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Few Things have had a more profound effect on human development than language, especially the ability to write on clay, stone, papyrus, or paper what we are thinking and what we want to say to other humans.
Many species of animals communicate through a variety of sounds from tweets, barks, grunts, to whale songs. But when an animal dies, its thoughts and messages die with it. And for thousands of years while we were evolving into sapient humans, and even now in some cultures, oral communication sufficed to keep members of communities informed enough to participate in trade, exploration, and religious ceremonies. But when the members of a community died, their thoughts and messages were either passed on by another member of the community, or were lost forever.
Written language, however, has given humanity the ability to communicate ideas far beyond what we could achieve before it was invented. Along with such things as making stone spearheads and the ability to cultivate and prepare foods, writing separates us from our animal ancestors as nothing else does. From inscriptions carved in stone, to computer generated text, the story of our ability to communicate through the written word has been an interesting journey.
Cave paintings go back at least 40,000 years in human history. Some scholars believe the paintings were not just art but also depicted information on animal migrations and birthing seasons. If so, these wall paintings could easily have been some of humanity’s oldest forms of symbolic communication from one community to another.
But even long before cave drawings, there were lines, circles, dashes and other symbols showing up on stones and bones in various places around Africa, as well as the Fertile Cresent area from Egypt to Mesopotamia, as far east as China, and in Mesoamerica not long after the first Native Americans arrived. It was as if groups of Homo sapiens, although wide spread and many miles from each other, had developed the idea of written communications at about the same time.
It is believed that the earliest systematic written language was cuneiform, a type of script using a stylus or pointed stick to make impressions on a clay tablet. It was developed around 5,000 years ago by the Sumerians who lived in the Mesopotamian area around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Cuneiform was in use for several hundred years and many of the old clay tablets have been excavated and studied. The symbols used influenced those developed in later cultures.
A good deal of the early Sumerian script was mundane accounting as to how much wheat or other food items a person bought from the government storehouses. But some 4,000 years ago, the Legend of Gilgamesh, about the adventures of a Sumerian king, was inscribed on clay tablets and is believed the be the first literary work ever written.
Chinese Oracle-Bone script developed about the same time as cuneiform. This was a form of logographic or picture writing done on animal bones and turtle shells in which symbols represented words. Over the years, the figures and symbols developed into today’s Chinese script.
Also round that time, Egyptians developed hieroglyphics, another type of logographic writing that used stylized pictures of birds, people, snakes, eyes and other symbols, over a hundred in all. They were carved into the walls of tombs and palaces. And after the invention of papyrus about 4,000 years ago from the pulp of a wetland reed, hieroglyphic symbols were used on some official documents, although the spoken language was an early form of what came to be known as Coptic. Hieroglyphics were last used around 400AD.
As the Roman Empire grew, the need for mass communication became important to the point the that the Romans started what became the world’s first newsletter. Called the Acta Diurna, it was a mainly a daily account of official government notices but also contained some private notices of weddings, deaths, and other personal news much like today’s newspapers. Carved daily in stone or metal and put up on message boards around Rome, the purpose of the Acta Diurna which was published from 59BC to 222AD was publicare et propagare, that is, to make public and propagate the news of the day. It was an important step in the history of printing.
Another event that became very important in the history of printing was the invention of paper in 105AD. A Chinese court official named Cai Lun mixed tree bark, hemp, cloth, and old fishing net material then pressed it all together and came up with a flat sheet that could be written on and used in block printing. As crude as it was at first, it proved to be a great improvement over the variety of materials used for writing at the time. In the next centuries refinements were made yet even today most paper is still made by pressing and drying moist fibers of cellulose pulp made from wood.
The oldest printed and dated book was the Diamond Sutra produced in China on the 15th day of the 4th month of the 9th year of Xiantong, which works out to be May 11, 868AD. Printed with wooden blocks by Wang Chieh to honor his parents, it was made of 7 paper sheets glued together to make a scroll about 16 feet long and 10.5 inches tall that contained early Buddhist wisdom. The book has been translated into several languages and is still used today by some Buddhist groups. Then around 900AD, as the history of printing progressed, books began to be printed on small sheets and bound into the kind of books we know today.
