Johannes Gutenberg

1398
Mainz, Germany
February 3, 1468
Mainz, Germany

Inventor, printer

In the 1450s the German inventor Johannes Gutenberg perfected the printing press, which is recognized as one of the most important advances in Western (non-Asian) history. A mechanism by which small metal pieces engraved with single characters (letters) could be arranged to form words and sentences, the first press was used in Germany to print the Bible (the Christian holy book). Soon presses began to spring up all over Europe, and the impact was enormous. Literacy grew rapidly and knowledge spread as literature became readily—and affordably—available to many people for the first time. With the aid of printing, the ideas born in the Italian Renaissance (a revival of ancient Greek and Roman culture) during the late 1300s spread northward to France, England, Spain, the Netherlands, Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden, and Norway), and eastern Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Printers use new technology

Around 1440 experiments with "writing mechanically" were being undertaken in three different areas of Europe. Laurens Coster (c. 1370–c. 1440) of Haarlem, Holland, was said to be experimenting with a printing press. Although some historians have accepted Coster as the inventor of printing, most now give the credit to Gutenberg. The printing press combined two known but separate technologies, the screw press and the steel punch. The screw press consisted of a large upright screw that held two parallel frames. The screw press had long been used in linen, paper, and wine making. Printers adapted the frames of the screw press to hold "forms," or individual letters of the alphabet made of molded metal. The steel punch had been used by mints (places where coins are made) and goldsmiths to impress images on a softer metal and thus create a mold. Printers used this method to make molds for individual letters, whose "forms" were then cast in an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony (metallic element).

Fifteenth-century illustrations show three men—a compositor, an inker, and an operator—running a printing press. The compositor set letters in the two frames. The inker set the frames one above the other in the press, smeared them with ink, and inserted sheets of paper between them. The operator swung a lever to bring the two frames together and imprint two, four, or eight pages of text on each side of the sheet. The size of the book itself depended on the number of times a full sheet of paper was folded. The large folio (one fold, two pages) was used for academic works, and the smaller quarto (two folds, four pages) was used for literary texts. The still smaller octavo (four folds, eight pages) was at first used for Psalters and books of hours. Ideally, such a team could run off more than one thousand sheets from a pair of frames in a day's work, thus completing one part of the edition while the compositors prepared the frames for the next. But that meant working in close coordination. It took time to train a press team, and the printer had to buy the required equipment—press, types, and paper—before he could count on getting any money back from sales of a completed book. The risks involved in the printing business ultimately contributed to the failure of Gutenberg's own print shop.

Suffers financial setbacks

There is no record of Gutenberg's whereabouts after 1444, but he appears again in Mainz according to a document dated October 1448. By 1450 he is known to have had a printing plant. He borrowed eight hundred guilders (a type of money) from the rich financier Johann Fust (1400–1466) for tools and equipment. In December 1452 Gutenberg had to pay off his debt. When he was unable to do so, he and Fust reached a new agreement, under which Gutenberg received another similar loan and the financier became a partner in the enterprise. At that time Gutenberg already printed with movable type, thus making the idea conceived in Strassburg a reality in Mainz. A valuable assistant to Gutenberg was his young employee and disciple Peter Schoeffer (c. 1425–1502), who joined the firm in 1452. In spite of their successes, the relationship between Gutenberg and Fust took a bad turn. Fust sued Gutenberg for two thousand guilders, and in 1455 the partnership was dissolved. Fust won the court action, thereby acquiring Gutenberg's materials and tools, and went into partnership with Schoeffer, who was his son-in-law.

Gutenberg's Mainz printshop may have contained as many as six printing presses. There is no way to know how many works Gutenberg produced, however, because tracing printed works of the fifteenth century is difficult. Also there are no surviving texts with Gutenberg's name on them. Nevertheless, historians believe that Gutenberg printed the Vulgate, the official Latin translation of the Bible. More than two hundred copies of the Vulgate were released during 1454 and 1455, some on calfskin, known as vellum, and the others on paper. Each page was composed of forty-two lines of print. For this reason, the Vulgate is known as the Forty-Two-Line Bible, but is also called the Gutenberg Bible or the Mazarin Bible. The work stands as the crowning achievement of many years of collaboration by the Gutenberg-Fust-Schoeffer team. One might expect that such an experimental "first book" would be crude and error filled. On the contrary, the forty-two-line Bible is a work of near perfection. The Gothic type is sharp and clear and the right hand margins are straight. Many of the copies were beautifully illuminated (illustrated with brightly colored paint) by hand in the spaces left by the printer for capital letters and headings. This process had been perfected during the Middle Ages (c. 400–1400) in the production of manuscripts.

