Professor David Peimer
Gutenberg and the Printing Revolution: Why is it Important to Remember Gutenberg today?
Professor David Peimer - Gutenberg and the Printing Revolution Why is it Important to Remember Gutenberg Today
- Okay, so, hi everybody and welcome and hope everybody’s well everywhere. So, today, going to kick off with Johannes Gutenberg, who lived 1400 to 1468, Germany, who basically invented the printing press, or what was called the movable printing type. And why it’s so important, asking a couple of questions. Why is it so important to remember Gutenberg today? Does he speak to us in some way? What can he remind us or his invention at least? And I guess the other main point is how this for me is so linked to the birth of the Renaissance, which then gives birth to the Enlightenment period, which I know Julie and Patrick and Dennis and everybody else has spoken about a lot. And how perhaps we are now, you know, in the last gasp stages of the Enlightenment, Post-Renaissances Enlightenment period, which is part of the, if you like, the darkening clouds hovering in many countries around the world at the moment that we all sense and feel and practically can see happening.
So for these reasons, I think it’s important, really, really significant and quite profound to look at this one guy who lived in a small, which was a small town then in Germany and inventing this machine based on a wine press in order to have print books, printed book, everything, et cetera, and why it’s regarded as one of the greatest inventions in human history. Not only from an historical point of view, but because it gave birth to so much social, political, cultural, artistic change in every society globally after the mid 1400s when Gutenberg invented it. Important to say that a lot of people, a lot of guys, especially in Germany, were trying to come up with something similar at the time, but he was the one who had three main ideas, which put it all together to result in what became, you know, the first printing press. And I’m going to speak a little bit about Gutenberg, a little bit about the actual in the press, in the machine itself, what it led to within 30-40 years after his invention. And then link it as much as I can to the Renaissance and why it’s so important for us today to not just remember, but reimagine what this guy helped to initiate and why it’s so important for us, I think to never forget the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, because all the time historical forces, not only the 30’s and the 40’s, obviously in Nazi Germany and other countries, First World War as well and many others have tried to smash so much of human invention or flip it into total destruction and the forces of destruction and the forces of evil and hate.
But actually with most inventions from the internet to the printing press to the wheel, we see the blessing and the curse always with all human endeavour and the massive, the major human inventions and ideas. But why it’s important for us today to be reminded of some echoes of the meaning of the Renaissance leading to the Enlightenment. Okay, so if I can begin, this is an image of the actual printing press. It’s a makeup, it’s a copy, you know, done very recently of the actual press itself and I’ve got a better image, which I’ll show again in a little while. I’m going to purposely be jumping a little bit because I want to link imagination with invention, with the idea, because all of this to me relishes the celebration of the beginning of the Renaissance. And I know Trudy, I’m going to be talking about the Medici period and so on. But the Renaissance begins the end of the futile times, so important in human evolution and human history in our societies and what they gave rise to. And I want to use Gutenberg’s printing press as a prime example of everything to come afterwards and so much with us today. And as I said, the darkening threat, first imagination, one of my favourite quotes from Mr. Albert Einstein, and this is true, which he obviously said much later in life. “At 16 I imagined riding on a beam of light. I realised, and from that vantage, light would appear as a frozen wave.” I’ve always been struck by this magnificent quote of Einstein’s, not only because of his, because of what it fed in terms of the general theory of relativity, which is for another lecture entirely, but imagination as a teenager, that this guy as a teenager imagines riding a beam of light, first of all. Well then he is going as fast as, it can’t go faster in the universe.
So of course, light would appear frozen. Everything would appear frozen. It’s travelling at the same speed. And the revolution that Einstein begins with the general theory of relativity starts to happen. As we all know, the old examples, we’re sitting in an aeroplane and just looking across at people next to us, they’re not moving and we’re not moving because we’re at the same speed. We all appear frozen in a moment, the same, you know, the examples on a train, you know, maybe going at 80 miles an hour, but with relation to the people sitting next to us we’re frozen, riding in that carriage in the train. So Einstein imagining riding a beam of light through the universe, the cosmos, the galaxies, everything would appear frozen because nothing can go faster. So, that we know of so far, but I’m pretty sure. I don’t want to go into Einstein’s theories on gravitation and many others, but what fascinates me here is he always stressed the importance of imagination over an accumulation of historical knowledge. He never dismissed it. Knowledge is crucial, vital, important and history. But what does the imagination do with it is the real issue. Do we just regurgitate it? You know, as so many schools and universities nowadays, let’s be honest, you know, encourage just regurgitate, repeat, it’s all about the grade. It’s not about the question, the thinking, the imagination, anything that Einstein is trying to celebrate. Is he naive? Is he being over romantic and idealistic for our times? What about people getting a job, earning money? Come on, we’ve got family mortgages, everything, you know, all that stuff. Is this a romantic idealist dreaming at the age of 16?
I wanted to include this because I’m linking it to Gutenberg who is inventing a printing press. So we have to imagine that these books are written by monks, mainly can take a year to write one version of the Bible, if they’re lucky, handwriting, all the rest of it. How many people can read, how many people can write, how many people are going to sit and actually do these things, spend a year writing one little book, the Bible, and, you know, in hand, all the rest of it, come on. So the massive revolution that Gutenberg begins is as huge as many others, you know, on a par with Einstein and many of the others in a totally different context, obviously. Okay, and I want to just celebrate Einstein’s talking about imagination in the way of using and applying, learnt or discovered knowledge, you know, in the way that Darwin and many of the other great thinkers did, linked to the spirit of the Renaissance, to think for oneself finally as an individual, to imagine, to think, to not merely follow the received precepts of the previous generations and centuries. This is a picture here of the, these are later images of Gutenberg.
