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Gutenberg’s moving type propelled Europe towards the scientific revolution
- _rpd 8y agoThis is an incredibly uncontroversial thesis, but the article provides lots of supporting statistics and graphs.
- k__ 8y agoI'm coming from Gernsheim were they told us that, in fact, Peter Schöffer was responsible to making Gutenbergs invention usable for the masses.
- skookumchuck 8y agoEach sparked a revolution in technology: 1. speaking 2. writing 3. printing press 4. telecommunications 5. internet Wonder what the next one will be!
- rahulrrixe 8y agoI am just guessing here. I feel we will get more connected to biology in the future meaning communication with your cells and what your body is trying to tell you.
- iscrewyou 8y agoMy guess. Quantum? Quantum technology leading to very high processing of data leading to studying human genes and dna and any model you throw at it.
- BurningFrog 8y agoYou forgot coffee between 3 and 4!
- randomsearch 8y agoBrain interfaces.
- black-tea 8y agoSpeaking is the only one on that list not generally considered a technology. Every human civilisation we know about has developed spoken language. It seems to be built in to us. Writing has only been independently invented a few times in history, as far as we know. Some historians reckon that map-making came before written language and it was that which had the largest impact.
- 29athrowaway 8y ago1. ideas as spoken words 2. spoken words as symbols 3. symbols as data 4. data as packets
- zachguo 8y agoThey are all about making the transmission and accumulation of information easier.
- devoply 8y agoSo why Europe and not the East Asia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_As... I personally like the theory that it was constant war and conflict which propelled the scientific revolution. The need to compete and outdo others which went hand in hand with the industrial revolution and the politics and economics of the time that led to the french revolution.
- zachguo 8y agoBecause it's much cheaper to build a printing machine for alphabets. Cheap transmission of information caused a grassroot intellectual explosion, i.e. the Enlightenment. While in China only the ruling class could afford a printing machine for tens of thousands of characters.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoHuh? In China they just didn't bother with movable type. They printed everything, using wood block printing. (Instead of assembling each page from sorts, carve each page into the surface of a wooden block.) The press looks exactly the same.
- woodandsteel 8y agoI agree about constant war and conflict, but I would add in very different views of things like truth, nature and human psychology from Greek philosophy.
- nabla9 8y agoYou can see the economic and political differences increasing in when you map the locations of the prints and look what happens within next 100 years when the number of printed books and pamphlets increases. Scotland had eight printers by 1700, Russia had two and there were heavy controls for what could be printed. Within 100 years Scotland became a center for engineering, and many famous self taught inventors came from Scotland.
- phreeza 8y agoScotland probably also had a lot more bagpipes. A fact like this is not enough to draw conclusions from.
- paganel 8y agoYou generally need a printing press to become a good engineer, because unless you’re the new Leonardo you kind of need to read what other engineers and knowledgeable people have done before you trying out new stuff. A bag-pipe has almost nothing to do with becoming an engineer.
- nabla9 8y agoUnlike bagpipes there is plausible causal link between printers and engineers. Especially those with low class background.
- mci 8y agoTangent: While I get the gist of Figure 1, expressing historical prices in "daily wages" that disregard the place and the profession strikes me as sloppy [1]. [1] https://marcinciura.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/earnings-in-poland/ https://marcinciura.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/earnings-in-pol...
