The travels of Marco Polo(1300) talks about books in China so cheap that people could actually buy them as they are made from woodblocks.
But "cheap" here is not the price of a book today. A book requires someone spending at least a year writing it, specially in the past, with very bad lighting after sunset or in bad weather. That usually meant a book costing the equivalent of a car today, or even more expensive.
Chinese books were cheap compared to buying a car but way more expensive than today. And very few books could justify the investment of creating the woodblocks.
Gutenberg probably got the idea from Marco Polo,woodblock was already used for graphics in Europe, but added his knowledge with metal working and invented an alloy that expands as it cools down. That is extremely rare in metals, almost all of them contract.
That unique property gave Gutenberg type its incredible quality.
Also, Gutenberg knowledge of metal made him create a method that let you recreate the type very easily again and again when the type wears out.
And then he added the concept of the press and the distributor of ink that were taken from other professions like olive oil and wine makers(something as old as Romans in Europe).
Type metal doesn't actually expand much when it solidifies either; it's an alloy of tin, lead, and antimony which contracts when it solidifies, but only very slightly. Antimony by itself expands when it solidifies, and so by varying the amount of antimony (and consequently the proportion of antimony crystals in the solid) you can get a type-metal-like alloy that expands when it solidifies, one that contracts, or one that remains precisely the same size. What you actually want is something that contracts by the same amount as the mold, which is a very small amount, because the mold ("matrix") is made of iron.
The Sn–Pb–Sb eutectic is 4–84–12. Most type metal alloys have a substantial excess of antimony over that.
> A book requires someone spending at least a year writing it, specially in the past, with very bad lighting after sunset or in bad weather. That usually meant a book costing the equivalent of a car today, or even more expensive.
> Chinese books were cheap compared to buying a car but way more expensive than today. And very few books could justify the investment of creating the woodblocks.
> Whereas only dozens of biji have survived from earlier periods, extant Song [10th-13th centuries, predating Marco Polo] works number in the hundreds. This development can be attributed to three major factors: the expansion of the publishing industry, the growing size of the scholar-official class, and the rising level of literacy among the Song population. Combines, these trends led to the wide circulation of printed materials in general, and the increase in biji authors and popularity of anecdotal writing in particular.
> it was a common practice among Song biji authors to state in the prefaces for their works that their biji were the result of years of casual record keeping of items gathered at social occasions or acquired through personal investigation. As a result, a typical biji would touch on various topics, ranging from observations about natural conditions to everyday life of the elite and ordinary people, and from local practices and customs to interesting personalities and strange and unusual occurrences.
> The sizes of biji collections, for example, varied greatly. Some contained only a few dozen short entries. Others included lengthier episodes and amounted to hundreds of chapters. Equally diverse were the backgrounds of biji authors. While towering scholarly and literary figures [such as... ] composed biji, the majority of biji authors achieved neither high office nor literary fame. Their biji collections were often their only surviving works, bearing witness to these men's varied geographic and familial origins, travels, social connections, scholarly and artistic inclinations, and everyday concerns, such as personal hobbies, career aspirations, and obsessions.
> Even though both Casual Notes and the Record [夷坚志] are classified as biji works, Hong Mai apparently meant for them to differ in their content and purpose. Compared to the Casual Notes' attention to the institutional, literary, and historical developments of the Song and earlier times, the majority of the Record stories were gathered through conversations and hearsay. If Casual Notes was more scholarly in nature and intended to demonstrate Hong's erudition in the classics, literature, and history and politics, the Record was a declaration of the author's love of the strange, the marvelous, and the supernatural
> The Record achieved an immediate success. In multiple prefaces, Hong Mai referred to its popularity and the pressure he was under to produce additional chapters in increasingly shorter intervals.
> At the time of Hong Mai's death in 1202, the Record had grown to a massive collection of 420 chapters, totaling over four thousand entries. Although it is not clear whether any complete editions were ever published by any Song publisher, we do know that multiple editions of varying sizes and qualities were made available by commercial publishing houses in different parts of the country.
This describes a rather robust publishing industry that was happy to create blocks for the minor memoirs of people of no particular note, and that published works that achieved actual popularity in every conceivable price point, cutting new blocks specifically for the cheaper editions! And all this is against a cultural background in which reading -- the skill and the activity -- is much more difficult than it ever was in Europe.
Meanwhile -- OK, several hundred years prior -- novels were produced for the popular market in the Hellenic world. Those were not printed and could not have been as cheap, but they were a popular consumption good, not something out of reach.