We don’t know how exactly, how accurate or not, but fairly accurate I think, especially the one on the left. Okay, then here, this is the first major book that he published was the Bible, obviously, and the incredible, the meticulous attention to detail, the colours, the shapes, the letters, the structure. All of it comes from Gutenberg originally, you know, that we read books and we get the exact, you know, the fine line down the left and the margin on the right and so on. All of it begins with this perfectionist, Johannes Gutenberg, I mean, he was an obsessive artistic perfectionist, not only a kind of semi-absent minded inventor, although in business he was a disaster, which I’ll come to later. This is to give an example from the first version of the Bible. These are obviously copies done, you know, and so on and in Latin. This is a phrase from Gutenberg, which I’ve always loved and remember, the alphabet, of course, is 26 letters, in terms of the Latin based alphabet. I’m not talking about the acrylic of the eastern countries of Europe, Russia, and so on and further out. “Give me twenty-six soldiers of lead, and I will conquer the world,” Gutenberg. Twenty-six soldiers of lead because every little piece in the movable type, I’m going to show it to you in a second here. Every little piece here, these are all the little pieces of lead that he made, and these are copies of what he did. So every little piece has a letter or a number as a letter of its own, and it was made out of lead ultimately.
And you can make a thousand copies of the letter A, the letter S, and then you rearrange it. Unlike Scrabble, you rearrange it all the time constantly, and you’ve got your page of words and sentences. He also helps to invent the use of grammar, full stops, semicolons, colons, you know, dash, et cetera, et cetera, because you got to make the sentences make sense, basically. It’s on this printing machine of movable type. So when he talks about the 26 soldiers of lead, these are the soldiers. They’re not bullets, they’re not swords. They would be I suppose pencils. But it’s these little piece of lead with the letters inside which can be rearranged in any order, at any time to have, so you can have the page and then you can make as many copies as you want once you’ve got it. And I love this phrase of his, and it shows that he is a romantic, he’s an idealist as well as a scientific inventor who worked for years on this, on the printing machine itself on its own, you know, to have that little phrase. And it’s a phrase that’s gone down in history as one of the greats, if you like, from this guy Gutenberg. And he did and I think it does conquer the world and it’s 26 letters. Okay, what I want you to start with is, is printing wasn’t invented by Gutenberg, it wasn’t invented in Europe, as I’m sure many people know. It was invented more than a thousand years prior to Gutenberg.
So prior to the 1400’s, more than a thousand years ago the Chinese invented printing press. And the problem was because the Chinese language as everybody, as so many people know, is as many thousands of characters. Whereas these Latin-based languages of Western Europe coming from the Latin and so on, and other influences of language, have 26, mainly 26 letters in the alphabet. So there are letters in an alphabet, and they’re only 26. It’s not thousands like in the Chinese. And thus the Chinese invention of thousand years before Gutenberg had serious limitations and could never achieve mass production of movable type, mass production of books. People become literate, reading, education, everything that comes from it, on knowledge and so on. So it is a remarkable invention in human history. And I want to give an example here. This is a Chinese version. You can see these are the Chinese characteristics which have tried to be similar in creating early versions, is from early versions of a printing press for the Chinese language, much harder because there were thousands of characters. This is a quote from Mark Twain, “what the world is today, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg, everything can be traced to this source, but we are bound to bring him homage for the bad that his colossal invention has brought about is overshadowed by a thousand times by the good with which mankind has been favoured.”
And I think overall, if we take a step back and look at the overall evolution of human history going back thousands of years, I’m taking the big picture, snapshot here. My personal feeling is that human nature is dicey, but human society has certainly massively benefited a thousand times more for the good than the evil that his printing press gave us. Of course, the evil is huge. Again, back to Einstein, what do we do with knowledge? What do we do with inventions? What does the imagination do? And of course, this can lead, the printed word can lead to the most horrific experiences on a personal, on a mass societal level imaginable. But it can also lead to far more good. And I agree with Mark Twain ultimately. Ultimately, the good outweighs the evil, you know, of this particular invention. You know, we can debate this till the cows come home, you know, the spreading of the atom can lead, of course, to the atomic bomb, but it can also lead to, you know, endless energy for human society. We all know the aeroplane, so many others as well. Always the blessing and the curse to me is the paradox of every human endeavour, every human invention.
It’s not a simple polemic, it’s a paradox, a mixture. Okay, I want to show us as well, this here is an example. This is the actual, another mockup, but it’s exact to his original machine, it’s so simple, it looks so , it’s based, as I said, on the wine printing, the wine press. And you know, basically he invented the oil, a mixture of oil to get the ink. His idea was the ink and how he experimented to get it. Number one, the ink. Number two, the actual letters in lead. They could be movable and you could use these letters again and again and again in a thousand ways. So that was his second main idea. And the third idea was how you could print it using the influence of a good old wine making press. So he, but he had to put together these ideas. Nobody put these ideas together before him. Although a lot of were trying and experimenting at the same time as Gutenberg in the 1400’s. This is it, it looks so simple, it’s wood and a couple of other things, here it is. But let’s never forget some of the greatest inventions, you know, penicillin, you know where it comes from and so many others. Okay, this is a quote from Wendell Phillips, “what gun powder did for war, the printing press has done for the mind.” We can debate this for many, many years, many hours to come.
