5 ms·

I wish school curriculum included things like "how printing actually worked through ages". Monks writing out manuscripts is somewhat relatable since we all (at

by ekelsen 2mo ago

I wish school curriculum included things like "how printing actually worked through ages". Monks writing out manuscripts is somewhat relatable since we all (at least for now) still learn how to write. Everyone is taught the Gutenberg press was a big deal -- but how did it actually work? Why was it still a pain and how did later inventions fix those problems?

rcbdev 2mo ago
In my school curriculum here in Vienna, this was very specifically taught in history class.
- ekelsen 2mo ago
  That's really awesome! Did they have you try and typeset something by hand? I feel like for us it presented as some magical thing that made producing books trivially easy, whereas in reality typesetting a page was still very labor intensive and not that fast!
  - WalterBright 2mo ago
    The printer setup is where all the cost is, the printing itself is practically free.
    - vee-kay 2mo ago
      [dead]
    - ekelsen 2mo ago
      I think even the printing was still not _that_ fast. You needed to physically press down each page. Make sure the ink was right, replace the paper, make sure not to smudge anything, etc. I'd be surprised if they could average more than 2 pages / minute? Which for 1000 pages is still a full days work.
      - WalterBright 2mo ago
        Compare 30 seconds to print a sheet to the cost of pulling hundreds of letters out of bins, tossing worn ones out, casting new replacements, lining them up, inserting spaces, and proofreading. I'd probably want to print 1000 sheets before setting up another page. I was involved a bit in printing manuals in the 1980s. The cost of printing 100 copies vs 1000 copies was pretty much the same. The delta is the cost of the paper.
        ekelsen 2mo ago
        Another way to phrase the question: how many copies on a Gutenberg before you're even in time with typesetting? Random online estimates suggest 4 hours to typeset a page and 200 pages an hour. So 800 copies. I think this makes my point that on a Gutenberg press printing the already typeset page still wasn't that fast.
        WalterBright 2mo ago
        300:1, as I wrote earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49253673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49253673 And inevitably, efforts were made to improve the efficiency of the printer.
        ekelsen 2mo ago
        I don't see how the reduction in price from a manuscript to a gutenberg pressed book is the same as the figure I was calculating? Anyway, feels like this is no longer a productive discussion.
  - rcbdev 2mo ago
    We learned about how the Gutenberg Press physically worked, how it was based on wine presses and how difficult it supposedly was to produce a single metal letter. Also, how it was a PITA to re-arrange them to print something else, alas it was mostly used to print the Bible.
eru 2mo ago
Most of the things school curricula touch turn awful. It's never been easier for you and interested kids to learn these things on their own.
- ekelsen 2mo ago
  I know them now, the questions were rhetorical. I agree that school curricula is often bad. I disagree that we should just accept it as hopeless and not hope it could get better.
  - eru 2mo ago
    No, no, just the opposite: school curricula are full of lofty highfalutin ideas. I didn't say anything is hopeless. It's just that adding more good and lofty ideas and topics to the curriculum isn't addressing the actual bottleneck.
- Retric 2mo ago
  The vast majority of people vastly overestimate how well they learn things without the feedback of formal education. Easier on its own is therefore effectively meaningless when people aren’t actually learning beyond the most superficial layers.
  - abyssin 2mo ago
    It’s not only feedback, having arbitrary checkpoints like exams is an important motivator, and it also creates a whole culture around it that makes the learning experience into a social one.
  - jacobolus 2mo ago
    > overestimate how well they learn things without the feedback of formal education People benefit greatly from external human feedback, but 1:1 tutoring (with a good tutor) is roughtly an order of magnitude more effective and efficient than a classroom, and classrooms themselves vary wildly; in general the more participatory the better. Self learning without any help can be more effective and efficient than a typical classroom, because as it is self directed, self paced, can use the best materials someone can find and a whole variety of them vs. whatever was assigned, etc., but it takes a lot of skill (which comes from past practice) and effort on the part of the learner. Many researchers/scholars are doing significant amounts of self-directed learning as their career, and can get very good at it with decades of practice. The speed of learning in a classroom with 15+ students is inevitably unbelievably slow, and the time is used incredibly inefficiently. This isn't any particular problem with specific teachers, but as far as I can tell an inherent problem with aligning a bunch of people's preparation, motivation, and attention, and a problem with giving feedback in a 1:many setting. Teaching/learning speed generally seems worse at a primary school level vs. at a college level, given a very good teacher in both; I'm not sure if this is because of better prepared (because older) students, or just more motivated students.
WalterBright 2mo ago