As was true for much of Gutenberg's life, the inventor did not receive credit for his work. When the first finished copies of the Vulgate were published in early 1456, Gutenberg—undoubtedly the main creator of the work—no longer belonged to the partnership. The cost of production apparently exceeded the profits from sales, and Gutenberg was already being sued by Fust. Fust continued printing successfully with Gutenberg's equipment and also with machinery improved by Schoeffer. In the meantime Gutenberg had to start all over again. It is believed that the fruit of his work in these years is the Thirty-Six-Line Bible and the famous Catholicon, a kind of encyclopedia. Again, as Gutenberg never put his name on any of his works, assigning the printing to him is merely guesswork.

An important invention

Johannes Gutenberg perfected the method of manufacturing moveable lead-based type that met the precise and exacting the requirements for printed books. He apparently experimented with many materials in his attempt to make printing more efficient. He worked out a system of typecasting each letter of the alphabet individually with an engraved steel punch and matrix (mold) box. His formulas for both lead type and ink could still be used today. For the type he used an alloy (blend) of 80 percent lead, 5 percent tin, and 15 percent antimony. For the ink he used a mixture of linseed oil, varnish, and lampblack (carbon produced by burning oil in a lamp). Book pages were printed on either calfskin or on paper, which was cheaper. The printing press changed the course of Western civilization, and represented one of the most influential inventions in human history.

Lives in poverty

In 1462 Fust's printing office was set on fire and Gutenberg and other craftsmen suffered losses as well. As a result of this disaster many typographers left Mainz and settled in other areas, where their carefully guarded secrets of printing began to spread. Gutenberg remained in Mainz, but he was again reduced to poverty. He requested the archiepiscopal (church district) court for a sinecure, an office given by the church that requires little or no work and provides a salary. Guttenberg's request was granted in 1465, and his post at the court brought him some economic relief. Although Gutenberg continued his printing activities, works from this final period in his life are unknown because of lack of identification.

Reportedly, Gutenberg became blind in his last months, while he was living partly in Mainz and partly in the neighboring village of Eltville. He died in Saint Victor's parish in Mainz on February 3, 1468, and was buried in the church of the Franciscan convent in that town. His physical appearance is unknown, though there are many imaginary depictions of his face and figure, including statues erected in Mainz and Strassburg. In 1900 the Gutenberg Museum was founded in Mainz with an attached library that contains objects and documents related to the invention of typography.

Gutenberg has great influence

Gutenberg's work in the development of the printing press was in many ways a turning point in the history of Western civilization. The spread of printing had a limited effect on the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century, but it influenced cultural and commercial developments in northern and western Europe in the sixteenth century. During the last half of the fifteenth century, printshops, often staffed with master printers of German origin, appeared in many cities and towns in western Europe. The availability of printed books fundamentally changed the methods by which students, scholars, and other educated people stored, retrieved, and shared information. Gutenberg's invention guaranteed that information could be reproduced accurately, quickly, and cheaply. The manuscript and oral culture of medieval Europe shifted to the visual world of the printed page. Previously, handwritten or copied manuscripts had no punctuation or visual clues for paragraph structure, so they had to be read out loud or memorized. When the shift from hand-copied manuscript to the printed page occurred, there was less need to memorize texts or to read them aloud.

One result of the broad distribution of printed materials was the censorship of books. This practice was unnecessary in the limited world of the scribe (a person who copies texts), but it became common in the centuries following the development of printing. Although the printing press had little impact on the Italian Renaissance, many of the books produced in the first fifty years of printing were works of ancient Greeks and Romans that had been revived by fifteenth-century scholars. Also popular were late-medieval and early Renaissance writers such as the poets Petrarch (1304–1374; see entry) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). Writing and composing new and original works for the printing press became common in the first several decades of the sixteenth century. Another new use of printing was the production of maps relating to the discoveries in the New World (the European term for the Americas). Accurate maps were essential to Europeans in understanding the new world.

Although information about Gutenberg's life is lacking, there is enough evidence to show that he deserves the acclaim he has received from the beginning of the age of print to the present. Gutenberg focused on and solved many complex problems of printing. His first major effort of book printing with moveable type, the forty-two line Bible, will remain a remarkable product of a revolutionary invention, the Gutenberg press.

For More Information

Books

Burch, Joann Johansen. Fine Print: A Story about Johann Gutenberg. Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Books, 1991.

Fisher, Leonard Everett. Gutenberg. New York: Macmillan, 1993.

Krensky, Stephen. Breaking into Print: Before and After the Invention of the Printing Press. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996.

Web Sites

The Gutenberg Bible. [Online] Available http://prodigi.bl.uk/gutenbg/, January 3, 2002.

"Gutenberg, Johannes." Famous People in Printing History. [Online] Available http://www.ssc.cc.il.us/acad/career/depts/technology/ppt/whatsup/trivia/gutenbrg.htm, April 5, 2002.

Gutenberg Museum. [Online] Available http://www.gutenberg.de/, April 5, 2002.