Bachelor of Journalism & Mass communication, Media Evolution & Trend, Gutenberg's movable type and the print revolution

1. GUTENBERG’S MOVABLE TYPE AND THE PRINT REVOLUTION
The invention by Johannes Gutenberg of the movable metal
type was perhaps one of the most important ones that led to
modernity. Printing and printing presses existed long before
Gutenberg perfected his process in or around 1446. The
Chinese were using wooden block presses as early as 600 A.D.
and by 1000 A.D. had movable clay type. Gutenberg hit upon
the idea of using metal type crafted from lead molds in place of
type made from wood or clay. This was an important advance.
Not only was metal type durable enough to print page after
page but letters could be arranged and rearranged to make any
message possible. With the help of the movable type
Gutenberg was able to produced virtually identical copies.
Gutenberg saw his his invention as a way to produce books –
many copies – for profit. But his stress over quality, since he was
printing copies of the Bible, could not have made it a very
profitable venture. Other printers, however, quickly saw the true
economic potential of Gutenberg’s invention. The first
Gutenberg Bible appeared in 1456 and within 44 years printing
operations existed in 12 European countries and the continent
was flooded with 20 million volumes.
Though perhaps never foreseen by Gutenberg, his invention
had a profound cultural impact. Handwritten or hand copied
materials were expensive to produce and the cost of education
had made education an expensive luxury. However with the
spread of printing, written communication was available to a
much larger portion of the population and the need for literacy
among the lower and middle classes. The ability to read became
less of a luxury and more of a necessity as did education.
Soldiers at the front needed to read the emperor’s orders.
Traders, soldiers, clergy, bakers and musicians all now had
business at the printer’s shop. They talked. They learned of
things, both in conversation and by reading printed material. As
more people learned to read new ideas germinated and spread
and still newer ideas were born. More material from various
sources was published and people were freer to read what they
wanted when they wanted. The authorities – church and the
king – were now less able to control communication and
therefore the culture of the people. New ideas about the world
appeared and new understanding of the existing world
flourished.
Duplication also provided the means of standardisation and
preservation. Myth and superstition gave way to standard,
verifiable bodies of knowledge. History, economics, physics and
chemistry all became part of the culture’s intellectual life. Literate
cultures were now on the road to modernisation. Printed
materials were the first mass-produced product, speeding the
development and entrenchment of capitalism. Use of the
printing press helped fuel the establishment and growth of
large middle classes. Printing had given a powerful voice to the
people. The French Revolution and the Industrial Revolutions
followed.
The history of the book presents us with a complete, observable

2. communications revolution. The historical record is such
that we can watch the whole of a vast socio-cultural, political,
and economic change happen over a period of some three to
five hundred years (depending on whose perspective you
prefer). By following the developments in manuscript and print
book production, tied to the changes in the technologies used
to produce those texts, we can also chart the various changes in
social organization, politics and economics from the feudalism of the 7th century, through to the advent and advance of
early
capitalism in the 15th century.
The implications of the printed word are vast. There are those
who argue that Martin Luther and the Protestant revolution
could not have taken place if it were not for the printing press.
While this is not entirely valid, the press and the already wide
distribution of books and other printed matter in Luther’s time
certainly added to the distribution of his ideas and work. In the
shifts in the world from the mid 15th century to the end of the
18th century, it is possible to trace the divergence of science
from religion and the opening up of the new world.
In order to understand the effect of printing in the 15th
century, you have to go back to the 7th century and see how the
book world was organized prior to the advent of printing.
Then you can see what changed along with the introduction of
printing.
In their view, print came along and sustained that revolution,
with the promotion of vernacular languages and new information.
But the early Italian Renaissance was initiated by a social
restructuring of learning through the emergence of a university
system.
The 7th to 13th Century can be called the age of religious
“manuscript” book production. Books in this period are
entirely constructed by hand, and are largely religious texts
whose creation is meant as an act of worship. 13th to 15th
Century: The secularization of book production. Books are
beginning to be produced that do not serve as objects of
worship, but that try to explain something about the observable
world. The difficulty with the spread of such knowledge is
that production is still taking place via pre-print - manuscript -
methods.
The production of secular books is driven by two things:
1. The rise of universities in Europe, spreading from Italy.
2. The return of the crusaders in the 13th century, who bring
with them texts from Byzantium. These books, written
during the Greek and Roman periods in history, focus on
this-world concerns.
By far,the biggest effect of the universities, print books and an
increasingly literate reading public, came in the emerging
scientific fields of botany, geography, and astronomy.
In large part, the rise of Science as a replacement for religion as a
way of seeing the world has to do with the changing nature of
libraries. Instead of a few repositories, usually in the control of
the church, people began to accumulate private libraries.
Misinformation in books was impossible to spot until you
could gather a stack of books together on the table and do

3. comparisons. In much the same way that literacy allows for
critical reflection, print books pushed this ability into a new
dimension. For the first time private individuals could gather a
collection of books which allowed them to examine a range of
opinions and attempt to fix invariances in the world. In this
case,the knowledge that underlie an emerging science did not
have to come from direct experience in the world, but could
instead come from experience with books.
In the early 13th century, science got a boost from the Crusaders
returning from the Holy Land. These men brought back copies
of the texts of the Greeks and Romans, lost to European
audiences since the fall of Rome. Included in those texts were
science texts from the Greeks.
The 19th century saw a series of important refinements in the
process of printing. Continuous roll paper, which permitted
rapid printing of large numbers of identical, standardised pages
was invented in France in the beginning. Soon after in 1811, a
German Friedrich Koenig converted the printing press from
muscle to steam power, speeding production of printed
material and reducing its cost. In 1830 Americans Thomas
Gilpin and James Ames perfected a wood grinding machine
that produced enough pulp to make 24 miles of paper daily,
further lowering the cost of printing. Another most important
development in this connection was the the invention of the
linotype machine in 1884 by Ottmar Mergenthaler, a German
migrant to the US. Employing a typewriter-like keyboard, the
linotype allowed printers to set type mechanically rather than
manually. About the same time was invented offset lithography
which made it possible to print from photographic plates rather
than from heavy and relatively fragile metal casts.
Of course, the developments of the late 20th century which saw
the advent of desktop publishing has pushed many of the
path-breaking inventions into history. Now the entire process is
managed on computers except the last one in which the content
is transferred to paper by the use of ink.
References-
1. Baran and Davis; Mass Communication Theory; (2000); Thomas-Wadsworth
2. Fiske; Introduction to Communication Studies; (1982)
3. Infante, Rance and Womack; Building Communication Theory, 2nd edition; (1993);
4. Berger; Media Analysis Techniques