- zachguo 8y agoIronically this important piece of technology invented in China 400 years before Gutenberg flourished in the West while made negligible impact in China. The trajectory of history was so carelessly determined by a tiny factor, different choices in writing system. Manufacturing a printing machine for dozens of alphabets was much cheaper than making one for tens of thousands of characters.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoFor this thesis, you need to show that movable type in specific, rather than printing in general, was necessary and sufficient for the scientific revolution. China made extensive use of printing, for things like important philosophical works and also for things like recreational plays and novels. And while the West used movable type, it often seems not to have bothered to exploit the movability of the type. From the introduction to my reprint of Smyth's 1920 A Greek Grammar for Colleges: > When the Department of Classics of Harvard University acquired the plates to A Greek Grammar for Colleges by Herbert Weir Smyth (1920), the decision was promptly reached that this excellent and detailed treatise should again appear in print. > There is in fact scarcely any sector of Greek Grammar which has not marked progress as a result of extensive research or else based upon ingenious combinations of existing data. > If a revision of Smyth was therefore from many points of view a desideratum, it was clear that a complete revision would be an extremely complex task, and also, because of the difficulty and expense of making alterations in the plates, a very costly one. Many of the texts cited by Smyth have since been re-edited; some of his citations would undoubtedly prove to be in conflict with the readings of our best current texts. Yet it would be a vast and perhaps profitless undertaking to verify all the citations, make alterations where necessary, and change the commentary to the extent required. > As it turned out, even the much less ambitious revision of Smyth as originally conceived has not been possible, largely because of financial considerations. Accordingly, it is necessary to list here exactly in what respects the present revision of Smyth -- which might more modestly be termed a corrected reprint -- differs from its predecessor. > Some changes have been made in the historical comparative part of the work, particularly in Smyth's original introduction and here and there in his original Part I (Letters, Sounds, Syllables, Accent). A very few changes, again bearing on historical linguistics, have been introduced in Part II (Inflection). Prof. Sterling Dow has contributed a valuable revision of paragraphs 348 on the Greek system of notation and 350 d on dating. > In addition, lists of corrigenda have been supplied by several scholars, and these have been silently inserted wherever appropriate. > Perhaps one caveat is in order. The student unfamiliar with the reconstruction of assumed intermediary forms may sometimes be puzzled by Smyth's use of such forms with no indication that the actually occurred or else are purely hypothetical. It would have been tempting to mark all the non-existent reconstructions with the now traditional asterisk as is customary in works on historical linguistics. > One important lacuna in Smyth must be pointed out since it has not been filled: there is no section on prosody. So Harvard came into possession of the undestroyed plates for printing a classic work, and wanted to update it with the last 40 years of research in the field. But that was cost-prohibitive. They couldn't even adjust the notation, since that would have required re-setting much of the book. They could insert whole pages, and they could make changes to a small number of individual pages -- and both of those things would have been true if the book had been block-printed originally instead of being set with movable type. It is not obvious to me that Western printing with movable type offered all that much advantage over Chinese block printing, leaving the logistics of the writing system aside. Movable type made it easier to destroy works that didn't sell well, because their materials could be cannibalized for new works. But it didn't make it easier to reprint works that were in demand, and it didn't make it much easier to produce works originally -- most of the work is in the arranging, not the materials cost.
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- Merrill 8y agoIt was actually the development of cheap paper that propelled the use of Gutenberg's movable type. So long as either writing or printing was done on very expensive parchment and vellum made from animal hides, there was not much economic advantage from movable type because print runs on a very expensive medium would be short. The cost of materials dominated the labor costs. About 1350 the price of paper began to fall exponentially in England and Holland. This made movable type economic almost 100 years later. See Figure 5 on page 10 of "Prices and the Growth of the European Knowledge Economy, 1200-2007" https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:384596/FULLTEXT01.pdf https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:384596/FULLTEXT0... The Moore's Law of paper prices was to printing as the Moore's Law of silicon integrated circuits is to the internet.
- askvictor 8y agoBegan to fall logarithmically perhaps?
- chmod775 8y agoRadical idea: Could it be that both cheap paper and Gutenberg's invention contributed directly?
- nonbel 8y agoIt wasn't either of those things. It was only possible due to the development of novel ink: https://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/ink.html https://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/ink.html
- jacobush 8y agoI'd argue type and ink were an integral invention.
- Merrill 8y agoCould be, but it appears that the price of paper started its decline long before movable type was invented. Using the internet analogy, movable type printing would be more like the LCD flat screen, which contributes mightily to the internet (especially mobile) but well after the Moore's Laws of integrated circuits, magnetic storage, and optical communications technologies have provided the basic infrastructure.
- bb101 8y agoIf you're interested in topics such as these, I can highly recommend reading Ian Mortimer's Centuries of Change [1]. The moving type features heavily, as do clocks and looking glasses (mirrors). One memorable example: thanks to moving type, women could publish views that were, at the time, at odds with views in a male-dominated society. Previously such manuscripts, being few in number, would have been easily destroyed or restricted, whereas distribution of printed books became harder to control. Books also reduced the stranglehold of education held by the clergy, with women and common folk learning how to read and educating themselves with the help of the printed book. The Bible was the best-seller at the time -- Mortimer quips that it was one of the world's first "self help" books. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20493659-centuries-of-change https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20493659-centuries-of-ch...
- sctb 8y agoA different but very related paper, “How the medium shapes the message: Printing and the rise of the arts and sciences ”: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0205771 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....