You see Don Quixote hailed as the first novel (granted, this happens less than it used to), but that reputation is based only on a gross unawareness of history.
This article missed the point. Gutenberg didn't invent metal movable type and that's not why we remember him. He invented making a repeatable casting method with appropriate alloys for metal type that had accurate enough uniform dimensions that he could to use a wine press mechanism to press paper onto the uniform surface.
The molding method he made was astounding clever and went far beyond using basically metal coin minting process that has existed for thousands of years around the world.
Gutenberg's place in history is as the man who ushered in the printing press and commodity publishing in the west. Whether or not he was the first ever to do it isn't relevant to that history, but I do think knowing that other people were onto similar ideas is interesting. Just like in 100 years the iPhone will be "the first smartphone", and people will learn about blackberries and palmpilots in random little "did you know" snippets...
He was interrupted printing the Bible, the Pope asked him to print indulgences. Indulgences were sold, to raise money for the Papacy. Enter Martin Luther and the Protestants Reformation.
I, for one, grew up hearing that Gutenberg invented the printing press—when people wanted to be more specific they would credit him with movable type.
I think it's valuable to point out from time to time how incremental most of the actual innovations in history have been, even the most revolutionary ones. The most frequent narrative surrounding these major breakthroughs in history leaves people assuming that the way the world works is everything sits stagnant until some great person comes along and changes everything. A far more productive lens through which to see human progress is one in which most progress is the result of tying together existing ideas in new ways. This kind of innovation is within the reach of most of us, if we simply stopped trying to be the "first" and became okay with synthesizing what's already there.
It's like the arguments that Edison didn't invent the lightbulb. Other inventors had made glowing wires before. But Edison's great insight was to pass high voltage but low current through the filament (previous inventors used low voltage and high current). Edison also used an effective vacuum machine to prevent the filament from burning.
The result was a practical light bulb, one that lasted more than moments, and did not consume vast amounts of power.
It’s a little more complicated, lightbulbs where very much a useful thing before Edison and several other improvements occurred from 1802 to Edison’s 1879 patent and the actual breakthrough of a cheap bulb reaching 1200 hours occurred after that patent. Warren de la Rue for example had an efficient and long lasting design that was simply to expensive for mass production. Henry Woodward is arguably the first inventor of a practical bulb using carbon rods in nitrogen filled bulbs, though his business failed and he sold the patent to Edison.
Critically, it was really electric infrastructure more than the physical bulb design that resulted in GE’s success. Arc lamp’s had become very popular for street lighting through the 1870’s, which really set the stage for lighting alternatives.
> practical bulb using carbon rods in nitrogen filled bulbs
Arc lamps are good for search lights, but they suck enormous amounts of power, will burn your eyes if you glance at them, and are totally unsuitable for residential lighting. Just imagine someone lighting up your living room with an arc welder - it's the same thing. You'd go blind.
Your argument seriously underestimates the utility of Edison's high voltage, low current design. It persisted with little change up until just recently when LEDs finally displaced them. It's a pretty amazing run.
de la Rue's design failed because it relied on a platinum filament - not practical. It also relied on low voltage and high current - a dead end.
That quote is about low voltage technology. Edison’s design changed dramatically over time, his early bulbs used a carbon filament just like the quoted example. Tungsten bulbs invented by Franjo Hanaman in 1904 where a significant improvement on that design and he’s arguably the actual inventor of modern incandescent lightbulbs.
Similarly, the gasses uses inside bulbs and the filament design all changed significantly over time.
PS: Arc lamps like florescent bulbs are “high voltage, low current design” however all early incandescent bulbs where low voltage. Edison improved the design of low voltage bulbs, but he hardly invented the idea.
His direct competitor at the time had a patent out 1 year sooner, entered mass production one year later, had as you say lower resistance. (Blanking on the name).
Prior to this various different bulbs where created that had more or less resistance. It was a wild time period prior to centralized power distribution.
and think of all the electric power wasted trying to block that light. Besides the crackling/buzzing sounds, and the toxic smoke wafting off of it, and trying to keep it from setting fire to your drapes.
All fluorescent bulbs are just a specific subtype of Arc lamps. In the 1970’s plenty of different gasses where being used in Arc Lights. For example in 1860, John Thomas Way used arc lamps operated in a mixture of air and mercury vapor which eventually evolved into mercury vapor lamps which where invented before Edison, but the first popular variation was invented in 1901.
Also a fairly thin sheet of glass blocks most of the UV, welding masks are thick and dark because welding produces a lot of light and you want significant eye protection from shards etc. Modern ARC lamps are bright specifically because we have incandescent bulbs when you want less light.
