According to some historians, Friele Gensfleisch was a member of the aristocracy and worked as a goldsmith for the bishop at Mainz in the Catholic ecclesiastical mint. It is known that as a young child and adult, Johannes lived in the Gutenberg house in Mainz. It is believed that Gutenberg moved with his family to Eltville am Rhein Altavilla , Germany, where they lived on an estate inherited by his mother.
Wherever he received his formal education, Gutenberg learned to read and write in both German and Latin, the language of scholars and churchmen. While Gutenberg was never known to have married or fathered children, court records from and indicate that he may have broken a promise to marry a Strasbourg woman named Ennelin.
No more is known of the relationship. By the early s, European metalsmiths had mastered woodblock printing and engraving.
One of those metalsmiths was Gutenberg, who began experimenting with printing during his exile in Strasbourg. At the same time, metalsmiths in France, Belgium, Holland, and Italy were also experimenting with printing presses.
It is believed that in , Gutenberg became involved in an ill-fated business venture of making polished metal mirrors for sale to pilgrims coming to a festival in the German town of Aachen to view its collection of relics from Emperor Charlemagne. When the festival was delayed for over a year by floods, the money already spent to make the mirrors could not be repaid. In , while still living in Strasbourg, Gutenberg is believed to have revealed his printing press secret in a book oddly titled "Aventur und Kunst"—Enterprise and Art.
It is not known whether he had actually attempted or succeeded in printing from movable type at the time. By , Gutenberg had moved back to Mainz, where with the help of a loan from his brother-in-law Arnold Gelthus, he began assembling a working printing press.
To get his new printing business off the ground, Gutenberg borrowed guilders from a wealthy moneylender named Johann Fust. By , Gutenberg entered into a business partnership with Fust in order to continue funding his printing experiments.
Gutenberg continued to refine his printing process and by had printed several copies of the Bible. Consisting of three volumes of text in Latin, the Gutenberg Bible featured 42 lines of type per page with color illustrations. This ease of readability proved especially popular among the church clergy. Unfortunately, Gutenberg didn't get to enjoy his innovation for long.
In , his financial backer and partner Johann Fust accused Gutenberg of misusing the money he had loaned him in and demanded repayment. When Gutenberg refused or was unable to repay the loan, Fust sued him in the archbishop's court. When the court ruled against Gutenberg, Fust was allowed to seize the printing press as collateral.
Fust continued printing the Gutenberg line Bibles, eventually publishing about copies, of which only 22 exist today. Virtually bankrupt, Gutenberg is believed to have started a smaller printing shop in the town of Bamberg around The oldest surviving manuscript from the early Gutenberg press is that of a fragment of the poem "The Sibyl's Prophecy," which was made using Gutenberg's earliest typeface between — The page, which includes a planetary table for astrologers, was found in the late 19th century and donated to the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz in While printers had been using movable type made of ceramic or wood blocks for centuries, Gutenberg is generally credited with the invention of practical movable metal type printing.
Instead of individually hand-carved blocks of wood, Gutenberg made metal molds of each letter or symbol into which he could pour molten metal, such as copper or lead.
Great quantities of each molded metal letter could be produced far more quickly than carved wood letters. The printer could thus arrange and rearrange the individual metal letter slugs as often as needed to print several different pages using the same letters. Gutenberg continued his printing career and appears to have continued modifying printing methods to enable additional efficiencies. At the end of his life, he was granted an allowance from the archbishop of Mainz for food and clothing, suggesting he lived out his days in relative comfort.
Some conjecture that Gutenberg's exposure to metal-casting methods in the family goldsmithing business gave him the skills necessary to create the individual, reusable letters that he had cast in metal, known as "movable type," but contrary to popular belief, this was not Gutenberg's crucial contribution. The first movable type was made from porcelain by the Chinese artisan Bi Sheng about years before Gutenberg's device, during China's medieval Song Dynasty.
This was followed by Chinese movable metal type, initially using bronze, which was later used to print entire books. The earliest of these was a collection of ritual books compiled in by the Korean civil minister Choe Yun-ui, but this did not survive. The earliest book still in existence today that was printed with movable metal type is the Jikji, an anthology of Zen teachings by Buddhist priests compiled by the monk Baegun and printed in Korea in Gutenberg's metal type necessitated the invention of new, oil-based inks that would stick to the type.
It also necessitated the creation of a device that could transfer—or "press"—the ink evenly onto the pages. It's assumed Gutenberg used a screw press to print his books. Similar devices were used at the time to make paper and to press grapes for wine. Improvements in paper production brought costs down and made the paper a viable substance for books, more economical than vellum. The Gutenberg Bibles, which date from the s, are considered the first books printed in the Western world and, although they don't bear the printer's name anywhere in the volumes, are attributed to Gutenberg's first printing efforts.
Several of these are in the possession of the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City and are frequently on display. Prior to the invention of the printing press, books existed in codex form. That is, books were hand-copied, and a Bible would take around two years to produce.
