Gutenberg's Printing Press

c. 1440 CE — Central Europe, Holy Roman Empire

Today: Mainz, Germany (spreading across Europe)

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 knowing: In 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.

Pattern: Information-medium revolution — A new way to record or transmit information lowers the cost of copying ideas and reorders who holds knowledge and power.

Entry 148 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.