Printing presses and movable types
Did you know that Gutenberg invented neither the printing press nor (surprising to me) movable type?
I’m reading a pretty interesting article about the life cycles of texts. In an offhanded way, the author states at one point: “A great leap in the development of the text cycle was Gutenberg’s invention of loose type and his improved use of the printing press.” That presses had existed before, and that Gutenberg’s huge innovation was movable type itself, didn’t surprise me much (although I hadn’t thought about it before). What did surprise me was that he re-invented movable type.
Here’s a small part of what Britannica says on the topic: (please do not keel me Mr. Copyright, I’m a mere excited researcher sharing the goodness that is knowledge)
About 1041–48 a Chinese alchemist named Pi Sheng appears to have conceived of movable type made of an amalgam of clay and glue hardened by baking. He composed texts by placing the types side by side on an iron plate coated with a mixture of resin, wax, and paper ash. Gently heating this plate and then letting the plate cool solidified the type. Once the impression had been made, the type could be detached by reheating the plate. It would thus appear that Pi Sheng had found an overall solution to the many problems of typography: the manufacture, the assembling, and the recovery of indefinitely reusable type.
In about 1313 a magistrate named Wang Chen seems to have had a craftsman carve more than 60,000 characters on movable wooden blocks so that a treatise on the history of technology could be published. To him is also attributed the invention of horizontal compartmented cases that revolved about a vertical axis to permit easier handling of the type. But Wang Chen’s innovation, like that of Pi Sheng, was not followed up in China.
In Korea, on the contrary, typography, which had appeared by the first half of the 13th century, was extensively developed under the stimulus of King Htai Tjong, who, in 1403, ordered the first set of 100,000 pieces of type to be cast in bronze. Nine other fonts followed from then to 1516; two of them were made in 1420 and 1434, before Europe in its turn discovered typography.
Nifty!