When thinking about globalization, the thought is encompassing. The process of a large world becoming an interconnected society is comprised of small achievements. One of the greatest elements in making this achievement possible was the Gutenberg Printing Press. Named for his modernization of the printing press, Johann Gutenberg was born in the late 1300s in Germany and lived a wealthy life where both his parents were prosperous and successful. As a result, he was able to receive a good education, which would essentially help shape the world’s way of printing press forever. However, albeit Johann Gutenberg wasn’t the first to invent the printing press, and it was instead by the Chinese and Korean, Gutenberg was the one to modernize and popularize the printing press. Up until the Gutenberg Press, text in Europe was created by hand where each letter was carved into a block, comprised of materials including clay, papyrus, wax, parchment, and wood - the most prominent being wood. A mirrored image of the design would be carved onto the wood block and was sued as a template for the printing press, but the block couldn’t be edited and could only be replaced with a new copy. Regardless, the wooden blocks would wear away after a while. The making of these blocks was costly and time-consuming. Due to its extensive process, books were a symbol of high social status and thereby limited the accessibility of written books. Hence, when Johann Gutenberg manufactured his printing press, it stood out. Gutenberg was a goldsmith by trade and a polisher of gems. In the middle of the 15th century, Johann created typography that enabled movable metal letters -allowing individual letters to be interchanged- and allowed him to create numerous copies. His skills and creativity led to an accidental experiment with printing and essentially built a whole empire of manufacturing printing presses.
The first printing press was officially created around 1440 in the Holy Roman Empire and went unchanged until Gutenberg's contributions. Gutenberg’s printing press dramatically made it more convenient and practical with a dramatic decrease in the duration of how long it took to produce a book. The press created was able to generate approximately 290 different types of shapes, including upper and lower case letters, punctuation marks, and other symbols. Furthermore, as Gutenberg’s press became more prominent, Gutenberg continuously made advancements and changes to the movable type. Early typewriters required water-based ink, which wouldn’t have correlated well with his metal typewriter. Thus, Gutenberg created a glossy ink comprised of copper, lead, sulfur, and similar compound used by oil painters. The uniform blackness of his ink’s compression is considered standard quality still widely utilized to this day. Furthermore, Gutenberg's first book took him a few years to print.
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In addition to the numerous additives, churches, and devout institutions say Gutenberg’s press was an intervention to produce more Bibles and religious scripts and texts. The press provided a large number of people access to books in an individual setting for the first time without intervention from the church and state reading to them. The merge of decreasing pricing and increasing production led to space for an individual to establish their own opinions and written words. This influenced many to become writers who could express their interpretations of others’ works. However, the fact that people other than the church could put out their ideas became a seeming threat to the main publisher of the time, the church. Those in power at the time were fearful that Gutenberg’s press would jeopardize their influence and power and claimed that the press would supposedly destroy the world. Nevertheless, Gutenberg’s printing press indeed did significantly weaken their authority and destroyed their worlds. The Catholic church took initiative and introduced censorship into the print shop in 1487 when Pope Innocent VIII required all church authorities to approve of the books or texts before they are published. Churches had censored books in the past but it had been much more difficult after the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press. A few dozen forbidden texts soon became a few thousand copies of restricted texts every year.
Gutenberg’s printing press resulted in a myriad of accomplishments and influences. The fact that Gutenberg’s printing press allowed numerous quantities of the general public to create books and texts on their own ignited a spark of individuality. And hence leading to an increase of secularism and humanism, the overall view of the Renaissance. Adding on, the printing press advocated for knowledge to flourish, and a huge boom in literacy transpired. Ideas from books and all types of texts were spread quickly due to the mass production of copies of these scripts, and many of the first books produced were mainly travel literature. Despite the very visible significant contributions made by Gutenberg, he didn’t live a very financially prosperous life. During his life, he was in constant debt and wasn’t credited as the creator until further after his death.
Gutenberg expresses the idea of turning the printed press into a manufacturing process, where he could make thousands of copies quickly and efficiently. This started the notion of substituting machines for our tasks. As a result, the artisan era came to an end, and what can be imperatively known as the industrial era commences. Gutenberg's legacy will live on as his invention of the printing press helped develop printing, and would still be utilized to this day.
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