A Brief History of Printing

The roots of modern printing may reach back solidly to Johannes Gutenberg, but a definite, though more fragile, link extends back more than thirteen CENTURIES before "the father of printing."

The origin of modern printing is traceable to Chinese scribes of the first century. They developed a method of movable type that is, truly, the beginning of TechColor Graphics in Chino, California. The revolution these scribes created was movable clay characters, a single set of which could reproduce dozens or even hundreds of duplicate documents.

Such a revolution in communication would seem to have a life of its own; to transform the society which invented it. But this didn't happen in ancient China. Only the elite of the ruling class were literate, and any documents created from this new technology were reserved for their use. But a more important reason why this revolution remained quiet is that, regardless of how many people could read the texts, the process of producing them was just not superior to hand-inscribing. The Chinese alphabet contains thousands of characters. Producing complex texts on paper (another Chinese invention) was performed much more efficiently by a more basic Chinese invention: pen and ink.

Regardless of its relative inefficiency, movable type remained a viable mode of communication in China for the next eleven centuries, when the technology for making paper finally escaped to the outside world in the minds of slaves or prisoners captured by Arabs.

The introduction of paper to the Egyptians in the twelfth century began a transformation which is the predecessor of mass communication. The simple availability of paper, which supplanted the ever-rarer papyrus, inspired an explosion of Egyptian philosophers and scientists.

As this new revolution of thought swept from Egypt to Europe in the next century, paper's importance increased, as did the information written on it. By the fourteenth century, there were simply more demands for any given document than there were scribes to hand print it.

Into this mix, add another huge factor: Christianity. The written word of God had been the sole domain of a select few priests, who jealously guarded their access to the Bible. In fact, possession of the written Word by a layman was punishable by a certain and unpleasant death. With the knowledge of paper making, the knowledge of the written word grew as well. Before, only priests and government bureaucrats needed to be literate, but now a whole population had, at least, the potential to interpret for themselves what exactly God was saying to them.

Onto this scene came Johannes Gutenberg, a profit-minded goldsmith from Southern Germany. Ben Franklin he was not. His inspiration for the reinvention of movable type (this time cast in metal) was not the betterment of his society, nor the advancement of human knowledge. His motivation was personal profit. He hoped to get rich by printing the Church's ever-popular indulgences. These handy slips of paper could be bought by a sinner to gain dispensation from any discretion, past or future.

So popular were indulgences that soon Gutenberg was printing up to 200,000 of them in one run. Unheard of numbers for a single document. Of less importance to Gutenberg himself was another document he printed. Though unimportant monetarily to the man himself, history regards the Gutenberg Bible as a milestone in modern thought. It was also a deep threat to the Church, which felt its exclusive grip on the messages of Christ slipping away.

As plentiful as business was in the area of sin dispensation, Johannes Gutenberg ended up defaulting on the loan which financed his invention, his technology soon became public, and his creditors reaped the growing profits from his printed Bible.

As the New World grew in importance, so too did the media of printed communication, especially in the fledgling United States, where any man could own a press and print any opinion he wished.

But Gutenberg's technology had not change for about 400 years, until a revolution happened in paper making. Up to this point, sheets of paper were manually applied to inked characters and squeezed together in a cumbersome wooden machine much like a wine press. Now, that technology had to improve as innovators in the paper industry developed the next revolution: continuous rolls of paper

This changed Gutenberg's design greatly, though it may seem like a small alteration. Instead of laying out type on a flat surface, the new, continuous, presses laid out Gutenberg's metal type on the outside of a cylinder which rolled on and on for as long as a roll of paper.

The numbers of printed pieces available to the public jumped astronomically, and the price plunged to the point where every man could afford to become literate. Especially politically literate, a concept which, for the common man, was as foreign as fine wine and caviar.

In the last 20 years, further revolutions have taken published words through the realms of photocopying, desktop publishing, and the Internet.

And now, at the turn of the millennium, we have reached the absolute pinnacle of human potential in the printed word. We can't possibly make any more advances, Right?