Johannes Gutenberg spent years cloistered in secrecy, perfecting a machine that could uniformly stamp letters onto a page.

If his idea could spring from the confines of his mind and make it into the real world, everything would change.

To finance the project, Gutenberg borrowed money from a wealthy merchant named Johann Fust,

using his equipment as collateral.

When profits from the endeavor were too slim and too slow, Fust sued, and in 1455,

Gutenberg lost everything. The court case, his workshop,

and the printing press itself. Welcome to the Preamble podcast. More on this story at a moment,

but first an introduction. If you're new, hello and welcome. Each week, you'll hear some of the most interesting stories from our weekly magazine, also called the preamble. We'll speak with a

fascinating guest for a short interview. Today I'm joined by a woman labeled by some as one of the

most dangerous people in America, and I'll be answering your most pressing questions like, why is the United States

giving $40 billion to Argentina but not funding SNAP benefits or paying air traffic controllers?

Stay with me because there's so much more to come. I'm Sharon McMahon. And this is the preamble

podcast.

And now back to our story.

Within a few months, Fust and one of Gutenberg's apprentices were printing, not copying, the world's first mass-produced Bible.

Gutenberg, however, vanished from public life, forced to subsist on a modest pension bestowed by the Archbishop of Mainz. Gutenberg unlocked the modern age,

but he died penniless while others built entire empires atop his idea. Tempting as it is to

imagine that this is a cautionary tale about

investors and visionaries, it's more than that. The trial of Johannes Gutenberg was the first

recorded moment when technology, money, and information collided. Goodenberg wasn't simply

inventing a machine of efficiency. He was creating a new way for ideas and

information to multiply. Its genesis may have been a tool for copying scripture, but soon it was an

...