It’s the same basic reason people use incandescent bulbs at home. They Mercury etc Lamps might last longer and be more efficient, but incandescent bulbs produce more pleasing light, started up faster, don’t flicker, are quite, etc.
They where very much an improvement for home use, but the lighting market was fairly large by the time Edison’s bulbs showed up, which is what allowed for such rapid growth.
> the lighting market was fairly large by the time Edison’s bulbs showed up
Not really, as Edison needed to install a generator even to light up his bulb coming-out party, and needed to come up with a central generator to electrify city blocks because people wanted his bulbs, not arc lamps.
Edison's bulbs, with their high resistance, used far less electric power than arc lamps.
So did everyone he sold a bulb to in the early years. Central power distribution didn’t start until 1881, but a great many places had generators back then. It’s still the seemingly flat part of the hockey stick graph, but zoom in and you’re looking at exponential growth so starting 10 years early would have dramatically cut into sales.
> Edison’s bulbs, with their high resistance, used far less power than arc lamps.
Edison’s bulbs where less efficient so they needed more power to produce the same light as arc lamps. In applications where a single Edison bulb was sufficient it used less power, but it was extremely common back then to use multiple bulbs as early incandescents didn’t put out much light and it was only companies or the ultra wealthy who could afford to electrify. He was in the sweet spot entering a large enough market to be profitable, and then riding exponential growth into true wealth.
Oddly, this is also why he favored peep shows over movie theaters. His bulbs didn’t put out enough light to project movies.
Yea, but let's reframe this... does it matter? Let's say people thought Bozo the Clown invented the printing press. What does it change? I'm not trolling. This might be more of me having too deep of thought on the matter. I'm the kind of guy that'll rabbit hole into the history of Macedonia for too much of 3 weeks because I came across an article about them having trouble getting into NATO due to the country's name (yes I did this). I know more about Macedonia (now North Macedonia) than 99% people... so what?
Better example, I enjoy watching sports with friends and with alcohol. Every now and then, commenters and friends will mention some sort of niche bit of info. Like a certain football play and what it means. Knowing or not knowing the specifics of game plays changes zero of my entertainment of the game. In truth, it wouldn't mean anything to my friends either in reality. Any of us knowing or not knowing the exact, specific details of football changes nothing. We still watch it on ESPN. We still hang out at someone's house. We all bring food and booze. It matters to the players, coaches and anyone else directly involved. Them flubbing a named detail can change the game, yes. Me knowing? I could call American football, "ice skating" and it'll change zero in the real world. That's not a football, it's an ice cube. Pauly Shore was the nickelback for the Bucks in the last Nachobowl.
99% of people can get through life just fine thinking the printing press was invented by a hamster. That knowledge doesn't change the utility of a book. I think I'm just overthinking it, but maybe culturally we apply too much value on tidbits of facts.
Facts have real-world significance if it becomes part of a cultural propaganda. If one were less friendly they would say you have been "brainwashed" to believe that the European cultures (and their descendants) are entitled to more credit than they deserve in advancing the technology of humanity. Maybe, just maybe, people would be more humble if they knew that we have all learned from each other, and not, as the narrative goes, invented everything merely from a stroke of genius.
Of course, it doesn't really matter for a learned person who has the natural curiosity to figure things out (presumably that includes you), since these people aren't often affected by dogma or rigid conceptions anyway, but the other 99% have no clue, and it's probably easier to state facts than to teach people curiosity.
I totally agree with you and probably that's my problem with the whole tidbit info thing. Does it actually matter if it was a German, Chinese or whoever that invented the first printing press? I mean, yes, it's nice to give credit where credit is due. Nothing wrong with that. That doesn't mean, "We [insert country] invented the [insert invention], we are all your rulers!" I feel like people take a little good (or bad) and run too far with it. Which probably leads to your propaganda point. Just because you share a nationality with someone that was useful, doesn't immediately make you useful. This also goes for wars. There's just this weird want to associate certain facts with bigger concepts and ideals for no good reason. A lot of the things people praise or denounce are far more isolated compared to what they try to apply it to.
Maybe you're more right about the thing with being curious and what it leads it. At a certain point, I at least, learned how both connected and disconnected many things are from each other. Especially from ideologies. Man, I think that pisses me off the most. I can't stand how any ideology tries to wrap themselves around anything by using the loosest relation they can think of.
