When was the development of printing in europe

He died in One notable detail about this edition is the inclusion of a colophon for the very first time in history. A colophon is the section of a book that details publication information.

Ten copies of this edition of The Book of Psalms are known to still exist. The spread of printing as a trade benefited from workers in Germany who had helped Gutenberg in his early printing experiments and then went on to become printers who taught the trade to others.

By , Italian printers began to make a successful trade in printed matter. German printers were invited to set up presses at the Sorbonne in Paris in , and the librarian there chose books to be printed, mostly textbooks, for the students.

By , other German printers had moved to Paris and set up private companies. Spain welcomed German printers in in Valencia, spreading to Barcelona in In , Portugal invited printers to Lisbon. Caxton went to Cologne to learn to print in in order to set up a press in Bruges and publish his own translations of various works. After returning to England, he set up a press in Westminster Abbey , where he worked as a printer for the monarchy until his death in The worldwide spread of the printing press meant a greater distribution of ideas that threatened the ironclad power structures of Europe.

Twenty years later, books from John Calvin and Martin Luther spread, bringing into reality what Alexander had feared. Furthering that threat, Copernicus published his On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres , which was seen as heresy by the church.

By , the first official newspaper, Relation , was printed and distributed in Strasbourg. The Invention of Printing. Theodore Low De Vinne. Rebecca Romney. Joseph Needham, Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin. Cambridge Illustrated History of China. Patricia Buckley Ebrey. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, and the invention of the mechanical movable type printing press helped disseminate knowledge wider and faster than ever before. German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around , although he was Americans enjoy freedom of the press as one of the rights guaranteed by People began crafting writing systems for their languages more than five thousand years ago, one of the earliest being Cuneiform, created by Sumerians in Mesopotamia about B.

The Chinese developed a process for manufacturing paper about nineteen hundred years ago. By the eighth century this process had spread to the Middle East, with a paper mill operating in Baghdad in Less than four centuries later, in , the first paper mill in Europe was operating in Spain, knowledge about this manufacturing process having spread from the Middle East.

Meanwhile the Chinese developed wood-block printing, the precursor to printing presses with movable metal type, in A century later, movable type was invented in China in By the early fifteenth century wood-block printing had spread to Europe. Johannes Gutenberg, a fifteenth-century inventor, printer, and publisher, put together these elements, along with movable metal type in a printing press he developed in his home town of Mainz from to Woodblock printing in China dates back to the 9th century and Korean bookmakers were printing with moveable metal type a century before Gutenberg.

With the newfound ability to inexpensively mass-produce books on every imaginable topic, revolutionary ideas and priceless ancient knowledge were placed in the hands of every literate European, whose numbers doubled every century. Here are just some of the ways the printing press helped pull Europe out of the Middle Ages and accelerate human progress. His greatest accomplishment was the first print run of the Bible in Latin, which took three years to print around copies, a miraculously speedy achievement in the day of hand-copied manuscripts.

Palmer, a professor of early modern European history at the University of Chicago, compares early printed books like the Gutenberg Bible to how e-books struggled to find a market before Amazon introduced the Kindle. Gutenberg died penniless, his presses impounded by his creditors. Other German printers fled for greener pastures, eventually arriving in Venice, which was the central shipping hub of the Mediterranean in the late 15th century.

The ships left Venice carrying religious texts and literature, but also breaking news from across the known world. Printers in Venice sold four-page news pamphlets to sailors, and when their ships arrived in distant ports, local printers would copy the pamphlets and hand them off to riders who would race them off to dozens of towns. Since literacy rates were still very low in the s, locals would gather at the pub to hear a paid reader recite the latest news, which was everything from bawdy scandals to war reports.

Sketch of a printing press taken from a notebook by Leonardo Da Vinci. The Italian Renaissance began nearly a century before Gutenberg invented his printing press when 14th-century political leaders in Italian city-states like Rome and Florence set out to revive the Ancient Roman educational system that had produced giants like Caesar, Cicero and Seneca.

One of the chief projects of the early Renaissance was to find long-lost works by figures like Plato and Aristotle and republish them. Wealthy patrons funded expensive expeditions across the Alps in search of isolated monasteries. Italian emissaries spent years in the Ottoman Empire learning enough Ancient Greek and Arabic to translate and copy rare texts into Latin. The operation to retrieve classic texts was in action long before the printing press, but publishing the texts had been arduously slow and prohibitively expensive for anyone other than the richest of the rich.

Palmer says that one hand-copied book in the 14th century cost as much as a house and libraries cost a small fortune.