Not sure gunpowder is the image I would choose, but certainly war being as powerful part of human society and human history and daily experience and the printing press, well certainly gunpowder and printing press. It’s a provocative statement intended to provoke debate and thought of the importance of the printing press. Okay, another one here, which I’d like to share, this is from Gutenberg. Religious truth is, because what I’m interested here is this quote is double edged and we look carefully and we’ll see the double meaning, he’s not just praising religion at all Gutenberg, the opposite. “Religious truth is captive in a small number of manuscript books which guard the common treasure, instead of diffusing it. Let us break the seal, which holds the holy things; give wings to the truth that by means of speech, no longer written at great expense by the hand that wearies itself, but multiplied as the air by an unwearied machine. It may fly to seek every soul born into the world!” Meta dramatic language for us today. But in his times, this would’ve been appropriate. It wouldn’t have been seen as meta dramatic. It would’ve been seen as having the aesthetic of religious, of the times, you know, given in speeches, given in talks and so on. And I think because he’s part of his times, Gutenberg is using that rhetoric of religious persons speaking with that flourish of what we would see as melodrama.
But it’s a mixed message here. He’s also talking about wings. Fly, be free, soar, you can imagine, you know, if peasants can read and write, if they can learn, people can become literate. I can make you a million books a month. More, millions and millions, education, literacy, knowledge is going to break through the iron shackles in the iron grip of religion, of the assumed divine authority of kings and political and other leaders, of not only the church, but other religious leaders who guard so-called knowledge, you know, here because they’re so threatened, obviously insecure about power, are guarding it. Are they the only messengers of knowledge? Are they the front of all knowledge received? Nonsense, what about other people, what about classes? What about people learning to read and write just as simple and thing as that, they will revolutionise human society. It has to. And in Gutenberg’s dream, I think he can’t say it because of the strictures of his times. It will give a renaissance to the mind. The spirit of the renaissance can be free. And what is that spirit really, a split of church and state or divine authority of the king or whatever leader or whatever person has a little crown on their hair, you know, whatever person.
And it will split the mind from church and state and perhaps judiciary a little bit later, the beginnings of society, of modernity that we know. But it requires an invention like the printing press to give birth to it because it’s a practical thing which can then give everybody on the planet, not only in Germany or Europe access to at least not only knowledge, but discussion, debate, questioning, challenging knowledge, and the received truth in inverted commas. I’m getting carried away because I think that Gutenberg inspires us to think in this way and in these dark times. And I really think it is the closing of the Western mind, not only the West that’s happening in our times or the threat of it at least. And I think it’s time that we need to, I think can only help perhaps with a little bit of imagination, a little bit of invention. What can we do to reimagine just a touch of the spirit of the Renaissance and the resultant Enlightenment. Okay, Gutenberg goes on about it here and so on. I want to give one example. This is obviously not Gutenberg. The top rights are the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur on one of their early machines. Okay, which flies maybe a couple hundred feet, 12 seconds. Well that was the very first one.
This is a little bit later. Orville and Wilbur wright, 1903-1904, very early on in the 20th century, the first flight ever by human beings, as we all know, only too well. And I want to alert us to the picture on the left we know so well. This is Apollo 11 landing, Lunar Module. There you can see Neil Armstrong at the bottom. Picture by Buzz Aldrin. There’s the human being. This is the tiny little lunar module, this picture’s from the rocket on the moon. First image ever from the moon. And what I want to, and obviously there’s the Earth in that and this is the moon at the bottom, in the bottom right here with the earth, the little earth round right in the far distance, which revolutionised and changed human society and human perception forever. Why am I showing this? Because it’s 66 years from the Wright brothers. First little aeroplane flying for 12 seconds with a few pieces of balsa wood, few pieces of wire. Bicycle, two guys who own a bicycle shop. 66 years later is man lines on the moon in 1969. 1903, Wright Brothers, 1969, 66 years to man landing on the moon. That’s one lifetime. Look at the extraordinary development of technology and what it can achieve when the human mind, when human society puts its determination, in Kennedy’s great speech, its determination, its willpower to achieve something which can be great in human nature.
And in 66 years it can end up landing and standing on the moon. That’s what it takes, with the willpower, the determination, obviously the resources, the capital, the money and all the rest of it. Look what can be done if human nature could put itself a little bit more, perhaps a few more times in these areas, remarkable other things could be achieved in less than a lifetime of 66 years. And it’s always struck me this, I’ll never forget, you know, as a, post-grad student at Columbia and going to Washington state with my cousin Basel and going to the Smithsonian and intending to spend, you know, time looking at many other things. But I went back again to the Air and Space Museum every day for a week to marvel at flight. There it all is, 66 years, what humans could be capable of and have been at different times in history. Okay, I’ll share that for you. This is the picture going back to Gutenberg. So this is in the 50 years, that was 66 years. This is 50 years after the first printing press by Gutenberg in Mainz. This shows the development of printing presses all over Europe from that very first one in Mainz in Germany. And you can see it’s going from the mid 1400’s to the end of the 1400’s, into the 1500’s, into the 1600’s. You can see the different areas where printing presses just exploded to publish not only religious texts, the Bible and others, but so many other texts, scientific, educational, religious, et cetera, et cetera, literary and so on.
