Johannes Gutenberg Research Paper

Since the creation of the first printing press in the fifthteenth century by Johannes Gutenberg, printing has come a long way with modern printers able to print thousands of books in a matter of days. The first form of printing that is known of appeared in China in something called block printing. Block printing was the transfer of ink to paper from carvings of characters in small wooden blocks and was used on playing cards and paper money (Kreis, Steven). The first movable type was also created in China in the eleventh century by Bi Sheng using baked clay ("Technological Advances during the Song"). These forms of printing had eventually reached Europe by the thirteenth century, along with gunpowder and the compass, and, in the words of Francis …show more content…
He was a former goldsmith before and had created an alloy made of lead, tin, and antimony that was very durable (Kreis, Steven). Using this alloy, he was able to create a printing press that was easy to use because of its pieces being reusable. Gutenberg is most famous for the printing of 200 of his Gutenberg Bibles, sold at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1455. These bibles were expensive and elaborate with a price equal to three years worth of pay for an average clerk (Kreis, Steven). In order to create these bibles, Gutenberg borrowed lots of money from Johann Fust and never returned it, which led Fust to suing Gutenberg and getting some of Gutenberg’s printing equipment (Who was Johann Gutenberg and what do we know about him?). Johannes Gutenberg played a key role in the spreading of the printing press and its functions because of these bibles which were sold all around Europe and introduced the idea of the printing press, By that time many other countries had acquired a kind of printing press and were using it to mass produce …show more content…
The most important part of the advancement of these two things was the preservation of knowledge in standardized form which initiated an “information revolution” similar to the internet (Kreis, Steven). The easier access to scientific discoveries through printing led to what later became known as the Scientific Revolution, or the emergence of modern science during the early modern period. In the Ways of the World: A Global History with Sources textbook by Robert Strayer, it informs that the initial breakthrough in this revolution came from Polish mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus who had written a book titled On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in which he shattered the idea that everything revolved around Earth by revealing evidence that the Earth, in fact, revolved around the sun (Strayer 742). Due to the publishing of this book, other scientists such as Galileo and Johannes Kepler were able to find and build on his findings. Another scientist that had broken traditional views of the region was Charles Darwin, also mentioned in the textbook, whose famous books The Descent of Man and The Origin of Species brought up the idea of evolution and therefore again initiated further scientific study (Strayer 748). Without the use of printing, neither of these scientists would have been able to spread their ideas as far as they had with the publication of their