All You Ever Wanted To Know About The Printing Press

Who invented the printing press? If you were a good little scholar and paid attention at school, as all of us did, in retrospect at least, then you would probably have given the answer as: Johann Gutenberg. At least that is the answer that you were meant to have given or else this article is going to hold very little interest for you.

The thing is, and it was given away a bit in the opening paragraph, Johann Gutenberg only invented a certain kind of printing press. He didn’t invent the first one. In order to find out who invented the first printing press we have to go much further back and a little east.

Far East, China to be exact, where so many things originated, something many Westerners conveniently forget. It was 1040 and Bi Sheng is the person who is credited with inventing the first movable printing press. He made it with porcelain components. It remained in use for around two hundred years and during that time it was transmitted to Korea, where it was also used until they went one better. They invented a metal press around the year 1230 during the Goryeo Dynasty. That can’t have pleased the Chinese too much. They kind of ruled Korea. They viewed it as a province of China. It must really have irked them to have the provincial yokels out smart them technology wise.

We have to go even further back than that though if we want to find the earliest examples of printing. Block printing is about as far back as printing history goes (according to a certain well know online encyclopaedia), dating as far back as 627. It was used fairly widely, examples being found across the Far East and Europe. It was mainly used for pictures though and I guess the Chinese wanted something more practical for their writing, hence the development of the porcelain press.

Our friend, the German engraver Gutenberg, is only third in the printing press hierarchy and he only comes along in 1440. A full 400 years after the Chinese invented their press. He makes up for his tardiness though by coming up with a special alloy consisting of lead, tin and antimony (which is quite an interesting metal if you look it up). The new press made books that were more durable and of a higher quality than those that were previously printed. He also used a special matrix to make a new type of printing block. It seems that Gutenberg was quite the overachiever because in addition to all of the things just mentioned, he also found the time to mess around with inks and come up with a new oil based ink to replace the water based ones that they had been using at that time. One can only assume that he led a solitary life.

After the invention of Gutenberg’s press authorship became meaningful and profitable and suddenly people discovered that if they weren’t careful, others could steal the very ideas out of their heads and claim them as their own. Thus copyright laws of intellectual property rights were born. Out of the great, come the devious, and new ways have to thought up to thwart them.

In 1812 another pair of Germans, Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer invented the Steam-powered Press. It could print over 1000 copies of a page an hour vs the 240 copies that the Gutenberg press could do. It seems there was no stopping the Germans. They were going to take over the world one printing press at a time.

Fortunately for us the US wasn’t going to take this kind of rampant runaway triumphant behaviour lying down. In 1833, Richard M Hoe, invented the Rotary Printing Press. This press didn’t deal with mere thousands of copies; it did millions of copies a day. You can always count on the Americans to go large.

By this stage someone (could have been the Germans, could have been the Americans, could even have been the Chinese, my research did not cover it) had managed to reduce the size of the press in order to use it for smaller jobs. Coincidentally it was called a jobbing press. It was used for business cards, letterheads and envelopes and the like. Commercial printers were born and a whole new job market opened up.

These days we use Offset Printing Presses, usually in combination with lithographic practice. There is a rubber mat involved and water and oil and somehow the water is repulsed and all of this results in consistently higher image quality. Its technical.

It’s been quite a journey, from cruddy blocks to high tech rubber mats and oil and water. It’s been a global journey, with just about the whole world contributing something to the creation of the ready availability of the written word. Now if only we could do something about the appalling illiteracy rates that plague great swathes of Africa, South America and Asia (where literacy was practically born), we might be allowed to call ourselves civilized.