This is where it exploded first in Europe. Very interesting to me, London and England came much later. Germany and Italy were first, you know, to just absolutely explode with this invention. Thus the link again with Italy and the Renaissance, France, French word, but Italy, the beginnings of the Renaissance spirit. You can see the link when you look at where the printing presses, the actual, the businesses were set up, you know, Italy, Germany and France, mainly in the beginning, and partly Spain as well. So, and even Portugal has more than England. So interesting to me, the beginnings of the Renaissance spirit, which then spreads out to Europe and the world can be seen simply where the printing press businesses were set up and fast.
Going back to the idea of the Renaissance, and I want to link it here, and I’m going to show this here, because these are little of lead, in essence, the ideas of the Renaissance for me is captured in the word the individual, scepticism, a secularist attitude, the resurgence of studying the classics. Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, Pythagoras and so many of the others, the Romans as well, the aqueducts, the building of it, et cetera. The building of the Colosseum, from architecture to construction, to roads, to everything begins again with the Renaissance period. But for me, the interest is the mind. At least the challenge or the questioning of received morals of there is, which I would call so much of it as propaganda, you know, as internalised propaganda of the feudal era and many other periods pre-feudalism. The rise of the individual who can think for him or herself, make decisions for him or herself. Of course, I’m talking about a few small educated elite that have access to this and become literate and can read and write and can invent and can write and come up with new ideas to, you know, from Galileo to many, many others. The Renaissance, man or woman and for me, Leonardo is the ultimate one that we all know. And I don’t want to talk about him only as a person very briefly ‘cause I know Patrick’s going to talk fantastically about his art, but he lifted life, which has become iconic of Renaissance thinking.
The Renaissance imagination that Einstein alludes to, that Einstein to me looked as a Renaissance’s man as well. A life on personal development, a life on the expansion of the mind and imagination, not only did this guy, Leonardo, paint the Mona Lisa and many others, but in his notebooks, the first flying machine, and realistically, parachute, which is pretty close to parachute today. Machine gun, the natural world anatomy, the flight of birds to understand flight, architecture, mechanics, , a 65 foot flying machine, principles of physics and aeronautics, the first armoured tank, diving suit, a self-moving cart leading to the car, helicopters, ideas, revolving bridge, robots, et cetera, et cetera. This for me is the Renaissance mind encapsulated by this one guy Da Vinci. All of it is capable of imagining and thinking, taking from the classics, taking from wherever to inform the beginning of the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment in terms of human rights and the place of the individual at the centre of society. Not the divine power of, you know, of inherited wealth or inherited leaders. Not the divine power of, of inherited power of the church and other religious institutions.
But it can be begin to located in individual. For me, this is encapsulated in theatre with Shakespeare. With Shakespeare’s writing at the end of the 1500’s, 1580, 1590, at beginning of the 1600’s. Soliloquies, and we think of the characters in the stories of Shakespeare, the beginnings of psychology and the soliloquies in Shakespeare are so important. Why, for me it’s on the cusp of the end of feudalism and the beginning of individualist capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system compared to Feudalism, peasant and the Lord, no middle class, and of course no printing press and none of the others. But the individuals and individual human rights, individual psychology is pretty irrelevant. And it’s reflected in the literature, mostly pre-Shakespeare where the characters are all stock types. The village idiot, the king, the princess, the queen, the fool, the courtier, the joker, the soldier, et cetera. The characters are all types, social types in society in theatre up until that time. But from Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Marlo Johnson and others and before that and after Shakespeare, it’s the individual character that it becomes centre to the theatre.
And he’s reflecting that shift for me between the end of Feudalism and the beginning of Individualist Capitalism. And Brett wrote quite an interesting article about this as well. Freud said about Da Vinci, what’s remarkable is not only what he invented or painted, but how the man lived. Freud goes on, he lived like a man who awoke too early in the darkness, which he inherited and while the others were all still fast asleep. And that’s the Einstein spirit, that’s the Leonardo, the Gutenberg spirit, the spirit of the Renaissance. And I sound probably as if I’m a bit high and euphoric about it, because I believe so passionately, this is not the purpose to knowledge, university, studying, reading, everything, unless we question, challenge, learn, discover, rediscover, invent, trash the invention of yesterday, discover something new, try, experiment. Whether it’s on a stage, whether it’s with scientific things, or whether it’s with a book or a novel, whatever, just to help understand something about human nature, that’s all. And to give it a purpose, a reason for doing a few things, you know, in human nature. And I think Gutenberg was obsessed and that’s why I wanted to read that, that idealistic sort of rhetorical flourish of his language, because I think he and others were caught up in these times, pre, the official beginning of the Renaissance. They sensed some spirits changing, you know, some sight guys changing in their times. And they wanted to ride the wave of it, to ride the wave, not just be the foam on the wave of history.
Okay, in fact, Leonardo wrote iron rust from disuse stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen, even so does the inaction of the vigour of the mind become frozen like stagnant water. So we must stretch ourselves to the limits of human imagination. Anything less is a sin against man and God, the link against man and God, before it would’ve been only God. So all these values, we can see all these images is about obviously reminding of this human ingenuity, creativity, the ideas of democracy and freedom coming back from the ancient Greeks who of course had slaves, let’s never forget, free speech and all these ideas coming in. Even Martin Luther, as we all know, beginning the Protestant religion, the break from Catholicism. Martin Luther was very aware of how to use the printing press in his own times. And he made sure that half a million copies of his, if you like, slightly adapted version of the Bible were sent out through his ideas.
