DiscoverScroll article

A printing press is a machine that transfers ink onto materials such as paper or cloth by applying pressure to an inked surface.

It marked a major advance on earlier methods, in which ink was applied to the printing surface and the paper was rubbed by hand to transfer it. The invention and global spread of the printing press transformed book production and communication during the early modern period. Around 1440, the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented a method for mass-producing movable type for a printing press, beginning the Printing Revolution in Europe. Modeled on the screw presses already in common use, a European press around 1600 could produce up to 3,600 impressions during a 15-hour workday. Woodblock printing could produce 1,500 to 2,000 double sheets a day, while Korean metal movable type produced 40 sheets. Gutenberg's hand mold allowed metal type to be cast quickly and in quantity. From Mainz the press spread within a few decades to around 270 cities across Europe, and by 1500 the presses of Western Europe had produced more than twenty million copies. The spread of printing introduced an era of mass communication that reshaped European society. Printed texts became cheaper and more widely available than manuscripts, while adult literacy rose across Europe at different rates. As books increasingly appeared in vernacular languages rather than Latin, print helped to standardize the spelling and syntax of national languages. By 1800 Lord Stanhope had built the first iron printing press, which could print a whole sheet at a single pull. Hoe, introduced in 1843, enabled much higher output; later rotary presses could produce millions of page impressions in a day. During the twentieth century, offset printing, phototypesetting, and digital printing largely displaced letterpress for commercial work.

Johannes Gutenberg developed the movable-type printing press around 1440, combining four technologies that had each matured by the mid-fifteenth century: the screw press, movable type, the codex book format, and mechanized paper production. The economic and cultural changes of late medieval Europe helped to create conditions in which his press could succeed commercially.

In the Ottoman Empire, non-Muslim communities operated presses from an early date: Sephardi Jews established a Hebrew press in Constantinople in 1493, followed by an Armenian press in 1567 and a Greek press in 1627.

The press could print a whole sheet in one pull, its chief advantage over the wooden press, and did so with far less effort on the lever. Two ideas altered the design of the printing press radically: first, the use of steam power for running the machinery, and second, the replacement of the printing flatbed with the rotary motion of cylinders.

The term printing revolution describes the wide circulation of information and ideas made possible by the printing press.

The printing press changed the relationship between authors and their texts.

Dittmar, Jeremiah E. (2011), "Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of the Printing Press", The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126 (3): 1133–1172, doi:10.1093/qje/qjr035 Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. (1980), The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-29955-8

Childress, Diana (2008), Johannes Gutenberg and the Printing Press, Minneapolis: Twenty-First Century Books, ISBN 978-0-7613-4024-9 Moran, James (1973), Printing Presses: History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times, Berkeley: University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-520-02245-4 Pettegree, Andrew (2015), Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe – and Started the Protestant Reformation, New York: Harper Press, ISBN 978-1-59420-496-8 Pollak, Michael (1972), "The Performance of the Wooden Printing Press", The Library Quarterly, 42 (2): 218–264, doi:10.1086/620028, JSTOR 4306163 Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. (2005), The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (2nd, rev. ed.), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-60774-2

Quick Facts

• Around 1440, the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented a method for mass-producing movable type for a printing press, beginning the Printing Revolution in Europe.
• Johannes Gutenberg developed the movable-type printing press around 1440, combining four technologies that had each matured by the mid-fifteenth century: the screw press, movable type, the codex book format, and mechanized paper production.
• By 1800 Lord Stanhope had built the first iron printing press, which could print a whole sheet at a single pull.
• The invention and global spread of the printing press transformed book production and communication during the early modern period.
• From Mainz the press spread within a few decades to around 270 cities across Europe, and by 1500 the presses of Western Europe had produced more than twenty million copies.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Printing press". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.