4 ms·

I was shocked by how eurocentric this is. Expected to see China SOMEWHERE . . . since printing was invented there . . . it is cool though, if incomplete.

• ddoran 10y ago
  > "The Atlas of Early Printing is an interactive site designed to be used as a tool for teaching the early history of printing in Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century." [https://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/about.php https://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/about.php]
  • sctb 10y ago
    Thank you, we've updated the submission title to make this clear.
• AvenueIngres 10y ago
  Not to disparage one of the four great inventions of the Chinese but Europeans invented the printing press which is kind of the crux here: massive partially automated distribution of knowledge.
  • douche 10y ago
    The Chinese did have movable type and all of the building-blocks centuries earlier, though. Unfortunately, much of the head start the Chinese had in printing seems to have been chewed up by their devilishly difficult writing system. Learning the thousands of characters necessary to become literate in Chinese is a steeper task than the couple dozen of Latin letters and the few tens of ways that they combine phonetically. Not to mention the purely prosaic result that a Latin script requires far, far fewer different varieties of type for printing. On the other hand, I am not sure that European literacy and printing would have exploded so quickly without the Protestant Reformation inducing demand for the printed word, or rather Word.