Around 1040, Chinese printers came up with the idea of movable block printing instead of a whole page on one block. A single Chinese character carved on a small individual block of wood, metal or clay could be moved around to print different documents or stories without having to carve the whole page for different printed items. But the blocks cracked or wore out over time requiring a constant supply of new blocks. The process was time consuming but a great step forward in the history of printing. A similar process was in use in Europe around 1300.
These innovations in print communication covering over 5,000 years from various parts of the world were leading up to the invention that would finally put it all together: the Gutenberg printing press. Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg was born sometime around 1400 in the city of Mainz on the Rhine River in central Germany and grew up there. In his 20s, Gutenberg spent a few years working as a goldsmith in Strausburg on the German-French border where it is believed that he first came up with the idea for a printing machine.
By the late 1440s Gutenberg had moved back to Mainz and continued to work on his invention. He put together several ideas such as Chinese movable type and his knowledge of metallurgy to create a metal type that would be more durable than wood or clay blocks yet moveable and reusable. His type was an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony, an alloy durable enough to take the pressure of printing yet easy to melt and be made into a new letter. This alloy was used for many years in what came be known as letterpress printing. The type face or letter design he came up with was a close match to the style of lettering used by the scribes who up to Gutenberg’s time were still laboriously writing books by hand. Since then, hundreds of other type faces have been designed.
The system Gutenberg developed for creating the type he needed was to make a master of each upper and lower case letter, each period, apostrophe, dash, slash and other elements of type in various widths and use the master to make the individual letters. In all he needed to make 290 master characters in order to print an entire page.
To get the pressure needed to press the paper onto the inked type, he utilized the same screw mechanism used in wine making to press grapes. Besides metal type and a press system, Gutenberg also had to invent an ink that would work better with metal type than the water-based ink used in wood block printing. He came up with an oil-based ink, similar to the varnish inks still used today. It took years of trial and error and a good deal of money to finally build a system of type, ink, and press that would produce multiple copies of a document and then be able to rearrange the same metal type to make a completely different document.
By 1450 Guttenberg had everything in place but developing all of these processes and then buying expensive paper took money. In order to earn some money from his invention, one of the first printing contracts he had was printing documents for the Catholic church. He also printed a Latin grammar book and a few poems. This work helped pay a few bills but it did not cover all of Gutenberg’s expenses and he kept getting further in debt.
Gutenberg’s next project was to typeset and print the entire Christian bible, both the old and new testaments. This ambitious undertaking was started around 1452. He had hoped that he could print several hundred copies of the bible on vellum, a type of parchment made from calf skin used on important documents. But vellum was expensive, and only 45 of the entire print run of 180 copies were on vellum. The other 135 were on paper.
There is some debate about the origin of Gutenberg’s paper. The first paper manufacturing facility in Europe was set up in Spain in 1151, and there was also a paper mill in Switzerland. However, the 42 X 60 centimeter or 17 by 24- inch sheets of paper Gutenberg used supposedly came from a papermill in Caselle in the Piedmont area of Italy. Each 1288-page bible required 322 sheets of vellum or paper. And both were very expensive.
It was estimated that after setting the type, Gutenberg could print about 240 impressions per hour. So, each bible, after the type was set and tightened down, would have taken around 3 hours of press work, then the sheets had to be folded, trimmed, illuminated or decorated in color, and then bound into a book. Each bible took several hours of labor.
After printing a few copies of the bible, Gutenberg was soon low on money. Then, what later turned out to be an unfortunate move was when he, in order to cover some of the debt he had accumulated, borrowed a large sum of money from a lender named Johann Fust. As Gutenberg was in the midst of printing the bible, Fust demanded payment on his loan and Gutenberg was unable to pay the debt. Fust then sued him for the money. The issue went to trial in 1455 and Gutenberg lost the case. Fust and his son-in-law Peter Schoffer, who had been an employee in Gutenberg’s shop, took over the business and finished printing 180 copies of the bible in 1457. Fust and Schoffer put their names on the finished bible and it was a few years before people gave Gutenberg credit for his revolutionary invention and the work he had done on the bible.
Widespread recognition finally came in 1462 when Archbishop Adolph von Nassau-Wiesbaden publicized Gutenberg as the true inventor of the printing press and the originator of the Gutenberg bible. The archbishop went on to bestow on Gutenberg the title of Hofmann or court gentleman, give him an annual stipend to live on as well as a gift of 2,180 liters of grain and 2,000 liters of wine. Gutenberg was able to enjoy his notoriety and stipend for six years before he died in February 1468.
