David maule
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Chapter 1 Printing
W hen personal computers first appeared, people began to talk of the “paperless office.” Everything would be done on computer, and there would be no need for paper copies. This didn’t happen. The new computers came with desktop printers and now more, not fewer, pages are printed. The story of printing is a long one, and it continues today.
Imagine that you are a printer working in China around a thousand years ago. Paper, a Chinese invention, has already been in use for hundreds of years. You produce printed books, but these are very expensive because they are difficult to make. To print just a single page of a book, you have to take a wooden board and cut into it until all the words and pictures stand up from the wood. After that, you spread ink over the board, turn it upside down onto a piece of paper, and press hard. And when you have made boards for all the other pages, and printed enough copies of the book, there is no possibility of reusing them. This system is quicker than writing each book by hand, but it is still very slow. It takes you and the other printers a very long time to make one book. Fortunately, sometime between the years 1041 and 1048, a man called Bi Sheng had an idea. He started to make small blocks, and on each of these he cut one word. To form a page, Bi Sheng put a number of smaller blocks together. After the page was printed, the blocks could be used again. The new method quickly spread through China, then into Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Japan. W ith reusable type, books and education became much cheaper, so many ordinary people were able to get better jobs. 1
Gutenberg By the fifteenth century, block printing had appeared in Europe, where it was used to make playing cards and a small number of books. Johannes Gutenberg was the first person to work with reusable type. Maybe he had heard of the Chinese invention, but it is also possible that he had the same idea himself. Gutenberg’s father was in charge of making coins in Mainz, Germany, so the son knew about metal from an early age, and he Gutenberg’s printing press 2 was later trained to make gold jewelry. As a result, he decided to use metal to make his reusable type. Recent progress in science had supplied new knowledge of different metals, but Gutenberg had to try many of these before he found the best. He also used earlier inventions. His printing press was similar to the heavy presses that were used for making wine. Good-quality paper had recently appeared in Germany. This was made from old cloth. Before then, books had been printed on sheets of material made from animal skin, which took between three and four weeks to produce. Only the new paper could be produced quickly enough for the speed of Gutenberg’s press. In 1454, Gutenberg began to print a new Bible. It is known as the “42-line Bible” because of the number of lines on a page. He made around 180 copies. O f these, 48 still exist, either complete or in parts. All of them are slightly different. Some were printed on animal skin, but most are on paper. Also, the large capital letters and some other details were added by hand, and different artists had different ideas. These Bibles are now the most valuable printed books in the world. In 1987, one incomplete copy sold for $5,390,000 in New York. Gutenberg himself made nothing out of his great invention. He had borrowed money to start his business from a lawyer called Johann Fust. W hen he was unable to repay this on time, he had to give Fust his press, his tools, and his materials. He died a poor and forgotten man in 1468. Fust continued Gutenberg’s work and, in 1457, he was the first person to print in color, using red and blue ink as well as black.
The invention of printing spread quickly through Western Europe, and by the year 1500 there were 1,000 print shops. These had already produced around 201 million copies of 35,000 3
different books. This had a great social effect. By 1530, 60% of the population of Europe was able to read. The first English printer was William Caxton, who learned the job in Germany and opened a press in England in 1476. He printed almost 100 books, mainly on literature and religion. He translated some of these himself from French and Dutch. In Venice, in 1494, Aldus Manutius started a business called the Aldine Press. Until then, books had been large and were kept indoors. Manutius began to produce smaller, cheaper books that could be carried around in people’s pockets. At first, he printed new copies of the works of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek and Latin writers. He later produced informative books on subjects like shipbuilding. W hen these appeared, people wrote to him with corrections and suggestions, which were printed in later copies of the book. This meant that information began to move around at a much faster speed. The Aldine Press has been described as an early kind of Internet. In 1638, a Mrs. Glover arrived in the United States. She had sailed from England with five children, a printer, some other workers, and a printing press. She had had a husband too, but he had died on the way across the Atlantic. Mrs. Glover’s plans didn’t end with his death, though, and she started America’s first printing press at the new college of Harvard.
After Gutenberg, there were very few real improvements to printing until the nineteenth century. It had always been possible to include pictures by using cut wooden boards, which were later made of metal. In 1719, Jakob Christof Le Blon of Frankfurt, Germany, started using three separate blocks covered with blue, yellow, and red ink. These were pressed onto the paper one after another to produce fully-colored pictures. 4
The first water-powered press was suggested around 1500 by the Italian Leonardo da Vinci, and in time this was actually used. The next step forward didn’t happen until 1810, when Frederick Koenig of Germany invented the steam press. The paper was placed around a tube, which then moved across the type. Soon afterward, Koenig began to use a second tube, so the press made a print forward and backward. John Walter, the owner of The Times newspaper in London, bought two steam presses in 1814. Each printed 1,100 sheets an hour. At this time, printers couldn’t work very quickly because all the pieces of type from one page had to be taken out and then put together again for the next page. In 1838, this changed when a new machine was invented in New York. This could heat the old type until it became liquid, and make new letters. It was much faster than the old system. Four years later, another machine was invented which could put the letters together. It had a keyboard like a piano and the operator only had to hit the keys to produce a page. For some time a second operator was needed to make the lines of type the same length. Then, in 1886, a new machine appeared which could do both operations at the same time. It could place 6,000 letters an hour and was soon in use around the world. The enormous growth of printing led to a great increase in the amount of paper used for newspapers, magazines, and books. After 1970, so many trees were cut down that there was a danger of changing the world’s climate. In recent years, people have worked hard to solve this problem. At the end of the twentieth century there was a move away from “hot metal” to computerized printing, and the old methods began to pass into history. A printer used to be someone who could make readable pages out of hot metal. Now it is a desk-top machine that delivers good quality pages at high speed. The work of Gutenberg and his followers is now done inside a computer. 5
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