Angela Fields

Professor Richard Winters

Technology and the Future

11 February 2017

The Printing Press

    The Printing Press is likely one of the most important invention that the human race has ever produced. Without it, information may have remained localized or even guarded, communication cripplingly limited, and ideas would not only remain mostly in the mind and through voice alone, but would not span the globe evolving into the web of collective minds that build on one another that we have today. Though we have the internet helping us perform many of these functions, had it not been for the printing press, that too may never have come into being. The printing press brought together many other important inventions which “included: manufacturing of paper, development of ink, woodblock printing, and distribution of eye-glasses” (Jones 133). What it developed into and continues to do so, has reshaped the human race’s ability to relay information that can cross great distances, even make history beyond simply writing it by the ideas that it can deliver to those the press’s products connect to. It has given humans the ability of permanence allowing people and moments that have come before to live on and has enlightened the world to the possibilities to come after.

    Though we most often consider Johannes Gutenberg, a German metalsmith by profession, as the inventor of the press around 1440, many others before him had developed earlier versions of the impressive model Gutenberg perfected. One such inventor was Bi Sheng, credited for movable text printing press created around 1040 in ancient China. His method was with the use of porcelain ceramic characters, instead of the metal ones Gutenberg developed. Bi Sheng’s strategy to create prints however, was expensive and labor intensive due in part by the number of characters used in the ancient Chinese written language. Though even before this technique was used, there had been the woodblock printing also believed to have started in China. The wood block printing was primarily used to put images or writing onto cloth with examples that date before 220 AD, later moving to a paper printing. Before this was the stamp and seal printing which was the first step to what we know as printing. It could be that the vast difference from that point to what we now use to print would be like comparing rocks used to etch on the wall and electronics that can detect a person's voice and notate. This flow chart gives a broad account to what was occurring before the press invention and how it impacted certain events after (see Fig 1.)

Fig. 1

Source: "The Flow of History." FC74: The invention of the printing press and its effects - The Flow of History. Chris Butler. 2007. Web. 14 Feb. 2017.

    Not only did the process of printing change dramatically over the years, but the machinery used in printing evolved as well and its impact to the world likewise expanded significantly. The impact felt through this invention are still visible to date. Without it we would not have books, billboards, newspapers, magazines, street signs, labels, and the list goes on and on. The very wheels that turn our daily lives could cease to take us where they have, had it not been for this invention, and as David R. Russell states, “The institutions that form our modern lives—government, commerce, industry, the arts, sciences, and so on—are mediated by written marks in databases, laws, regulations, books, and the Internet” (Adler-Kassner 27). And though we need or use these things every day, not all aspect of the press has been positive.

    The increase in products that these presses make and made, especially during the Industrial Revolution, when the steam presses were developed, changed dramatically because of the demand to have prints created faster. One major aspect that could possibly be seen as negative by this transformation with the evolving printing presses, has been claimed to have degraded the art once seen in prints. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, Ph.D. states this change, to have more prints to meet demands,

displaces what was a hand craft, a hand operated wooden press, to iron machines powered by steam. So, printing itself begins to seem more like a machine than a handicraft or an art. The artisan becomes a factory worker, and the metaphor of the divine art, which goes back to the renaissance, begins to disappear and the metaphor of an engine of progress, takes its place (Print History).

Despite the craftsmanship or art said to have been lost during this age, for many, it was a small price to pay to have access to the information these printed copies had to offer.

Due to this increase in production, so too did the number of readers. Perhaps this increase was due in part not only by the broader availability, but also the decrease in cost of the reading materials. This chart shows a significant increase in percent of people that were literate between the years of the 1500 to the 1800, in many of the larger European countries. This was even before the mentioned steam press made its mark on the printing world machine and its increased distribution of products (See Table 4).

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Source: Allen, Robert. Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press Inc., New York, 2011. Print.

Again, in the chart below we notice the large jump in literacy in many major countries around the world from shortly after Gutenberg's press in 1440 until now, which also shows the same drastic advances in a broader view and also goes closer to our present day (See Fig. 2).

Source: Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2016) – ‘Literacy’. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/literacy/ [Online Resource]. Web. 19 Feb. 2017.

What this means is that ability to read and write branched out all over the globe though the work and expanded use of the printing press and inventions that worked in much the same way over the years. This allowed for many more inventions to be created using the ability to process greater ranges of resources from prints, which made possible many other ventures into technologies that have helped form our modern world. Information and news traveled faster and the hold that governments and religious institutions once held with them, keeping the written at a distance to the people, now became readily available. Ideas spread like wildfire going from periods known as the Renaissance/Reformation/Enlightenment to the Industrial age, to the now Information age, all of which greatly involving the prospects of the press and in many ways possible because of it.

