A printing press is a machine that applies pressure to transfer ink onto a surface made of paper, cloth, or a similar material. Its workers are known as printing press operators. It marked a significant improvement on earlier methods, in which the paper was rubbed by hand to transfer applied ink to the printing surface.
The printing press was invented by the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, and its subsequent global spread revolutionized literary production and communication during the early modern period. The spread of printing brought about an era of mass communication in European society, allowing information to quickly spread across Europe and contributing to the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. The cost of printed texts declined and their availability increased, facilitating higher adult literacy rates across Europe. Books increasingly appeared in vernacular languages rather than Latin, and national languages were standardized.
The basic design of the wooden handpress was largely consistent for over three centuries, until the Industrial Revolution. By 1800 Lord Stanhope had built a new iron printing press printing a sheet at one pull. In 1814, The Times adopted Friedrich Koenig's new presses, which incorporated steam power and rotary motion. Richard M. Hoe's rotary printing press, introduced in 1843, enabled much higher output; later rotary presses could produce millions of page impressions in a day. During the twentieth century, the letterpress was largely replaced by offset printing, phototypesetting, and digital printing in commercial work.
History
Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press around 1440, utilizing four existing technologies: the screw press, movable type, the codex book format, and mechanized paper production. The economic and cultural changes of late medieval Europe brought about viable commercial conditions for his press. The urban middle class grew alongside trade and commerce, while the growing number of universities since the twelfth century had increased demand for books. Hand-copying was slow and expensive, and by the fifteenth century, the supply of manuscripts was much less than the demand.; ; Gutenberg integrated these four technologies into a single working system and added a number of innovations of his own, including a hand mold for casting type and an oil-based ink suited to metal type.
Technological factors
The first factor, the screw press, permitted direct pressure to be applied on a flat plane. Used for a variety of tasks and introduced by the Romans in the 1st century AD, it was often used by farmers for pressing grapes to make wine and olives to make oil.; ; Gutenberg may also have been inspired by the paper presses which operated similarly to the screw press and were used across the German lands from the late 14th century. He adopted the basic design of the screw press, thereby mechanizing the printing process. Printing brought the machine different demands, and Gutenberg adapted the construction so that the platen (a flat surface) exerted even pressure across the paper with minimal smearing. Gutenberg introduced a movable undertable with a level surface on which the sheets could be swiftly changed.
Movable type is the typographical principle of writing a text from individual reusable characters. The Chinese artisan Bi Sheng invented the first movable type in the 11th century during the Song dynasty, using characters made of baked clay. Around 1300, Wang Zhen developed a set of movable wooden type, arranged on revolving tables, which he used to print a local gazetteer. Wang wrote about his invention in his agricultural treatise. Woodblock printing remained the primary method in East Asia. The oldest surviving book incorporating metal movable type is the Jikji dating to 1377, produced under the Korean state of Goryeo. However, none of the various East Asian methods gained widespread usage, largely due to their relative inefficiency. The logographic script used in China included thousands of distinct characters, resulting in high production costs for a full set of type. The Gutenberg press benefited from its use of the Latin alphabet with a relatively small set of characters.; : "Gutenberg's invention took full advantage of the degree of abstraction in representing language forms that was offered by the alphabet and by the Western forms of script that were current in the fifteenth century."
The codex book format also dated to the Roman Empire, and was of utmost significance in the history of the book. By 500 AD, Christian and Muslim scribes had shifted from using scrolls to using codices.: "The most momentous development in the history of the book until the invention of printing was the replacement of the roll by the codex; this we may define as a collection of sheets of any material, folded double and fastened together at the back or spine, and usually protected by covers." (p. 1) The codex proved more convenient than the scroll format because of its greater legibility, compact arrangement, lower costs, and the availability of both left and right pages.
Medieval papermakers had successfully mechanized the production of paper. Water-powered paper mills were in usage by 1282, resulting in much greater production and replacing the tedious processes associated with Chinese; ; and Muslim papermaking.; The number of papermaking centers grew rapidly in late 13th-century Italy, causing paper to become much cheaper than parchment. These centers became more common in Germany a century later.
