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Entry 148 of 240Invention

Gutenberg's Printing Press

c. 1440 CE/Central Europe/Holy Roman Empire
Today Mainz, Germany (spreading across Europe)Span Printing Revolution · 1440s onward

Johannes Gutenberg combined movable metal type, oil-based ink, and a modified wine-press into a machine that could print books faster and far cheaper than any scribe could copy them. Within decades, ideas — soon including heresy and revolution — could spread across Europe beyond any authority's power to control. Within a generation, a German monk's local complaint about the Church would use it to split Christendom in half.

◆ Worth knowingIn the fifty years after Gutenberg, Europe printed more books than all its scribes had copied by hand in the previous thousand years — an information explosion the world had never seen.
◆ The mechanismInformation-medium revolution

A new way to record or transmit information lowers the cost of copying ideas and reorders who holds knowledge and power.

Also: Labor displacement · Ideological movement

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