Most of the general public would have seen a Bible only in church, and all but the wealthy would likely have had to travel to see a classic text such as Homer's Illiad. As book printing-publishing became a business, the first book trade fair was established in Frankfurt, Germany, not far from where Gutenberg printed his first Bible.
He also developed the idea of inking them using a rolling device which meant that the page settings could be inked and ready within seconds. This was the breakthrough he had been looking for. Suddenly, he could produce many copies of a book cheaply and quickly. This invention also meant that he could print in color as the pages could be passed a second and third and fourth time through the press to be over-printed with the color settings. Unfortunately, it is not easy to work out which of the many surviving texts of the subsequent period were actually printed in Gutenberg's workshop.
Unlike today there were no copyright laws. Added to that is the fact that Gutenberg never added his own name or even the date on any of his printed works! Scholars think that among his earliest productions were a German poetic work and a grammatical textbook for students. But he was to begin his most famous printing project in It was what is now known as The Gutenberg Bible. The first edition was published in and had a print run of copies.
That may not seem like much by today's standards but at the time it was a considerable run in such a short period. The Bible had exactly 42 lines on each page and must have been very difficult to read as there was no punctuation and no indentation of paragraphs! He financed the project himself and despite its success, the costs of initially creating the press left him deeply in debt. Later he was granted a special pension by the Archbishop Von Nassau but he never made a great deal of money from his extraordinary invention.
But his design had made a huge impression and within a few short years, there were "Gutenberg" printing presses being set up all over Europe.
The impact of the Gutenberg printing press was immeasurable. It caused nothing less than a dramatic social and cultural revolution. The sudden widespread dissemination of printed works - books, tracts, posters and papers - gave direct rise to the European Renaissance.
While Gutenberg's famous Bible was printed in Latin, his invention of the movable type press meant that Protestant tracts and the arguments between Martin Luther and the Catholic Church which led to the Reformation could be widely disseminated.
The Reformation, which began in Germany in the early 16th century, led to the Bible being printed in the languages of the common people. Gutenberg's invention led inevitably to the Protestant revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, the development of Modern Science and Universal Education: in other words, everything that has led to human progress and the advancement of the modern world.
What the world is today, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source, but we are bound to bring him homage I hope you have enjoyed finding out about Johannes Gutenberg and his important work as much as I have writing about it. If you want to find out more about Johannes Gutenberg and his work on the invention of the movable type printing press, either for a school project or your own personal interest, you might like to visit the website of the Gutenberg Museum in Germany, which is available in English and has links to the best resources available, from which you can get excellent and reliable information to help you.
This is the address: gutenberg-museum. And don't forget that even though you are reading this on a computer screen or mobile device, without Gutenberg's printing press your ancestors may never have learned to read and the computer would most certainly never have been invented! Thank you for reading my article and for your kind words. I'm fascinated by the idea that the Koreans developed a moveable type printing press 80 years before Gutenberg.
It seems entirely plausible. Printing presses were invented long before Gutenberg, but I was not aware that his invention of the "moveable type" press wasn't new. I would be very happy to put the record straight if you would be kind enough to leave me a few links to relevant research I could follow up on. Hello, Ms. I really enjoyed your article. I guess your article somehow helped me understand more about the Gutenberg Printing Press and its widespread effect on European literacy. However, I found a bit controversial statement from your article that Gutenberg Printing Press was perhaps the first movable type of Printing Press According to my knowledge, Koreans have first invented a movable type of Printing Press called Jikji about 80 years before the Gutenberg one was introduced to the world.
And I just want you to know that I'm not being hostile to you randomly I'm sorry about that. Please reply me back and tell me if I misunderstood your article or your contents. Thank you! It's true that the focus of this article is molded by its primary readership, which is European and North American.
With the limited space available in an article, selecting information is a necessary part of the editing process. It's unlikely that Gutenberg had any knowledge of what was taking place in Asia at the time, although not impossible. History is littered with examples of unconnected persons discovering or inventing the same thing. Wallace and Darwin both coming up with a theory of natural selection almost contemporaneously is a famous example which springs to mind.
And for any reader who may be interested, a Google search for "Jikji printed in Cheongju, Korea in " turns up fascinating results about the famous Buddhist text and the technology used to print it. Well, you need to acknowledge what the Chinese and Koreans did long before Johnny G. They were using movable porcelain type and movable metal type, and that is an early form of the printing press. Most scholars now agree that the printing press came from the Far East.
Gutenberg has been praised much too highly. Jikji, you know, was printed in Cheongju, Korea in Gutenberg may have developed his version of the printing press independently or--more likely--he had some clue of what the Chinese and Koreans had done. Write about this stuff!! You're very welcome. I'm glad you found it helpful and interesting learning about the "Wild West" and cowboys - and cowgirls!
Thank you so much for this!
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