Hundreds of thousands of copies of his leaflets, of his thesis about, you know, the beginning of challenging the Catholic church, the beginning of Protestantism and so on. He made sure hundreds of thousands of what we would call leaflets today were sent out in Germany. Well, in other words, he sussed this technological revolution, jumped on it and realised as a good PR guide how he could use it, you know, to send his message out. The connections today I think are fairly obvious. Okay, I want to show this here. This is a short, this is one of my favourite actors, Steven Fry. And this is from a documentary that Steven Fry made for the BBC. It’s about his love of books and Gutenberg and the origin of Gutenberg, which I’d like to share with all of us today. You may know him from acting in the Blackadder series, you know, the numerous Blackadder series as well, and also from some movies, for me he is a fantastic actor and a kind of public intellectual and just a wonderful human being. He’s written lots of books which I like and I admire this guy. And he’s been through a lot of trauma as well. So this is Steven Fry about Gutenberg.
CLIP BEGINS
[Steven] I’ve always been rather fond of books. In fact, I think they’re just about the most important things we’ve ever created, the building blocks of our civilization. So when someone suggested a journey in search of the genius who invented the printing press, I jumped at the chance. This is it. This was the man who launched the first media revolution and opened the door to the modern age, but his story is shrouded in mystery. So to get closer to him, we also decided to stage an experiment and build our own mediaeval printing press. So beautiful. That meant getting to grips with the tools and technology of the 15th century.
[Speaker] Don’t do that, Steven.
[Steven] And actually making some of the ingredients with my own bare hands. This takes me back to the school where I was always a dunderhead. As it turned out, that was the most revealing bit of all. I feel connected to Gutenberg somehow just by doing this. So here it is then, the slightly more hands on than I expected Story of Johannes Gutenberg and his marvellous machine. Well, if you’re anything like as old as me, you may well remember this. The John Bull printing outfit made in England. This was when I got my first experience of how printing works really and simple as it is, these little rubber bits here tell you all you need to know about printing with movable type. You’ve got ink. Oh, there it is, oh, I’m going to get my fingers dirty already. There are lots of different letters and you can rearrange them in any way you want. Onto one of these, which I think is called a form. And then when you print out. Hmm, it’s exactly the same every time. Advance in technology since the invention of the wheel. Letters and you can rearrange them in any way you want. Onto one of these, which I think is called a form. And then when you print out. Hmm, it’s exactly the same every time. You can have hundreds, thousands, millions of pages that are identical. And there we are. Of course, the point about it being movable type is that I can move these letters into any order, make another word, not unlike Scrabble. So I’m going to mess around, what am I going to get?
There we are. So how is it it took mankind so long to bring together these simple elements into one machine that could make books. The breakthrough was made by a man called Johannes Gutenberg more than 500 years ago. His printing machine was the most revolutionary advance in technology since the invention of the wheel. And we’re still living with its consequences today, as you can see here in the basement of the British Library where they hold a copy of every book published in English. You know, there are 14 miles of shelfs here. There are another eight miles added every year as 3 million new books come on stream in Britain and above me, all the readers demanding their books have little idea that there’s this labyrinth of shelves here. It was the invention of the printing press, which started all this, making mass production of books possible for the first time in history. Within a few years there were millions of them in circulation. And as they travelled, they carried their precious cargo of new ideas or theories, philosophy or propaganda to every part of Europe and beyond, sowing the seeds for that great cultural blossoming we call the Renaissance. The fruit of Gutenberg’s work can be seen all around us. But it’s more important than that, for everything that our culture and our civilization depends on starts with Gutenberg’s invention. And this was his calling card, one of the first and finest books created using his new machine. To the modern eye, the Gutenberg Bible opens a window onto a vanished world of monks and monasteries. But when it first appeared in the 1450s, it was viewed not as a reminder of the past, but as a signpost to the future, glittering proof that a new information age was dawning in Europe, fueled by the power of the printed word. I want to find out how and why Gutenberg invented his machine, to answer the how question I’m planning a unique experiment.
[Speaker] We’re going to jump from here.
[Steven] And here’s the laboratory where it’s all going to happen.
[Speaker] In you come.
[Steven] This workshop in the heart of England may not look very high In Germany. You know what, I’m genuinely tingling with excitement about coming close to a Gutenberg Bible having only seen one through glass and having examined so much about its means of production, having discovered just how important it was and what a symbol it is of everything the modern age stands for. The idea of actually touching one, albeit through cotton gloves, is giving me gooseflesh, cannot believe this. You know, I’ve looked at them through glass and I’ve read about them. And to be so close is an extraordinary feeling.
[Helmut] You want to have a look?
[Steven] Please.
[Helmut] This is actually, remarked by Jacob Grimm.
Of the famous brothers Grimm.
Yeah, when he was a librarian in A Gutenberg Bible. And it says , of the highest rarity.
Yes.
Yeah. This is the first page of the first volume.
[Steven] Do you know what’s interesting is that although the illumination and decoration and the, you call that a lubrication, don’t we?
[Helmut] Right.
[Steven] That the red letters literally, although they’re very beautiful, it is the typeface that really draws the eye, isn’t it?
[Helmut] Yes, I mean, people have said that it’s even at the start of this new technology that it is also an example of perfection in a sense.
[Steven] Yes. And the general view is that it’s so much more beautiful than it needed to.
That is very true, yes.
It’s simply, he was clearly a very driven perfectionist.