Gutenberg's press was made out of a wine press. Letters were cast in lead, then lined up on a tray under the press. The tray was inked. A piece of paper was set over the inked letters, and the wine press forced the paper onto the letters. This cut the cost of a book by a factor of 300(!). The trouble for Gutenberg was it was too easy to duplicate his press, and that combined with not being good at business led to his bankruptcy.
- ymolodtsov 2mo ago
  The paper was still expensive and there wasn't yet as much demand for books.
  - jhbadger 2mo ago
    And Gutenberg still was shooting for the high-end of the market -- he had his printed Bibles touched up by artists (Illuminated capitals, some color added here and there), meaning his Bibles weren't much cheaper than hand-copied because he believed that nobody wanted just cheap, functional books.
    - WalterBright 2mo ago
      Commoners weren't literate in those days, so I expect his literate customers would be wealthy and would be willing to pay for an illuminated book. But as books proliferated, it suddenly became advantageous for commoners to learn to read (the Bible was the typical primer used), and a virtuous cycle began and revolutionized everything.
cheesecakegood 2mo ago
I was able to do something probably few have, which is visit one of those small hole in the wall museums staffed essentially by just a single passionate old guy assembled with his life savings, dedicated to the printing press. Incredible experience. Anyways, it’s been about 15 years, but the thing that made an impression on me was that it wasn’t just one invention. Gutenberg basically had to assemble like two dozen separate innovations to make it all work. The type alloy (3 metals!) had to be just soft enough to cast easily, just expandable enough to set well, just hard enough to last. How to cast in quantity and re-melt as needed. The ink had to be just runny enough to apply easily but not so runny it gets everywhere, sticky enough to stick to type, and dry at a good middle speed. The blotter to apply the ink to type. The system of wooden casing to hold the pieces together with the right spacing, that won’t fall apart. How to set up the casing. The screw press needed to have very even pressure. The paper needed to be able to slide and take ink properly without spreading but also not tear. Proper fonts and ligatures for the type. And so on… IIRC most things stayed pretty similar for a few hundred years, mostly changing stuff like the paper feeding mechanism or tweaking ink application or minor variations in how the lever or screw work. So to be honest, Gutenberg did almost all the hard work himself. It was a big deal because a lot of these smaller inventions had to come together for a narrow purpose all at once (on top of the obvious huge historical effect of cheaper books!)
- afc 2mo ago
  Thank you for taking the time to type that, I found it informative and interesting. Like we like to think of it as a single idea that worked well, but it's actually a ton of work to get a million details just right, and failure in just a few of them would just have made the whole endeavor (of the printing press) fail.
- russdill 2mo ago
  Many of the same technologies enables woodcut presses which already existed.
- melvinroest 2mo ago
  What small hole in the wall museum was that? I might travel to it no matter where it is in the world. Sounds awesome, I'm hyped up
bell-cot 2mo ago
And at least as important are the surrounding economic, social, and archival systems for printed information. How much of the populace was literate? Was there licensing (for copyists or printers), copyright, public domain, or public libraries? Distribution systems? What sorts of material were being copied or printed? And how long did those materials physically last? My understanding is that there's a vast amount that we don't know about Ancient Rome, because their "paper" was papyrus - cheap and easy to make, but easily destroyed by rot in damp environments and by crumbling in dry environments.
- tremon 2mo ago
  All of those considerations are predicated on having the printing press first. There is little value in advanced literacy if written knowledge is rare or hard to come by. There is no need for licensing if verbatim copying takes a lifetime rather than an afternoon. Why would someone need an elaborate distribution system if their output is limited to (let's say) 2 books/year?
  - bell-cot 2mo ago
    > All those considerations are predicated on having the printing press first. Not true. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria Scribes are just lower efficiency, like wood-burning railroad trains vs. horse-drawn wagons. Not sure what you mean by "advanced literacy", but credible experts seem to put literacy rates in Ancient Rome (zero printing presses) in the neighborhood of 20%. If you consider how little demand (for printed material) there could be from slaves, rural peasants, and such - that's damned high. You seem focused on books with enormous page counts, requiring 6 months to a lifetime to copy. That's really not how societies without modern (ultra-cheap) printing technology did things. Same as their horse-drawn carriages didn't weigh anywhere near what a modern SUV does. (Yes, hand-copied Bibles were big. And rare. Are you trying to judge the size and cost of typical medieval buildings by the surviving the cathedrals and castles?)
danso 2mo ago
That’d be nice, as a news nerd and pagemaker monkey myself. But school curriculums don’t even have the space to teach touch typing anymore. Or huge chunks of U.S. history (nevermind histories of countries far older).
aleph_minus_one 2mo ago
> I wish school curriculum included things like "how printing actually worked through ages". [...] Everyone is taught the Gutenberg press was a big deal -- but how did it actually work? Just go to technological museums in cities near you: there you can see and learn all these things.

