced by computer typesetting programs, which make it easy to get similar results more quickly and with less physical labor. Some practitioners continue to print books the way Gutenberg did. For example, there is a yearly convention of traditional book printers in Mainz, Germany.

Some theorists, such as McLuhan, Eisenstein, Kittler, and Giesecke, see an "alphabetic monopoly" as having developed from printing, removing the role of the image from society. Other authors stress that printed works themselves are a visual medium. Certainly, modern developments in printing have revitalized the role of illustrations.

The Industrial Revolution

The Gutenberg press was much more efficient than manual copying and still was largely unchanged in the eras of John Baskerville and Giambattista Bodoni—over 300 years later.^[8] By 1800, Lord Stanhope had constructed a press completely from cast iron, reducing the force required by 90% while doubling the size of the printed area.^[8] While Stanhope's "mechanical theory" had improved the efficiency of the press, it still was only capable of 250 sheets per hour.^[8] German printer Friedrich Koenig would be the first to design a non-manpowered machine—using steam.^[8] Having moved to London in 1804, Koenig soon met Thomas Bensley and secured financial support for his project in 1807.^[8] Patented in 1810, Koenig had designed a steam press "much like a hand press connected to a steam engine."^[8] The first production trial of this model occurred in April 1811.

Koenig and Bauer sold two of their first models to The Times in London in 1814, capable of 1,100 impressions per hour. The first edition so printed was on November 28 1814. They went on to perfect the early model so that it could print on both sides of a sheet at once. This began the long process of making newspapers available to a mass audience (which in turn helped spread literacy), and from the 1820s changed the nature of book production, forcing a greater standardization in titles and other metadata. Their company Koenig & Bauer AG is still one of the world's largest manufacturers of printing presses today.

Later on in the middle of the 19th century the rotary printing press (invented in 1833 in the United States by Richard M. Hoe) allowed millions of copies of a page in a single day. Mass production of printed works flourished after the transition to rolled paper, as continuous feed allowed the presses to run at a much faster pace.

Also, in the middle of the 19th century, there was a separate development of jobbing presses, small presses capable of printing small-format pieces such as billheads, letterheads, business cards, and envelopes. Jobbing presses were capable of quick set-up (average makeready time for a small job was under 15 minutes) and quick production (even on treadle-powered jobbing presses it was considered normal to get 1,000 impressions per hour [iph] with one pressman, with speeds of 1,500 iph often attained on simple envelope work). Job printing emerged as a reasonably cost-effective duplicating solution for commerce at this time.

Later inventions in this field include the following:

• Lithography
• Offset printing
• Desktop publishing
• Electronic publishing
• Computer printer
• Composing stick

References

• Fontaine, Jean-Paul. L'aventure du livre: Du manuscrit medieval a nos jours. Paris: Bibliotheque de l'image, 1999.
• Citation from The Encyclopedia of World History Sixth Edition, Peter N. Stearns (general editor), 2001 The Houghton Mifflin Company, at Bartleby.com.

Further reading

On the effects of Gutenberg's printing

• Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Cambridge University Press, September 1980, Paperback, 832 pages, ISBN 0-521-29955-1
• More recent, abridged version: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, 2Rev ed, 12 September 2005, Paperback, ISBN 0-521-60774-4
• Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) Univ. of Toronto Press (1st ed.); reissued by Routledge & Kegan Paul ISBN 0-7100-1818-5.
• Briggs & Burke, A Social History of the Media: The Print Revolution in Context (2002)

See also

• Augustus Applegath - inventor of the vertical print press
• Anilox
• Color printing
• David Bruce
• Flexography
• George E. Clymer
• Muller Martini
• National Print Museum of Ireland
• Print culture
• Printing
• Printmaking
• Typography
• William Clowes (Printer)

External links

• Centre for the History of the Book
• Gutenberg printing Photos of Incunabula and the Gutenberg Bible (1455)
• BGDP Safety on printing presses