[Helmut] Yes, he uses what the scribes in the monasteries also used to use, he used abbreviations. That was the only way to create this right margin as clean as it is.
Now, there’s a little hole here, what’s going on?
[Helmut] Yeah, somebody must have,
Vandal.
Vandaled this, I don’t know when this happened. You see the illumination went up the page and somebody needed a model.
Right.
For an illumination. So, they cut it out and put it next to his manuscript and painted it off this model, which is unfortunate.
[Steven] Naturally, I feel very privileged to be able to leaf through this unbelievably rare and important object. A Gutenberg Bible in my hands. I’m wearing white gloves. I’m terrified of breathing water vapour on it. And yet, you know, the odd thing is that it doesn’t feel like something that is going to be crumbling to dust if I turn the pages too fast. It feels very solid and robust. And after all, it was made to be used more than once a day. I mean, if it was bought by a monastery, I guess it would’ve been used for all the offices of the day. And it was a solid object. A Bible was a thing that people had expected to turn to all the time. And it isn’t a fragile little thing like an ornament, it’s a useful object. And the extraordinary thing about this is that although there were only a hundred or so of these made and 12 of these in existence , you know that aside from the illuminations, every page is the same.
And that was really the most remarkable breakthrough, wasn’t it, that somebody in a monastery in Germany, somebody in a palace in Florence, somebody in a private house in Amsterdam, could turn to the same page number, the same word would begin at the top and at the end, they were looking at mass production for the first time. And although they were very rich, those who could afford it, they were nothing like as rich as those who could afford ones that had been made by scribes, handwritten. I can’t believe I’m here . I’d like to report a happy ending for the man who created this extraordinary book. But it didn’t turn out quite like that. Do you remember Mr. Fust, the dragon who bankrolled the printing of the Bible? Soon after the presses started running, he asked Gutenberg to repay the money he’d borrowed. Gutenberg didn’t have the cash, so he was forced to hand over all his printing equipment instead. It had taken him almost a lifetime to build his machine. Now, so soon after it had been completed, it was snatched from Gutenberg’s grasp. My journey ends here in the village of Eltville, a few miles outside Mainz. Gutenberg had family roots and his friends helped him get back on his feet and even to set up a new printing workshop. But he never enjoyed the riches which his invention earned for his former business partner Fust. Well, Gutenberg finally got the recognition he deserved up in the castle there, the elector called him a knight and gave him a pension. And when he died, the world knew that he had founded the modern art of printing.
But it’s not that really that has brought me here. It’s the thought of what went on after Gutenberg’s death, the replication of printing across Europe at such a speed, an unimaginable speed for that time. From zero books to 20 million in just 50 years. Gutenberg’s technology spread across Europe like a benign virus. It gave new ideas, a ticket to ride, and kick started the Renaissance. For the next 500 years, his method of printing was used to make books everywhere. His was the machine that made us. And that art, the art of movable type printing defines us. It’s our civilization more than anything else. I can imagine a modern world without cars. I can imagine one without telephones or computers, but I cannot begin to imagine a society, anything like the one we have that doesn’t have the printed word.
CLIP ENDS
- What I like so much is when Steven Fry ends it, you know, the debate, can we imagine a world without computer, without the car, the phone? What would it be without the printed word? And of course that’s a huge debate which is being provoked here. But the mere idea of provoking it is the spirit of the Renaissance, to develop, to question, to challenge, to debate these ideas endlessly, in order to give rise to new, not only inventions, but new ideas or at least insights onto old ideas. So for me, what’s so powerful about Gutenberg and this printing press is the link to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, but the very change of society completely. Curiosity, debate, question, all of this, coming back to what we have a little bit of understanding of I think about the ancient Greeks, ancient Romans and others. First newspaper was a couple of decades after Gutenberg’s invention was in Leipzig, was the first newspaper ever printed, disseminated with the news of the area of Leipzig and around, and of course the rest we know about newspapers.
As Steven Fry mentions it, within less than 50 years after the invention of the printing press, there were 20 million books, pardon me, in circulation in Europe alone. Obviously many of them were religious tracts, the Bible and many others, but not only, scientific, educational and so on. The beginning of real literacy, the beginning of real learning. What is the school, what is the university, what is the place of education? Understanding of the very word education, all changes with the printing press or would certainly not have evolved to become what we know it without that printing press. Mass communication, mass education, mass knowledge and dissemination. Of course, now with the internet, you know, that’s a speed of a flick of the coin. So what I really wanted to share was how from one little idea so much happened, how this guy worked so hard. And also because he was, you know, business wise, he didn’t make really any money out of it. And his partner basically got all the bucks. It says to me something about his lack of business acumen. 'Cause he was always in debt, Gutenberg, to tell the truth because he was obsessed with perfecting. You can see it when you look at those first bibles that he printed, the obsession with artistic and aesthetic detail with the book and the letters and the structure of the words there, that obsession is greater than the obsession for him, fortunately, or unfortunately, I think making money.
