The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [50]
At some time in the 1450s came the answer to the problem, and with it a turning-point in Western civilisation. The event occurred in a mining area of southern Germany, where precious metal was plentiful. Major silver finds had been made there, and the most powerful family in Europe, the Fuggers, operated a vast financial empire with its headquarters at Augsburg, the chief city of the region. The nearby towns of Regensburg, Ulm and Nuremberg had for long been the heart of the European metal-working industry.
These cities were also centres for the manufacture of astronomical and navigational instruments, the source of the first engraving techniques, and the home of some of the best watch- and clock-makers on the Continent. Expert jewellers and goldsmiths inlaid precious metal on ceremonial armour and made complicated toys that were operated by wire. The region held many men highly experienced in the working of soft metals.
It was probably one of these metal-workers who recognised that the goldsmith’s hallmark punch could be used to strike the shape of a letter in a soft metal mould. This would be filled with a hot tin-antimony alloy which, when cooled, formed the first interchangeable typeface which could be used in a printing press. The press itself was a modified linen-press that had been in use for centuries; it was now adapted to push paper down on to an inked matrix of upturned letters, each one of which was close enough in dimension to its neighbour to fit into standard holes in the matrix base. The technique would not have worked with parchment because it was not porous enough to take the ink.
A fifteenth-century Czech coiner at work, striking coins from silver blanks. This was extremely delicate and demanding work, for each coin had to be struck perfectly with one blow.
The man who is credited with inventing the process was Johannes Gansfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg. His new press destroyed the oral society. Printing was to bring about the most radical alteration ever made in Western intellectual history, and its effects were to be felt in every area of human activity.
The innovation was not in fact new. There had been an even earlier attempt, in China, which produced baked-clay letter founts, but these were fragile and did not lend themselves to mass-production. In any case the task would have been daunting, as the Chinese language demanded between 40,000 and 50,000 ideograms.
The next step took place in Korea. In 1126 the palaces and libraries of the country had been destroyed during a dynastic struggle. It was urgently necessary to replace the lost texts, and, because they had been so numerous, any technique for replacement had to be quick and easy. The only Korean hardwood which might have been used to replace the books using woodcut techniques was birch. Unfortunately this wood was available only in limited quantities and was already being used to print paper money. The solution to the problem did not come until around 1313, when metal typecasting was developed. The method adopted of striking out a die to make a mould in which the letter could be cast was well known at the time, as it had been in common use since the early twelfth century by coiners and casters of brass-ware and bronze.
Due to a Confucian prohibition on the commercialisation of printing, the books produced by this new Korean method were distributed free by the government. This severely limited the spread of the technique. So too did the restriction of the new technique to the royal foundry, where official material only was printed and where the primary interest lay in reproducing the Chinese classics rather than Korean literature which might have found a wider and more receptive audience. In the early fifteenth century King Sajong of Korea invented a simplified alphabet of twenty-four characters, for use by the common people.