by ekelsen 2mo ago

rcbdev 2mo ago

In my school curriculum here in Vienna, this was very specifically taught in history class.

ekelsen 2mo ago
That's really awesome! Did they have you try and typeset something by hand? I feel like for us it presented as some magical thing that made producing books trivially easy, whereas in reality typesetting a page was still very labor intensive and not that fast!
- WalterBright 2mo ago
  The printer setup is where all the cost is, the printing itself is practically free.
  - vee-kay 2mo ago
    [dead]
  - ekelsen 2mo ago
    I think even the printing was still not _that_ fast. You needed to physically press down each page. Make sure the ink was right, replace the paper, make sure not to smudge anything, etc. I'd be surprised if they could average more than 2 pages / minute? Which for 1000 pages is still a full days work.
    - WalterBright 2mo ago
      Compare 30 seconds to print a sheet to the cost of pulling hundreds of letters out of bins, tossing worn ones out, casting new replacements, lining them up, inserting spaces, and proofreading. I'd probably want to print 1000 sheets before setting up another page. I was involved a bit in printing manuals in the 1980s. The cost of printing 100 copies vs 1000 copies was pretty much the same. The delta is the cost of the paper.
      - ekelsen 2mo ago
        Another way to phrase the question: how many copies on a Gutenberg before you're even in time with typesetting? Random online estimates suggest 4 hours to typeset a page and 200 pages an hour. So 800 copies. I think this makes my point that on a Gutenberg press printing the already typeset page still wasn't that fast.
        WalterBright 2mo ago
        300:1, as I wrote earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49253673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49253673 And inevitably, efforts were made to improve the efficiency of the printer.
        ekelsen 2mo ago
        I don't see how the reduction in price from a manuscript to a gutenberg pressed book is the same as the figure I was calculating? Anyway, feels like this is no longer a productive discussion.
- rcbdev 2mo ago
  We learned about how the Gutenberg Press physically worked, how it was based on wine presses and how difficult it supposedly was to produce a single metal letter. Also, how it was a PITA to re-arrange them to print something else, alas it was mostly used to print the Bible.

eru 2mo ago

Most of the things school curricula touch turn awful. It's never been easier for you and interested kids to learn these things on their own.

ekelsen 2mo ago
I know them now, the questions were rhetorical. I agree that school curricula is often bad. I disagree that we should just accept it as hopeless and not hope it could get better.
- eru 2mo ago
  No, no, just the opposite: school curricula are full of lofty highfalutin ideas. I didn't say anything is hopeless. It's just that adding more good and lofty ideas and topics to the curriculum isn't addressing the actual bottleneck.
Retric 2mo ago
The vast majority of people vastly overestimate how well they learn things without the feedback of formal education. Easier on its own is therefore effectively meaningless when people aren’t actually learning beyond the most superficial layers.
- abyssin 2mo ago
  It’s not only feedback, having arbitrary checkpoints like exams is an important motivator, and it also creates a whole culture around it that makes the learning experience into a social one.
- jacobolus 2mo ago
  > overestimate how well they learn things without the feedback of formal education People benefit greatly from external human feedback, but 1:1 tutoring (with a good tutor) is roughtly an order of magnitude more effective and efficient than a classroom, and classrooms themselves vary wildly; in general the more participatory the better. Self learning without any help can be more effective and efficient than a typical classroom, because as it is self directed, self paced, can use the best materials someone can find and a whole variety of them vs. whatever was assigned, etc., but it takes a lot of skill (which comes from past practice) and effort on the part of the learner. Many researchers/scholars are doing significant amounts of self-directed learning as their career, and can get very good at it with decades of practice. The speed of learning in a classroom with 15+ students is inevitably unbelievably slow, and the time is used incredibly inefficiently. This isn't any particular problem with specific teachers, but as far as I can tell an inherent problem with aligning a bunch of people's preparation, motivation, and attention, and a problem with giving feedback in a 1:many setting. Teaching/learning speed generally seems worse at a primary school level vs. at a college level, given a very good teacher in both; I'm not sure if this is because of better prepared (because older) students, or just more motivated students.

