Printing press

Until the mid-15th century, all manuscripts had to be written out by hand, and the only way to make additional copies was to painstakingly copy out the original text. By the mid-1400s there was a race to perfect the techniques of printing with movable metal type. German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg developed a press that would eventually see him recognized as the father of modern-day printing.

Gutenberg’s press featured a movable “key” for each individual letter and symbol. His press mechanized the transfer of ink from movable type to paper, allowing rapid and cheap mass production of printed texts for the first time ever. The first complete book to emerge from Gutenberg’s press was the Bible in 1455.

Half a century later, William Bullock developed the roll-fed rotary press, which mechanized the process of feeding the press with paper and enabled printers to produce thousands of newspapers per hour. By the middle of the 19th century, printing was on a truly industrial scale. The newspaper industry was huge and powerful.

Impact
Few single inventions have had such far-reaching consequences as the printing press. The impact it had on the world was the same as the internet has today. The immediate effect of the printing press was to multiply the output and cut the costs of books, expanding the reach of literature beyond monasteries and into the lives of common people. Poems, plays, travelogues, almanacs, philosophical works and political tracts were soon available across Europe and beyond, disseminating information and ideas that would shape the world.

The major intellectual movements that swept through Europe in the early modern era, such as the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, would have been impossible without the widespread circulation of the written word.