So linking it to the beginning of the Renaissance, where do we put this? How do we categorise this? And many have tried over the years to link the invention of the printing press, for fry, it’s as big as the invention of the wheel. Well there’s some others here, you know, many academics love playing with these kind of ideas. Electric lights, the car, the phone, the aeroplane, vaccination with Jenner, radio and TV, the computer, gas powered tractor, concrete, anaesthesia, you know, Horace Wells in 1844, invention of the anaesthetic. It’s the compass in about 200 BC, the water wheel. Let’s never forget the calendar from the ancient Romans. Ancient concrete, so important, the steam engine, without which we would never have had, I believe the industrial revolution, the clock in 725 AD, the invention of the first mechanical clock. The wheel is obvious, the telescope and so on. The aqueduct. All of these things which are part of the remarkable development, if you like, the positive side of human endeavour and human imagination and the capacity for it. And for me, this is the spirit of the Renaissance in which to look at Gutenberg’s one invention and how one thing can give rise to so many others. I’m going to, you know, hold it there in a moment because there’s so many other things that we can talk about. I’ve purposely held off from, because there’s another whole series of lectures, you know, how it would link to what happened with Catholicism or Christianity, how it would link to possibly Judaism, you know, and the received wisdom coming only from the rabbi or only from the priest or the bishop, wherever.
And in the Islamic culture and many others. And how this, you know, the mechanical reproduction of the printed word could change so much of the reception and experience of religion itself and of freedom of individuality. For me, I wanted to really focus on the Leonardo spirit, which is the individual mind, to have freedom to roam and range, to make mistakes, to invent, to imagine, to try things. And that for me is ultimately where Gutenberg has a resonance today, because I do feel it’s under threat. And it’s ironically, it’s places of education that put it under threat because of the bureaucratization of it, because of the control of it by other business and other forces. And when other forces dictate, the agendas are set. And as a result it’s hard to imagine the flourishing of these ideas again. Of course, Da Vinci and many of these others and Gutenberg himself, it’s only capable because of the financing of the church in Gutenberg’s case and business and many others.
So going back to Einstein, it’s a question of how these inventions are applied, whose financing, where the open mind comes from to help us live the potential of what human beings can really achieve. And that for me is the link from the beginnings of the Renaissance with this invention of this printing press to, you know, Einstein and relativity and so much stuff that has come after that. I’m going to hold it here and just to share some of these things with you and for us to imagine today, obviously there’s the phone that we’re all holding, the laptop, we’re all in front of, the computer and so many other things. And to leave it at that for the moment. Thanks everybody.
[Speaker] David, did you want to take some questions?
[David] Sure.
Q&A and Comments:
Pouring not drizzling, thanks Hannah. We’re then petrol, absolutely. Joles, Montreal. Great, in Toronto, great. Joburg, okay, thank you. Jonathan, the Koreans were printing movable type in the 1380s. Ah, I did not know that. Thank you, Jonathan. That helps me very much.
Hannah, Martin Gilbert says Hebrew printing presses, absolutely, printing Hebrew versions of the Talmud and many others of the Torah and et cetera.
Q: Wouldn’t the lead be dangerous?
A: Possible, great thought. We know certainly with Marie Curie, you know, and the radiation exposure with x-rays and lead certainly led to her getting cancer and dying. Gutenberg quotation, I find it eternally inspiring.
Thanks, Barbara. You know, with 26 letters of lead, soldiers of lead, I will conquer the world. Patricia, hi and welcome and hope you’re well in Cape Town. Research the Chinese method. I don’t think, as far as I know, he knew nothing really about the Chinese method. This was being used by quite a lot of people at the time who were trying to come up with a printing press, but he was the one to put together the main ideas of the wine press, finding the right oil or the right ink, which a mixture of oil and other things. Had to make the letters in lead and also was very important. He understood that he had to make the thickness of the paper a certain level of thickness. So he put together ideas and took it a step forward. The first printing press in Baghdad where I was born.
Great, thank you. The second one, that’s amazing. Founded by my great great grandfather in 1888. Incidentally, he was my cousin. Oh, well that’s incredible. Thanks so much for this, this is really fascinating. Encyclopaedia Eduard Bucah, fantastic information, thank you.
And thank you to Alan yourself and Lynn and Julius for educating us so much more about the Jews of North Africa.
Mitzi, the internet, it might well, it might well equal or rival or surpass the printing press. We don’t know yet, quite possible.
Sonya, the flight. Okay, absolutely, thank you.
Marilyn, yeah, I like his comment about religion. He’s phrasing it in a way because he knows who his financiers are, and obviously he’s got to satisfy the church, obviously, but he’s aware of what this is going to lead to and challenge it.
Lori, the late state in Britain related to the church in Henry VIII, in my personal opinion, yes, but that’s more for the historians to debate, Lori.
Q: Romaine, would you describe scenes have become archaic, instant gratification.
A: Thank you Romaine. Yeah, it’s possible. But then we’ve got to go with Einstein on the speed of light and we’ve got to try and I guess the challenge to us is we can’t ignore instant gratification today, but what to do with it? What can we invent either through art or literature or science or business using this today? Good point, Romaine.
Marilyn, the Torah was given, okay, Jewish people or the rabbis interpreted, et cetera, by individuals, some degree of of literacy. Well that’s a fascinating debate and I’m very grateful to my friend Gale in Johannesburg and many others for helping me understand a little bit more about the debates amongst Jews around Gutenberg’s times. And it seems, and I’m certainly not the expert here and I would welcome information on this, more information, that there was similar debates amongst Christian religion and Judaism. You know, should one do this and make it accessible to everybody with the Bible, with the Talmud, et cetera. Or were they more sacred and holy? And I guess there’s massive amounts of debates by people far more learned and knowledgeable than me because it certainly happened around his time like it is with us in the internet today. You know, the blessing and the curse as with I believe every invention of human nature from the wheel, to the car, the aeroplane, everything.
