Posted on 08/14/2022 2:42:18 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
In 15th-century Germany, Johannes Gutenberg developed a printing press, a machine that allowed for mass production of texts. It is considered by many to be one of the most significant technological advancements of the last millennium.
Though Gutenberg often receives credit as the inventor of the printing press, sometime earlier, roughly 5,000 miles away, Koreans had already developed a movable-type printing press.
There is no question that East Asians were first. There is also no question that Gutenberg's invention in Europe had a far greater impact.
"What is not known is whether Gutenberg knew about the Korean printing or not. And if we could shed light on that question, that would be earth shattering," says Uwe Bergmann, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who, with UW–Madison physics graduate student Minhal Gardezi, is part of a large, interdisciplinary team that is analyzing historical texts.
"But even if we don't, we can learn a lot about early printing methods, and that will already be a big insight," Bergmann adds.
These texts include pages from a Gutenberg bible and Confucian texts, and they're helping investigate these questions. The team includes 15th-century Korean texts experts, Gutenberg experts, paper experts, ink experts and many more...
This summer, Bergmann and Gardezi were part of a team that used XRF scanning at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California to produce elemental maps of several large areas from original pages of a first-edition, 42-line Gutenberg Bible (dating back to 1450 to 1455 A.D.) and from Korean texts dating back to the early part of that century.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
A photograph of a scanned Korean text. The white dotted box indicates the areas shown in the middle and bottom panels. Each element produces a unique X-ray fluorescence. After scanning the text, the researchers applied filters for the known XRF patterns of different elements and created a color-coded heat-map of their abundance, from lowest (blue) to highest (red). An element found in only small quantities is in the red circles in the bottom part of the image.Credit: Minhal Gardezi
Stephen Fry takes a look inside the story of Johann Gutenberg, inventor of the world's first printing press in the 15th century, and an exploration of how and why the machine was invented.How The Printing Press Revolutionized The World
The Machine That Made Us | Timeline
August 25, 2018 | Timeline - World History Documentaries
Gutenberg’s use of the printing press generally marked the end of the medieval period and the beginning of the Renaissance. Books and the printed word would soon become available to everyone not like before when mostly the wealthy, royalty and the Church could afford books.
At the same time Gutenberg was printing the Bible, in Mainz, Germany, a monk began handwriting the Bible. It took him 18 months to handwrite one Bible. Gutenberg was able to print about 180 copies in the same amount of time.
Bonus trivia: books printed before 1500 are called incunables or incunabulae. A book printed before 1500 is an incunabulum.
It is possible Guttenberg heard about the Korean printing press from traders? Yes. However, given the distances involved at that time, there is almost no chance he got to examine a working model.
Great video. Thanks for the link!
I think you’re charitable. That such a piece of information, from more than half a world away, would make it to a person willing and able to act on it without the reference making its way into any other contemporaneous western sources, is more than just a bit of a stretch
Well, the person (trader) who actually saw it working in Korea might be have been impressed enough to seek out printers in Europe to inform them of the invention.
I agree it is unlikely, but possible.
My pleasure.
I regard this as being an analog to the difference between Columbus and all of the previous encounters with the Western Hemisphere, it was Columbus that made the ‘discovery’ permanent. Yes, there were earlier seafarers like the Vikings and others BUT it was the Columbus voyages and the technology of his era that made his the last ‘discovery’!
The same applies to the Gutenberg SYSTEM development, the press, the metallurgy for the type, the paper & binding for the pamphlets & books AND the burgeoning wealth & literacy that created the market. What tends to be forgotten is that the examples from Asia came from monolithic cultures where there was little incentive to grow this technology. In the mid-1400s Europe, with religious wars being propagandized (consider Luther’s attack on PRINTED indulgences) and multiple polities as well as the growing literacy in Europe, the Gutenberg Press was a spark against dry tinder!
A query; Would Columbus’ and his follow-on explorers been the same level of permanency WITHOUT the Gutenberg to publicize it?
Gutenberg’s press hit right at the right time in the right place, and wasn’t just some kind of toy for some royal court.
The first known use of movable type was on the Phaistos Disk, btw. :^)
“In 15th-century Germany, Johannes Gutenberg developed a printing press, a machine that allowed for mass production of texts. It is considered by many to be one of the most significant technological advancements of the last millennium.
Though Gutenberg often receives credit as the inventor of the printing press,”
article written by ignorant moron ... printing presses were already the standard for mass reproduction ... Gutenberg’s revolutionary invention was the use of moveable type ...
“Gutenberg’s use of the printing press generally marked the end of the medieval period and the beginning of the Renaissance.”
I don’t think so. The usual achievement ascribed as the beginning of the Renaissance was Ghiberti’s bronze doors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Ghiberti Also, the Renaissance was very much a part of the Middle Ages, it was it’s closing era and a culmination of several centuries of development in arts, education, science, exploration, and so on.
You find that true about any technology. The Wright brothers built on scores of entrepreneurs, scientists and engineers before them.
Same with the telephone and telegraph, metallurgy, the steam engine, mass production, interchangeable parts, sewing machines, threshers, combines, reapers, safety razors, etc. We are taught in school that one person made that breakthrough invention when it was scores and hundreds of predecessors working in the same field over decades.
Gutenberg made his money printing romance novels.... : )
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