"Johannes Gutenberg is famous for having designed and built the first printing press to incorporate movable type and mechanized inking and for using his invention to produce the Gutenberg Bible."
-- brittanica.com
"Gutenberg's technique of making movable type remains unclear. In the following decades, punches and copper matrices became standardized in the rapidly disseminating printing presses across Europe. Whether Gutenberg used this sophisticated technique or a somewhat primitive version has been the subject of considerable debate.
"In the standard process of making type, a hard metal punch (made by punchcutting, with the letter carved back to front) is hammered into a softer copper bar, creating a matrix. This is then placed into a hand-held mould and a piece of type, or "sort", is cast by filling the mould with molten type-metal; this cools almost at once, and the resulting piece of type can be removed from the mould. The matrix can be reused to create hundreds, or thousands, of identical sorts so that the same character appearing anywhere within the book will appear very uniform, giving rise, over time, to the development of distinct styles of typefaces or fonts. After casting, the sorts are arranged into type cases, and used to make up pages which are inked and printed, a procedure which can be repeated hundreds, or thousands, of times. The sorts can be reused in any combination, earning the process the name of "movable type.
"The invention of the making of types with punch, matrix and mold has been widely attributed to Gutenberg. However, recent evidence suggests that Gutenberg's process was somewhat different. If he used the punch and matrix approach, all his letters should have been nearly identical, with some variation due to miscasting and inking. However, the type used in Gutenberg's earliest work shows other variations."
There's a lot of mystery even among those directly studying Gutenberg, exactly what he invented. There's some evidence that he didn't actually have character-based movable type at all, but was casting slugs of type for each line using punches to set the characters in a larger mold (I'm going on 25-year-old memories of an article I read in maybe Printing History). What is certain is that post-Gutenberg, punch-cutting to make matrices to cast individual characters and wooden printing presses spread across Europe pretty quickly. The press remained pretty much unchanged until the invention of the iron printing press in the early nineteenth century, followed by a flurry of improvements in the coming decades including cylindrical presses and stereotype printing. Typecasting remained largely unchanged until almost the twentieth century when there were the trio of inventions of the Monotype and Linotype casters which combined typesetting and typecasting and the pantographic engraving process which allowed designers to directly engrave matrices using a larger representation of the character rather than having to manually carve the letter at the actual printing size.
The timing is interesting. According to the article, one of the reasons this did not succeed more broadly was due to the large number of characters in the script adapted from the chinese writing system. The invention of Hangual a couple of centuries later did bring to Korea a script with dozens of letters instead of thousands. If the modern script was invented first, perhaps we would be crediting Korea as the birthplace of the printing press.
Hangul is still quite finicky to create a movable type with though. Although the basic letters themselves count in the dozens, they can combine not only horizontally but vertically (and even both at the same time), so in practice you would have to create every block for each possible syllable. It's still a lot less than the Chinese scripts, but large enough to make the printing press less practical than the alphabet. (Here's an example of a Hangul movable type: https://www.museum.go.kr/files/zin/curator_14_3.jpg)
I liked the article, but it's mistaken in its use of named centuries. It says "In the 12th century, the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan consolidated the largest empire in human history", but instead means the 1200s, which is the 13th century. (Recall the years 1-99 are the first century though the year numbers don't start in the 100s.) This mistake happens a few times in the article, but at least its consistent.
I have been workshopping a theory that the printing press was far more valuable in the West due to the small number of characters needed for printing the Latin alphabet compared with Chinese characters.
I'm admittedly unfamiliar with pre-modern Chinese printing techniques, though. Is my theory plausible or am I way off base?
It seems the difference is that the Korean Jikji (1377) is considered the oldest extant book printed with movable metal type, while the Tangut book (1139?) found in China is the oldest extant book printed using wooden movable type.
But "cheap" here is not the price of a book today. A book requires someone spending at least a year writing it, specially in the past, with very bad lighting after sunset or in bad weather. That usually meant a book costing the equivalent of a car today, or even more expensive.
Chinese books were cheap compared to buying a car but way more expensive than today. And very few books could justify the investment of creating the woodblocks.
Gutenberg probably got the idea from Marco Polo,woodblock was already used for graphics in Europe, but added his knowledge with metal working and invented an alloy that expands as it cools down. That is extremely rare in metals, almost all of them contract.
That unique property gave Gutenberg type its incredible quality.
Also, Gutenberg knowledge of metal made him create a method that let you recreate the type very easily again and again when the type wears out.
And then he added the concept of the press and the distributor of ink that were taken from other professions like olive oil and wine makers(something as old as Romans in Europe).