Richard, thank you. David, the Jews, well also by hand, you know, like everybody else, it was by hand before the printing press and what the Jews did afterwards is another whole debate. You know, I’ve mentioned briefly Martin Luther and Catholicism today, Hindi, first Hebrew text, yeah, thank you. Shout out over to you as well, belated.
Monty, we have now two, sorry, I’m just jumping here. Okay, two American weirdos, Bezos and Musk. Musk is an exile African, you want to go to the moon, prove the human condition for a good space tourist business. Yep.
Q: Okay, when were the first Jewish books printed?
A: That’s for another whole discussion on the trajectory on Jewish religion and the Jewish books of the Talmud, the Torah, the Bible, and all the other writings linked to the history in Judaism for those who more expert than me.
My beloved sister in Toronto, Nikki, okay. Before the turn of the century, 2000, there was a TV programme that looked at the most important adventures of the past century. Number one was the printing press
Thank you my dear sister, you are the real teacher to me. Nikki teaches at a high school, she helps run a high school in Toronto.
Daliah, of course the printing press was a major invention. Invention of paper, papyrus, absolutely. I mean people endlessly debate, the printing press, the aeroplane, the wheel, the control of fire and so many other things. We can have fun, you know, in the end, is there one more important than the other? I don’t think so, but we can start to imagine the level of imagination to come up with this, to come up with these inventions. That to me is what’s interesting. You know, the very phone, we’re holding the laptop, et cetera, everything was just an imagined idea before it was real.
Q: Okay, Arlene, Gutenberg was bought out. How is it we know him?
A: Well it was, we know of him because he did invent because of, Steven Fry mentions at the end there, he was given a Knighthood and a pension finally in the little city just outside the city of Mainz where he lived most of his life, there was some recognition given, but his business partner first was the one. 'Cause Gutenberg was always in debt. He had no sense really of business, no acumen. And he was always in debt and Fust was the one to raise the money from the church and other business people at the time. And Gutenberg in the end was so in debt that he sold, he gave everything, the printing press, everything. Everything he had done, he gave over to his partner to cover his debt. So he ended up being pretty poor but finally getting a pension later in life. And we know about him because of that business relationship and because the printing press itself, you know, I mean people knew that it did come from him.
Phil, moveable type of Hebrew lettering dated decades before Gutenberg. Okay, I don’t, that’s very interesting Phil, thank you. I’ll look it up and can try and find out.
Deryl, thanks. David, would haven’t been able to start the invention of 22 items, letters of Alphabet or the Phoenicians, exactly. But where I would say David, is that Gutenberg is not only about inventing a machine, when you look at his phrases, you know, the 22 soldiers of, you know, he is aware of where this can lead to, democratisation of education, of literacy, of knowledge, furthering of human, of ideas and of knowledge to come. And that it can lead to people learning to read and write, et cetera, et cetera. Which is probably not even dreamed of before his invention. He alludes to it in those few quotations of Gutenberg’s that I’ve given here. You know, conquer the world with 26 letters of lead, soldiers of lead.
Okay, Henry, the map, was the areas of Jewish settlement. It’s a fascinating idea which just crossed my mind 'cause there’s Germany, France, and Spain primarily where fair amount of Jewish settlement, Henry, can’t prove it, but it’s, you know, it looks like it there in the map.
Caroline Tar, Dawn, okay, Uther, thank you.
Jerome, it was considered the most outstanding invention of the last thousand years, absolutely, but I think it’s up there with quite a lot of others. But I agree with you and Steven Fry, so many of the others would not have been able without the printing press. I think that is fundamental and to the Renaissance and Enlightenment, which gave birth is the possibility of the aeroplane, of the telephone, of the computer and so many other things. I don’t know if all of that would’ve, don’t think it would’ve happened without the printing press. Caxton did. Caxton really developed his in England.
David, thanks for this. It was William Caxton who really developed it in England later.
Ray, when I was on the editorial staff, I was weekly, offices were part of the group. Good statue of Gutenberg, fantastic. Sally, how did he make the lead letters. That’s in the, it’s all captured. BBC documentary is about 50 minutes long and it shows exactly how he worked with the lead and the type to perfect it so that he could make many copies of the same letter. And you know, it’s a fascinating little scientific process that he goes through.
Okay, David, thank you for that.
Barbara, the illustrations, well they were made and some of them were put in afterwards by hand, but same as the letters. You could then print it and fill in the colour in with the ink 'cause he invented the ink.
Judy, the pleasure of meeting Nikki. Ah, she invited me to speak a book, City of the Giraffe. Fantastic, Judy, thanks for that. And yeah, and you’ll be seeing my sister, fantastic.
Betty, was the Basel, no not Basel Morgotas, Basel Kowalski, in Washington. It’s my cousin who just turned 80 and we had a Zoom birthday celebration for him, which was great.
Sonya, unfortunately the lead caused illnesses, yep. Your father in Czechoslovakia, well, I’m sorry to hear that. But the lead would, it’s same as, Marie Curie is the ultimate example. Hebrew from right to left, exactly.
Thanks Esther. Okay, so that’s most of the questions I think, and I just want to thank everybody again and for all the inventions to come just a little moment from history and from Renaissance to remind us, you know, through these dark times of Covid and coming out and these darkening times that we’re all living in, or the threat of it at least, a moment as Primo Levi would say, a moment of reprieve through the invention of the printing press.
Okay, thanks everybody. Lauren, thank you so much. And to Judy.
- [Speaker] Thank you, bye.