50 Things That Made The Modern Economy With Tim Harford

The Gutenberg printing press, invented in the 1440s by Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith

from Mints in Germany, is widely considered to be one of humanity's defining inventions.

Gutenberg figured out how to make large quantities of durable metal type, and how to fix that type.

Firmly enough to print hundreds of copies of a page, yet flexibly enough that the type could

then be reused to print an entirely different page. Gutenberg's famous bibles were objects

beautiful enough to rival the calligraphy of the monks. Actually, you can quibble with Gutenberg's

place in history. He wasn't the first to invent a movable type press. It was originally developed

in China. Even as Gutenberg was inventing in Germany, Koreans were ditching their entire method

of writing to make printing easier, cutting tens of thousands of characters down to just 28.

It's often said that Gutenberg single-handedly created mass literacy, but that's not true either.

Literacy was common six or seven hundred years earlier in the Abbasid caliphate,

spanning the Middle East and North Africa. Still, the Gutenberg press changed the world.

It led to Europe's reformation, science, the newspaper, the novel, the school textbook,

and much else. But it couldn't have done so without another invention, just as essential,

but much more often overlooked. Paper.

Paper.

Paper was another Chinese idea, just over two thousand years ago. At first, they used it for wrapping

precious objects, but they began to write on it. It was lighter than bamboo and cheaper than silk.

Soon the Arabic world embraced it. But Christians in Europe didn't do so until much later.

Paper came to Germany just a few decades before Gutenberg's press.

What took so long?

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