Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

On this date, February 3rd, 1468, Johannes Gutenberg died. Not only, was he the inventor of the printing press using movable metal type,

he could be considered one of the greatest liberators of thought in human

history. Prior to the printing press, copying by hand was a slow, laborious process that made books

expensive and rare. There was a strong chance in the copies of the copies of the copies that were

available for people to read that copy errors had been made and preserved. Errors were especially common in

works containing scientific charts and diagrams, for example, displaying the positions of

the planets or something like that. The printing press changed all of that. Printing became the

first mass production industry, and that made books far less expensive. A well-stock medieval monastic library may have

contained only a few hundred books, but after the printing press, individuals could amass far larger

private collections, and as a result become self-taught in a whole variety of different areas.

Access to more books was also a spur to creativity, contributed to the

blossoming of science and literature and philosophy in early modern Europe. With printing, every

copy of a book is exactly the same. Errors can be corrected in future editions. This was extremely

important in all fields, but especially in the sciences. Even more, printing made it essentially

impossible to suppress ideas. The revolutionary teaching of medieval religious reformers,

like John Wycliffe or Jean Huss, could to some degree be stopped by the authorities. But that

wasn't the case with Martin Luther. Luther even commented, and I quote,

God invented the printing press to reform his church.

Printing also resulted in new forms of literature, from comic books and pups to essays, short stories, and novels.

Most importantly, Gutenberg's invention enabled the growth of education and led to an explosion and literacy.

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