Printing is the process of making many copies of text or images by transferring ink, toner or another medium from a prepared surface (a carved block, a set of type, a plate or a digital file) onto paper, cloth or other materials. Ancient peoples pressed seals and stamps into clay and fabric, but printing on paper for reading began in East Asia during the first millennium CE. Several developments followed: movable type in China and Korea, Johannes Gutenberg's press system in fifteenth-century Europe, mechanized presses in the nineteenth century, and photographic, electronic and digital methods in the twentieth. Printing changed how knowledge is stored and spread, and it shaped religion, science, politics and education.
Woodblock printing in East Asia
Printing on paper relied on the earlier spread of papermaking in China. In woodblock printing, a craftsman carved the text and pictures for a whole page, in reverse, into a single wooden block. The raised surface was then inked and pressed onto paper. By the Tang dynasty the technique was used to reproduce Buddhist scriptures, calendars and charms. The oldest printed book that carries a precise date is a copy of the Diamond Sutra, printed on 11 May 868. It was found in 1907 in the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang and is now held by the British Library. Woodblock printing reached Korea and Japan early, and it stayed the main printing method in East Asia for centuries. It suited Chinese characters well because a carved block could hold thousands of different characters and could be stored and reused for later printings. Printing is counted among China's Four Great Inventions.
Movable type in China and Korea
Movable type uses separate, reusable pieces for each character. A craftsman named Bi Sheng invented it during the Song dynasty, around the 1040s. He made his type from baked clay and set it in an iron frame for printing. The scholar Shen Kuo described the method in his Dream Pool Essays in the late eleventh century. Around 1300 the official Wang Zhen made a set of wooden type, stored it on revolving tables, and used it to print a local gazetteer. He wrote about the system in his agricultural treatise of 1313. Metal type was also used under the Song, including for the identifying codes on paper money. Even so, movable type was used much less than woodblocks, because setting type for a script with thousands of characters took a great deal of work.
Korea developed cast metal type further. Records say cast metal type was used during the Goryeo period to print a large work in 1234. The oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type is the Jikji, a collection of Buddhist teachings printed at Heungdeok Temple in Cheongju in 1377. That was 78 years before the Gutenberg Bible. Only the second volume of the metal-type printing survives, and it is held by the National Library of France. UNESCO added it to the Memory of the World Register in 2001.
Gutenberg and the European press
Europeans used woodblocks until the mid-fifteenth century. Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith from Mainz, began experimenting with printing in Strasbourg around 1440. His system combined several elements: a metal alloy for type, a hand mould that cast identical letters in large numbers, an oil-based ink, and a screw press adapted from existing presses. A Latin alphabet needs only a few dozen letters, so movable type was much more practical in Europe than in East Asia. Gutenberg's workshop printed the 42-line Bible in Mainz around 1454–1455, in about 180 copies.
The technology spread quickly. Books printed in Europe before 1501 are called incunabula. By 1500 printing presses were working in roughly 280 European cities, and Venice, Paris, Lyon, Nuremberg and Basel had become major publishing centres. One widely cited estimate puts the number of books printed by 1500 at nearly eight million, possibly more than scribes had produced in the previous thousand years.
Social and intellectual effects
Printing made texts cheaper, more uniform and more widely available. Standardized editions of classical texts helped the humanist scholarship of the Renaissance. Later, during the Scientific Revolution, printing let identical diagrams, tables and observations circulate among scholars. Printing also had a large part in the Protestant Reformation. After 1517, printers in many cities quickly reproduced Martin Luther's writings. By one count, his publications sold more than 300,000 copies between 1517 and 1520, and pamphlets flooded the German-speaking lands. Over the longer term, printing contributed to the growth of literacy, the standardization of national languages, more translation of works into vernacular languages, newspapers, and reference works such as the encyclopedia.
Industrialization
Gutenberg's basic design changed little for about three and a half centuries. Around 1800 Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope, built a press with an iron frame instead of a wooden one. Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Bauer then built a cylinder press driven by a steam engine, one of the printing innovations of the Industrial Revolution. The Times of London began printing on their machines in November 1814, at about 1,100 impressions per hour. Richard March Hoe developed a rotary press starting in 1843, with type mounted on a revolving cylinder. From the 1860s, presses fed by continuous rolls of paper made very large newspaper print runs possible. In the 1880s Ottmar Mergenthaler's Linotype machine automated typesetting by casting whole lines of type from molten metal.
New ways of printing images also appeared. Alois Senefelder invented lithography in 1796. It prints from a flat surface treated so that ink sticks only to the image areas. In 1903 Ira Washington Rubel helped build the first lithographic offset press for paper. In offset printing, a rubber blanket transfers the image from the plate to the paper. Offset lithography went on to become the main method for commercial printing.
Photographic and digital printing
In the twentieth century, printing shifted from metal to light and electronics. Xerography, the basis of the photocopier, dates from 1938. Phototypesetting appeared around 1949 and gradually replaced hot-metal type. Inkjet printing followed in the 1950s and laser printing in 1969. Together with the personal computer, these technologies made desktop publishing and printing on demand possible. Digital printing presses arrived in the early 1990s. 3D printing (additive manufacturing), first developed in the 1980s, applies the idea of printing to building solid objects layer by layer. Today printed media exist alongside electronic publishing on the Internet, and print is still widely used for books, packaging, banknotes and security documents.
References
- History of printingen.wikipedia.org
- Printing pressen.wikipedia.org
- Printing Press - Invented, Gutenberg, Significancehistory.com
- History of the Printing Press Timelinepreceden.com
- The Prints and the Pauper — I Love Typography Ltdilovetypography.com
- “Jikji”, a treasure of the world of printingbnf.fr
- Jikjien.wikipedia.org
- History of printing facts for kidskids.kiddle.co
- Printing - New World Encyclopedianewworldencyclopedia.org
- The history of printingprepressure.com
- The First Moveable Type Printing Pressopentextbooks.clemson.edu
- Movable typeen.wikipedia.org
- By 1500 Printing Presses are Established in 282 Citieshistoryofinformation.com
- Printing and Protestants: Reforming the Economics of the Reformation*asrec.org
- An Empirical Test Of the Role Of Printing In the Reformationdigitalcommons.chapman.edu
- The Printing Press and the Birth of the Modern Worldhistoryprime.com
- Rotary printing pressen.wikipedia.org
- A brief history of printing. From the 15th century to todaypixartprinting.co.uk
- Mergenthaler Linotype Companyen.wikipedia.org