How Did Johannes Gutenberg Impact The Printing Press

Johannes Gutenberg’s Printing Press

An invention is the creation of a product unlike any other. Some inventions are innovated from previous inventions, while others are unprecedented. These inventions can impact a vast majority of people either negatively or positively. An example of an invention that impacted the world positively and greatly is the printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg.

History of Scientist

Johannes Gutenberg, or Johann Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, was born in 1400 and he died 1468, although historians are not certain because there are few records of these dates and his childhood. Gutenberg was born in Mainz, which is the capital city of the state Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany. Throughout his life, he worked

With that, millions of books were printed into circulation, “Gutenberg 's invention swept the West. As Nell Postman said in his book Technopoly, "forty years after Gutenberg converted an old wine press into a printing machine with movable type, there were presses in 110 cities in six different countries. Fifty years after the press was invented, more than eight million books had been printed, almost all of them filled with information that had previously been unavailable to the average person. There were books on law, agriculture, politics, exploration, metallurgy, botany, linguistics, pediatrics, even good manners. There were also assorted guides and manuals; the world of commerce rapidly became a world of printed paper through the widespread use of contracts, deeds, promissory notes, and maps” (“Gutenberg’s Milennium”). Postman explains that the books weren’t for leisure and entertainment as they commonly are used for today, but for supplying information to ordinary people. That means that the invention of the printing press endowed everyone of easily accessible information which was so crucial because nothing like this has been done before dating back thousands of years of humanity. This lead to the creation of other forms of text such as textbooks, guides, magazines, pamphlets, newspapers, and reference volumes which eventually lead to the formal

For example, there would be no internet, “Instead of replacing handwritten text by the use of individual letters of metal type that enabled the cheap reproduction of multiple copies as he did, it replaces each letter by a series of zeroes and ones. The means of transmitting these symbols is simpler than Gutenberg 's paper, although frequently they return to being printed on paper at the end” (Easton). This quote illustrates that the creation of the internet was based of the initial structure of the printing press. Therefore, without the creation of the printing press, the internet would not have anything to base itself off of, and consequently not exist. Also, as preposterous as this may sound, the United States might not have existed without the invention of the printing press. Because the printing press allowed the printing of various media types such as pamphlets, it helped lead underlying cause of the French and American Revolutions which “were fueled by the circulation of pamphlets, such as Thomas Paine 's "Common Sense" in America, that challenged the established order and galvanized public support” (Schlager and Lauer). The printing press today is different than its initial design in the 1450’s, “With only minor improvements, the technology of Gutenberg 's printing press remained relatively unchanged until 1814, when the first steam-powered