However, the increased usage of paper was just as dependent on the rise of movable-type printing.; : "In the West, the only inhibiting expense in the production of writings for an increasingly literate market was the manual labor of the scribe himself. With his mechanization by movable-type printing in the 1440s, the manufacture of paper, until then relatively confined, began to spread very widely. The Paper Revolution of the thirteenth century thus entered a new era." Codices of parchment are superior in quality to any other writing material,: "Despite all that has been said above, even the strongest supporters of papyrus would not deny that parchment of good quality is the finest writing material ever devised by man. It is immensely strong, remains flexible indefinitely under normal conditions, does not deteriorate with age, and possesses a smooth, even surface which is both pleasant to the eye and provides unlimited scope for the finest writing and illumination." and Gutenberg still made great use of them in his edition of the 42-line Bible.The ratio between paper and parchment copies is estimated at around 150 to 30 (). After much experimentation, he concluded that the formula for an oil-based ink worked best for printing with metal type.
Gutenberg's press
Gutenberg began working on the printing press around 1436, when he partnered with the gemcutter Andreas Dritzehn and the paper miller Andreas Heilmann. The first known mention of Gutenberg's work is in a 1439 lawsuit against him which describes his types, type molds, and collection of metals. Gutenberg had formerly worked as a professional goldsmith, and had obtained knowledge of metals from that craft. He was the first to produce type from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony. This alloy produced a particularly durable type suitable for high-quality printing. To create these lead types, Gutenberg used a special matrix that allowed him to rapidly and precisely mold new type blocks from a uniform template. His type case is estimated to have contained 290 separate letter boxes including special characters, ligatures, and punctuation marks.
Gutenberg is also credited with introducing an oil-based ink, which was more durable than the previously used water-based inks. He used both paper and vellum (high-quality parchment) in his printing. He created a trial of color printing for a few of the page headings in the Gutenberg Bible, present only in some copies. The Mainz Psalter of 1453, likely designed by Gutenberg, featured elaborate red and blue printed initials and was published by his successors Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer.
Operation A classical printing press is a stationary machine about long, wide, and tall. A compositor set the type, the small individual metal letters, into the desired lines of text. Several lines were arranged at once and inserted into a wooden frame, the galley. Once the correct number of pages was composed, the galleys were laid face up in another frame called a forme, which rested on a flat stone, the bed.
The type was inked using two pads of leather called ink balls and mounted on wooden handles. The ink balls were stuffed with wool or horsehair, and the leather was usually sheepskin, but sometimes also calfskin and dogskin. The compositor pressed the ink balls together to distribute the ink evenly, and then applied the balls to the type. A sheet of dampened paper was held together by various small pins and two thin frames, the tympan and the frisket. The paper was placed on the tympan, and the frisket, which contained cut-out openings matching the type, was folded over the sheet to protect the margins from ink.
The tympan and frisket were then folded down so that the paper rested on the inked type. The rounce (a small handle) and the windlass (a winch) were used to wind the bed under the platen. The compositor pulled a long lever, the bar, which drove a screw that pressed the platen onto the paper, and the elastic nature of the machine caused the bar to spring back after each pull. The rounce was then rotated in the opposite direction to move the bed away from the platen, the tympan and frisket were lifted, and the printed sheet was removed. Human hand worked the entire process until the development in the early 19th century of iron presses, some of which could be operated by steam power.
Mass production and spread in Europe
Gutenberg's mechanical movable-type printing press, alongside consumer demand for printed copies of Bibles and other religious works, precipitated the widespread growth of the printing industry across Europe. Gutenberg's print shop in Mainz was originally the only one in Europe, but by the end of the 15th century around 270 European cities were involved in printing. As early as 1480, there were printers active in 110 different places in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, England, Bohemia and Poland. The historians Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin conclude that by this date, the printed book was used throughout Europe.
In Italy, a center of early printing, print shops existed in 77 cities and towns by 1500, while 151 locations in Italy had hosted printing at some point by 1600. In 1600, nearly 3,000 printers are known to have been active in Italy. However, printing centers soon emerged, and one third of the Italian printers published in Venice.;
By 1500, printing presses throughout Western Europe had produced over 20 million copies. Their output grew to an estimated 150–200 million copies by 1600. European printing presses could produce between 1,500 and 3,600 impressions per workday.: By comparison, with manual woodblock printing,: : ; : Encyclopædia Britannica 2006: "Printing": a skilled printer could print 1,500 to 2,000 double sheets per day. A printing block could be used for up to 25,000 prints with repairs. The Korean Kabin font metal movable type developed in 1434 could print 40 sheets per day. At least 750,000 copies of Erasmus's works were sold during his lifetime (1469–1536), while Martin Luther became Europe's most published author , at the start of the Reformation. Printers across Germany reprinted 291 editions of Luther's 45 original works, and between 1518 and 1520 they distributed 300,000 printed copies of his works, with the widespread printing surprising both the pope and secular rulers.