Although Johannes Gutenberg is one of the most important figures in world history, especially in the history of printing, no one is sure when he was born nor exactly what he looked like. His year of birth is given as somewhere between 1393 and 1406, and the portrait of him we see today was drawn after his death. Apparently, he was never married and left no children. He was buried in the Franciscan church in Mainz which unfortunately was destroyed during WWII.
Today there are 21 known complete Gutenberg bibles in existence, each valued at around twenty-five million dollars. Most are in libraries or museums.
The technology Gutenberg had developed spread quickly around Europe and Asia. Printed books soon replaced those written by hand and the literacy rate in Europe increased. No longer was it only the educated clergy who could acquire books to read. When books became more plentiful, more people could learn to read.
The first weekly newspaper was established in Antwerp, Belgium in 1605. By the 17th and 18th centuries a number of newspapers were in circulation. In 1611, a Gutenberg press was used to again print a version of the Christian bible under the auspices of King James I of England. The King James Bible is still in use today by many Christian sects.
In the 1500s and 1600s printing technology crossed the Atlantic as the Spanish, English and other Europeans established colonies in the new world. The first book to be printed in the Western Hemisphere was in Mexico City in 1539, a book on Christian doctrine printed by Juan Pablos. In 1639 Stephen Daye set up the first press in British Colonial America at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
One of America’s first newspapers was started in Boston in 1690 by Benjamin Harris but was shut down because he did not have the proper license from the British government. A more successful newspaper was established in Boston in 1704 by John Campbell who managed to obtain a license and stay in business. At that time all of the printing type had to be imported from England. The first type produced in America was in 1735 by Christopher Sauer in Germantown, Pennsylvania.
One of the great proponents in the history of printing in America was Benjamin Franklin. His brother James had set up a printing establishment in Boston where he founded a newspaper called the New England Courant, which he published from 1721 until it was shut down by the British government in 1726 for being too critical of government policies. Soon after the newspaper closed, Benjamin, who had written articles for James’ newspaper, left Boston and set up a printing shop in Philadelphia. In 1729 he began printing the Pennsylvania Gazette newspaper and in 1732 began writing and printing the popular Poor Richard’s Almanack.
His business prospered and by the early 1730s he was financing the establishment of printing shops and newspapers in other parts of colonial America. One of these, for example, was set up in Charleston, South Carolina, where after the death of her husband in 1738, the business was taken over by Elizabeth Timothy who became the first woman newspaper publisher in America.
Since the days of Franklin, who was using a press not much advanced from Gutenberg’s, printing technology has changed tremendously. For example, in 1798 Johann Alois Senefelder of Munich, Germany developed lithographic printing where the letters and images are etched on a flat block of limestone which is inked and pressed against a sheet of paper. A modified process of the same technology but using a metal plate and a rubber blanket on a cylinder is used in today’s offset printing. In fact, the process is still called offset lithography. The speed of printing increased greatly with the advent of rotary presses in the early 1800s. Another major boost in printing technology came with the invention of the Linotype machine by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1886. Whole lines of type could be typed just like on a typewriter instead of having to set each individual letter. The first large company to use Linotype machines was the New York Tribune newspaper.
Today, most typesetting is done on computers and printing is done on offset presses that use flexible metal plates and rubber rollers rather than flat beds of type. We’ve come a long way from Gutenberg who brought book production out of the artisan era into the machine era. And the technology is still improving.
When one considers the greatest innovations in the history of humanity, we think of such things as our ability to control and use fire, making tools out of pieces of stone, the invention of the wheel, or the advent of agriculture. But surely one of the greatest human achievements has been developing the art of symbolic expression.
Perhaps it could be said that some animals when they use paw marks or urine scent to mark a territory, are communicating symbolically. Perhaps our distant ancestors had this animal behavior in mind when they scratched lines in a rock to convey a message to another person. We may never know how written communication began. What we know is that when we learned to use symbols to communicate an abstract idea to another human from the earliest scratches on rocks, to cave drawings, to the myriad written languages our species uses today, we profoundly set ourselves apart from our animal ancestors. We became the community of humans. As one historian put it: “Today we are a species awash in symbols.”
The history of printing continues today. Those first scratches on stone have become a world-wide communications network that in time will help us realize our human commonality and pull us together rather than splintering us into factions.
Ted McCormack
