1450 – 1830. Gutenberg, Aldine Press, the first newspapers, the first encyclopedias, the public library. For four centuries the dominant communication technology is hot lead set by hand on a wooden press. Literacy becomes a mass property of populations, not a guild skill.
Part of Media
14 moments in this segment.
- — Woodblock printing in East Asia. Centuries before Gutenberg, China and Korea printed texts and images from carved woodblocks.
- — Bi Sheng’s movable type. In Song-dynasty China, Bi Sheng invented movable type made of baked clay — four centuries before Europe.
- — Hangul — a phonetic alphabet by design. In 1446 King Sejong of Korea promulgated Hangul, a writing system consciously designed to be simple enough for anyone to learn — a rare case of literacy engineered as public policy.
- — Gutenberg Bible. Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz combines movable type cast from a lead-tin-antimony alloy, oil-based ink, the screw press, and the wine-press operating model — and prints 180 copies of the Vulgate Bible. The infrastructure of mass literacy enters Europe. Within fifty years the price of a book has dropped by 99 percent.
- — The Incunabula. By 1500 — fifty years after Gutenberg — there are an estimated 28,000 different books in print across Europe, called incunabula ("swaddling-clothes" books). Print shops have opened in over 250 cities. Venice alone has more than 200 working presses.
- — Relation — First Weekly Newspaper. Johann Carolus of Strasbourg starts printing his manuscript-newsletter Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien on a movable-type press, in weekly editions. UNESCO recognises it in 2005 as the world's first newspaper. The form spreads to Antwerp by 1620, London by 1621.
- — Diderot's Encyclopédie. Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert begin publishing the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. 28 volumes, 71,818 articles, 3,129 illustrations. Banned twice; published anyway.
- — Senefelder Invents Lithography. Bavarian playwright Alois Senefelder, looking for a cheap way to print his own scripts, discovers that grease-treated limestone will accept oil-based ink only where the grease is. The technique becomes the dominant illustration printing method of the 19th century and the direct ancestor of offset printing.
- — The Steam-Powered Press at The Times. John Walter II of The Times of London buys a Friedrich Koenig steam-powered cylinder press and prints the 28 November 1814 edition on it. The press runs 1,100 sheets per hour — four times the speed of a hand press.
- — The Penny Press. Cheap, ad-funded papers like the New York Sun created the first mass-circulation press.
- — Photography — the daguerreotype. Daguerre’s process let an image be captured by light itself — the birth of mechanical visual reproduction.
- — The rotary printing press. Hoe’s rotary press printed newspapers by the hundred thousand, industrialising the word.
- — The Linotype machine. Mergenthaler’s Linotype let one operator set a line of type at a keyboard, revolutionising typesetting.
- — The comic strip & the Yellow Kid. Mass newspapers spawned the comic strip — a new popular visual-narrative medium.