WalterBright 2mo ago

Gutenberg's press was made out of a wine press. Letters were cast in lead, then lined up on a tray under the press. The tray was inked. A piece of paper was set over the inked letters, and the wine press forced the paper onto the letters. This cut the cost of a book by a factor of 300(!). The trouble for Gutenberg was it was too easy to duplicate his press, and that combined with not being good at business led to his bankruptcy.

ymolodtsov 2mo ago
The paper was still expensive and there wasn't yet as much demand for books.
- jhbadger 2mo ago
  And Gutenberg still was shooting for the high-end of the market -- he had his printed Bibles touched up by artists (Illuminated capitals, some color added here and there), meaning his Bibles weren't much cheaper than hand-copied because he believed that nobody wanted just cheap, functional books.
  - WalterBright 2mo ago
    Commoners weren't literate in those days, so I expect his literate customers would be wealthy and would be willing to pay for an illuminated book. But as books proliferated, it suddenly became advantageous for commoners to learn to read (the Bible was the typical primer used), and a virtuous cycle began and revolutionized everything.

cheesecakegood 2mo ago

I was able to do something probably few have, which is visit one of those small hole in the wall museums staffed essentially by just a single passionate old guy assembled with his life savings, dedicated to the printing press. Incredible experience. Anyways, it’s been about 15 years, but the thing that made an impression on me was that it wasn’t just one invention. Gutenberg basically had to assemble like two dozen separate innovations to make it all work. The type alloy (3 metals!) had to be just soft enough to cast easily, just expandable enough to set well, just hard enough to last. How to cast in quantity and re-melt as needed. The ink had to be just runny enough to apply easily but not so runny it gets everywhere, sticky enough to stick to type, and dry at a good middle speed. The blotter to apply the ink to type. The system of wooden casing to hold the pieces together with the right spacing, that won’t fall apart. How to set up the casing. The screw press needed to have very even pressure. The paper needed to be able to slide and take ink properly without spreading but also not tear. Proper fonts and ligatures for the type. And so on… IIRC most things stayed pretty similar for a few hundred years, mostly changing stuff like the paper feeding mechanism or tweaking ink application or minor variations in how the lever or screw work. So to be honest, Gutenberg did almost all the hard work himself. It was a big deal because a lot of these smaller inventions had to come together for a narrow purpose all at once (on top of the obvious huge historical effect of cheaper books!)

afc 2mo ago
Thank you for taking the time to type that, I found it informative and interesting. Like we like to think of it as a single idea that worked well, but it's actually a ton of work to get a million details just right, and failure in just a few of them would just have made the whole endeavor (of the printing press) fail.
russdill 2mo ago
Many of the same technologies enables woodcut presses which already existed.
melvinroest 2mo ago
What small hole in the wall museum was that? I might travel to it no matter where it is in the world. Sounds awesome, I'm hyped up

bell-cot 2mo ago

And at least as important are the surrounding economic, social, and archival systems for printed information. How much of the populace was literate? Was there licensing (for copyists or printers), copyright, public domain, or public libraries? Distribution systems? What sorts of material were being copied or printed? And how long did those materials physically last? My understanding is that there's a vast amount that we don't know about Ancient Rome, because their "paper" was papyrus - cheap and easy to make, but easily destroyed by rot in damp environments and by crumbling in dry environments.

tremon 2mo ago
All of those considerations are predicated on having the printing press first. There is little value in advanced literacy if written knowledge is rare or hard to come by. There is no need for licensing if verbatim copying takes a lifetime rather than an afternoon. Why would someone need an elaborate distribution system if their output is limited to (let's say) 2 books/year?
- bell-cot 2mo ago
  > All those considerations are predicated on having the printing press first. Not true. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria Scribes are just lower efficiency, like wood-burning railroad trains vs. horse-drawn wagons. Not sure what you mean by "advanced literacy", but credible experts seem to put literacy rates in Ancient Rome (zero printing presses) in the neighborhood of 20%. If you consider how little demand (for printed material) there could be from slaves, rural peasants, and such - that's damned high. You seem focused on books with enormous page counts, requiring 6 months to a lifetime to copy. That's really not how societies without modern (ultra-cheap) printing technology did things. Same as their horse-drawn carriages didn't weigh anywhere near what a modern SUV does. (Yes, hand-copied Bibles were big. And rare. Are you trying to judge the size and cost of typical medieval buildings by the surviving the cathedrals and castles?)

danso 2mo ago

That’d be nice, as a news nerd and pagemaker monkey myself. But school curriculums don’t even have the space to teach touch typing anymore. Or huge chunks of U.S. history (nevermind histories of countries far older).

aleph_minus_one 2mo ago

> I wish school curriculum included things like "how printing actually worked through ages". [...] Everyone is taught the Gutenberg press was a big deal -- but how did it actually work? Just go to technological museums in cities near you: there you can see and learn all these things.