Who invented movable printing

Access to mass-produced books revolutionized Europe in the late s, with advancing literacy altering religion, politics, and lifestyles worldwide. At least, this is how the story is rendered in most books, including, for the most part, The Lost Gutenberg.

The first overtures towards printing that began around roughly AD, in China, where early printing techniques involving chiseling an entire page of text into a wood block backwards, applying ink, and printing pages by pressing them against the block. Around AD, printers in Zhejiang, China, produced a print of a vast Buddhist canon called the Tripitaka with these carved woodblocks, using , blocks one for each page.

Later efforts would create early movable type—including the successful but inefficient use of ideograms chiseled in wood and a brief, abortive effort to create ceramic characters. Meanwhile, imperial imports from China brought these innovations to Korean rulers called the Goryeo the people for whom Korea is now named , who were crucial to the next steps in printing history. Their part of the story is heavy with innovation in the face of invasion. First, in AD, a group of nomads called the Khitans attempted to invade the Korean peninsula.

This prompted the Goryeo government to create its own Tripitaka with woodblock printing, perhaps with the aim of preserving Korean Buddhist identity against invaders.

The attempt would be prescient; it preserved the concept and technique for later years, when more invaders eventually arrived. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan had created the largest empire in human history, which stretched from the Pacific coast of Asia west to Persia.

As part of their conquering, they burned the Korean copy of the Tripitaka to ash. The Goryeo dynasty immediately recreated the book.

This was important; attacks by Mongols would continue for the next 28 years. The Tripitaka reboot was scheduled to take Korean monks until AD to complete, and, meanwhile, the rulers began expanding into printing other books. But the lengthy book would have required an impossibly large number of woodblocks, so Choe came up with an alternative.

These letters were similar, more readable, and more durable than wooden blocks. Such letters could be arranged and rearranged many times as the printer wished to create different pages from the same letters. Gutenberg also introduced the use of printing press to press the type against paper.

For this he used a hand press used in his times by wine industry. Ink was rolled over the raised surfaces of the hand-set letters held within a wooden frame, and the frame was then pressed against the paper. The press enabled sharp impressions on both sides of a sheet of paper and many repetitions. After a page was printed, the type could be reused for printing other pages. Gutenberg introduced his invention around The 42 line Bible the number of lines per page , also known as the Gutenberg Bible or the Mainz Bible for the place where it was produced.

It took Gutenberg at least two years to complete his first book. The printing press is a device that allows for the mass production of uniform printed matter, mainly text in the form of books, pamphlets and newspapers.

Created in China, the printing press revolutionized society there before being further developed in Europe in the 15th Century by Johannes Gutenberg and his invention of the Gutenberg press. No one knows when the first printing press was invented or who invented it, but the oldest known printed text originated in China during the first millennium A. The Diamond Sutra was created with a method known as block printing, which utilized panels of hand-carved wood blocks in reverse.

Some other texts have survived from Dunhuang as well, including a printed calendar from around A. It was during this period of early printing that rolled-up scrolls began to be replaced by book-formatted texts. Woodblock printing was also used in Japan and Korea at the time, and metal block printing was also developed at some point during that period, typically for Buddhist and Taoist texts.

Moveable type, which replaced panels of printing blocks with moveable individual letters that could be reused, was developed by Bi Sheng, from Yingshan, Hubei, China, who lived roughly from to A. The first moveable type was carved into clay and baked into hard blocks that were then arranged onto an iron frame that was pressed against an iron plate. Shen Kuo explained that Bi Sheng did not use wood because the texture is inconsistent and absorbs moisture too easily, and also presents a problem of sticking in the ink.

The baked clay cleaned-up better for reuse. By the time of the Southern Song Dynasty, which ruled from to A. Massive printed book collections also became a status symbol for the wealthy class. Woodtype made a comeback in when Ching-te magistrate Wang Chen printed a treatise on agriculture and farming practices called Nung Shu. Wang Chen devised a process to make the wood more durable and precise.

He then created a revolving table for typesetters to organize with more efficiency, which led to greater speed in printing.

It was exported to Europe and, coincidentally, documented many Chinese inventions that have been traditionally attributed to Europeans. Goldsmith and inventor Johannes Gutenberg was a political exile from Mainz, Germany when he began experimenting with printing in Strasbourg, France in He returned to Mainz several years later and by , had a printing machine perfected and ready to use commercially: The Gutenberg press.

In order to make the type available in large quantities and to different stages of printing, Gutenberg applied the concept of replica casting, which saw letters created in reverse in brass and then replicas made from these molds by pouring molten lead.

This lukewarm reception was most likely due to the complexities of Asian writing systems. Unlike the concise, alphabetic script of many Western languages, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are made up of thousands of characters, which would each have to be cast individually for printing using movable type.

Such a daunting task may have made woodblocks seem like a more efficient option for printing in these languages. Europeans, however, took to movable type quickly. Before the invention of the printing press — sometime between and — most European texts were printed using xylography, a form of woodblock printing similar to the Chinese method used to print "The Diamond Sutra" in Manuscripts not printed with woodblocks were painstakingly copied by hand.

Both processes were extremely labor intensive and, as a result, books in Europe were very expensive and few could afford to buy them. But all that changed in the middle of the 15th century, when Johannes Gutenberg established himself as a goldsmith and craftsman in Strasbourg, Germany. In Strasbourg, Gutenberg first began experimenting with both xylography and the development of a more efficient method of printing.

Like Bi Sheng, Wang Chen and Baegun before him, Gutenberg determined that to speed up the printing process, he would need to break the conventional wooden blocks down into their individual components — lower- and upper-case letters, punctuation marks, etc.