 Since the press was created, paper too has been developing and its use has become standard around the world. This may also be seen as one of the negative outcomes to this world changing invention. Since we have started to rely on printing on paper verses vellum and parchment, as it once had been the primary medium, the deforestation of trees has steadily been increasing. Fiinovation, a global CSR Consultancy Firm, states on Quora that:

Since the start of human civilization, we have brought down the global tree count to nearly 46%. Currently, humans are consuming the largest amount of paper in that history. In the last 40 years, there has been an increase of 400 per cent. On every continent on this planet, nearly 4 billion trees or 35 per cent of the total trees are being used in the paper industry. The world is left with only 3 trillion trees. The number of trees cut down each year is a staggering 15.3 billion and the global forest cover loss is approximately 192,000 sq. km per year (not all is used in the paper industry). The estimate of the ratio of trees per person is 422:1.

To indicate just how large an area this is in, “A 2005 report it concludes that primary forest area (as opposed to plantations) are reduced globally by 60,000 square kilometers per year (about the size of Ireland)” (Olson). Because of this large use of trees cut down to make the paper used often in the printing processes, we are faced with new problems that the lack of trees can contribute, such as global warming. This large ripple effect from the invention of the printing press may well affect our daily lives over time beyond the simple use and function of products it produces, but from the paper we use to produce them. We can already see smog clearly here and elsewhere, where trees had once been able to clean out atmosphere without problem. Though it is hard to say if in the end the negative effect the products of the printing press will be outweighed by the good they have done on a global scale, or if the press will continue to change and adapt to our needs, making strides to overcome those obstacles, only time will tell. Perhaps we will see mediums that can take the place of paper, that will no longer have such a high cost to our environments in our time ahead.

Printing today, compared to the slow work of illuminators and scribes back in the middle ages, has become a vehicle to the wealth of knowledge that is now shared to anyone, as appose to when it once was not. This was a great step in the right direction, not only in preservation of that knowledge, but also to allow it to reach a higher potential in the minds of many. This change was completely necessary for the good of the world and though the church and ruling powers had doubts to allowing so many ideas to spread around, in the end the validity of the expansion won the day. The higher orders had to adapt to these new questions people began to ask themselves about their lives that were discovered through the work of the press and had to start answering to them, sometimes without acceptance and at times leading to their complete rejection. Not only did empires begin to waver under the large amount of new readers and free thinkers growing under their rule, but also the printed word changed very quickly to adapt to the spoken word instead of that of Latin. Spellings and printing formats became universalized to help with understanding.  

Progression in how information was delivered eventually made it so anyone could access it, sometimes bringing them information that was not the truth. With the hunger to learn more or know more, printing sometimes brought about change playing on that drive. Satirical caricatures or comics over time could get a rise from the people reading them, persuading them one way or another. Toward the end of the 19th century Yellow Journalism began to take hold of the American people, where sensational news beat printings of truth in order to make printers more money. This can still be seen today in some papers, magazines, and all over the internet. The wide spread propaganda may not have come about had it not been for the press and may be a problem that needs to be addressed now and in the future. Richard W Tonachel claims that he, “read once that a single day’s issue of the New York times contains more information than a person in the 1400s learned in a lifetime. So, we need to sort out, we need to select what we have available to us and decide what we can use. It’s hard to tell what people are using that reflect their life as far as the printed word” (Print History).

The printing press changed how the world around us is interpreted by allowing us glimpse into other people’s ideas, their stories, and their beliefs. It has given people a larger voice that can carry beyond one’s own physical vicinity. Though not every aspect of every implication of the press has always and will always be good, many of these negatives need only to be re-envisioned to make them work as we need them to. The printing press made possible the printed word and “the mass produced printed word was the first media wave to forever change society. The printed word is portable yet fixed, disposable yet permanent. Book, magazines, and newspapers inform and entertain, and they both reflect and reveal who we are, both to ourselves and future generations” (Print History). As Shakespeare claims, if all the world is a stage, then the press made the curtain. The curtain that reveals what we are, what we have been and what we are capable of.

Work Cited--In order of appearance (though some appear more than once)

Jones, Colin. The Cambridge Illustrated History of France (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. 20 Oct 1994. Print.

"The Flow of History." FC74: The invention of the printing press and its effects - The Flow of History. Chris Butler. 2007. Web. 14 Feb. 2017.

Adler-Kassner, Linda; Wardle, Elizabeth. Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies. Utah State University Press, 2015. Ebook Library. Web. 18 Feb. 2017.

Print History. [Electronic Resource (Video)]. n.p.: New York, N.Y. Films Media Group, [2005], c1997. 2005. SLCC Libraries Catalog. Web. 11 Feb. 2017.

Allen, Robert. Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press Inc., New York, 2011. Print.

Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2016) – ‘Literacy’. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/literacy/ [Online Resource]. Web. 19 Feb. 2017.

"How many trees are cut down a day for paper?" How many trees are cut down a day for paper? - Quora. Quora, Inc., 21 June 2010. Web. 14 Feb. 2017.

Olson, Brant. "How Many Trees Are Cut down Every Year? » Rainforest Action Network Blog." How Many Trees Are Cut down Every Year? » Rainforest Action Network Blog. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 May 2017.

Link to paper seeing how it was 40 pages long!