Book writing was very expensive and time consuming before printers were invented, as they had to be written by hand and copied by hand to be mass produced. The great invention of the movable type changed all this process making it easier, cheaper, and faster to mass produce books. In 1439 in Europe, the German Johannes Gutenberg created the movable type which he called the Gutenberg Press. The Gutenberg Bible was his most famous work ever produced, and he printed it using this machine. The printing business took of due to the movable type machine as books were not as luxurious and expensive anymore and they became much more uniform. The movable type is mostly credited to Johannes Gutenberg but before he introduced the movable type to Europe a Chinese engineer, inventor and artisan Bi Sheng had invented the movable type technology in a very similar way, this was between 1041 and 1048. 

Gutenberg Press (International Printing Museum)

The reason why Gutenberg’s is more associated to the invention of the machine than Bi Sheng is comes from the fact that in Europe the technique was picked up by the book mass making industry much quickly and was popularized in little time after its introduction. Another reason why Bi Sheng’s machine did not become as popular was because in Asia it was not nearly as expensive to mass produce books as it was in Europe at the time Gutenberg created it. Even though the machines that were first invented by Sheng and Gutenberg had the same technique, they used different materials at the beginning. Bi Sheng started off by using baked clay which was extremely fragile, and Gutenberg started using wood instead to print into printing surfaces like paper.

This image was retrieved from www.history.com from the article “7 ways the Printing Press Changed the World”

As the saying says, “knowledge is power”, the invention of the printing press automatically allowed people to share knowledge more quickly and widely as well as making it more affordable so that it could be used in terms of education across Europe and later worldwide. Something that the research I did got me thinking was about the fact that since the 1400’s machines had started stealing humans their jobs, it is not something that just started happening even if sometimes we believe it. 

Printing Press image from the Article “The History of Printing during the 15th Century” by Prepressure.

I chose this topic for my blogpost due to the fact that there is a huge storage for the printing press movable letters in the restaurant I work, and everyone is always curious about what it is because it looks so old and historical. After all this research I released how valuable it is to get to see that everyday as a reminder of where the origins of printing and typography.