I came across an article So, Gutenberg Didn’t Actually Invent the Printing Press. The claim the author made, that Gutenberg didn’t invent the printing press, is incorrect. The press part is the one thing that Gutenberg actually did invent. I get the spirit of what the author is trying to achieve. Here are some titles that are actually correct:
The author is confusing printing with moveable type with a printing press. The second word is important: press. Gutenberg invented the press, not the printing, and combined it with a knowledge of metalworking, ink and paper to produce beautiful printed bibles.
As the article acknowledges, Gutenberg didn’t invent movable metal type, that had been around for hundreds of years. He didn’t invent block-printing, that too, had been around for hundreds of years. But he did combine a number of technologies, ink, paper, metal type with a screw press of his own design, likely borrowed from the screw presses used in winemaking.
I’ve been reading the earlier text on printing, Mechanick Exercises: Or The Doctrine Of Handy-Works by Joseph Moxon in 1683. Moxon immediately acknowledges that printing with movable type originated in the far-east. There has been no grand conspiracy to obscure this fact.
Here’s Jared Diamond making similar mistakes but that’s for another day.
Published December 4, 2020 in Reading notes