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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 wit

• WalterBright 5y ago
  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.
  • Retric 5y ago
    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.
    • WalterBright 5y ago
      > 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.
      • neolog 5y ago
        > Just imagine someone lighting up your living room with an arc welder - it's the same thing. You'd go blind. You could use a diffuser/lampshade, no?
        • WalterBright 5y ago
          Take a look at welding goggles: https://www.amazon.com/YESWELDER-Powered-Darkening-Welding-Grinding/dp/B07Y6244WP https://www.amazon.com/YESWELDER-Powered-Darkening-Welding-G... 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. No thanks, I'll take an Edison bulb for the win!
          • Retric 5y ago
            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.
            • Retric 5y ago
              > In the 1970’s Ops, 1870’s
            • WalterBright 5y ago
              Edison's bulbs pretty much created the lighting industry. Arc lighting was nowhere near as useful. Why would Edison have even bothered if arc lights were plenty good enough?
• dbt00 5y ago
  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...
  • jlg23 5y ago
    Or it's the place in history of a man who provided a tool that allowed dissemination of "heretic" ideas, thus enabling reformation.
  • mymythisisthis 5y ago
    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.
• hoophoop 5y ago
  > that's not why we remember him 99% of people believe that he single-handedly invented the press with movable type. Ask around.
  • geoduck14 5y ago
    Can confirm. I totally thought that. Also, I represent 99% of America.
  • Igelau 5y ago
    Are people going to start protesting on my lawn now that I'm in the 1%?
  • Fern_Blossom 5y ago
    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.
    • 5y ago
• lolinder 5y ago
  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.
  • ptr2voidStar 5y ago
    Hear, hear!
• kragen 5y ago
  Gutenberg didn't just invent typemetal; he also invented printer's ink.
• wombatmobile 5y ago
  "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." -- Wikipedia
• dhosek 5y ago
  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.