invention of the printing press

The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting
by Anne Trubek
Published 5 Sep 2016

What was to them a new technology, writing, was associated—linguistically, at least—to an older one, drawing, which they had previously done on pottery.* Deciding to use clay for a writing surface was ingenious. As a result, many more examples of Sumerian writing have survived than more recent writing done by ancient Greeks, Romans, medieval Europeans, and even, proportionately, writing done after the invention of the printing press. If the Greeks had written on clay, the Library of Alexandria would have survived the flames. (Egyptian papyrus, the second oldest writing surface, has also lasted better than many forms that came after it because of the Egyptians’ practice of burying documents in sealed containers.) We have a glut of cuneiform but a paucity of cuneiform readers—only a few hundred in the world—so only a fraction of the discovered tablets have been translated.

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At first, the idea that a script could be political or the basis of judgment might seem absurd, but we make similar, if lower-stakes, associations between how letters are formed and the person forming them now. Consider how many perceive people who use the Comic Sans font or the hipster cool of Helvetica. European scripts, from the fall of Rome to the invention of the printing press, were not neutral; they carried great symbolic power. The first medieval script was borrowed from Rome. The Romans wrote only in capitalis, whether on an obelisk, building, or scroll. The most famous example of this all-capital letter script is Trajan’s Column, with its symmetrical and geometric letters.

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Gothic compresses letters more tightly together. It is more illegible than most scripts, signaling the Church’s return to the diversity and localization of the pre-Carolingian period. Gothic is more of a family of scripts than a singular hand; dozens of variations were used across Europe until the invention of the printing press. Italian scribes were never enamored with Gothic, which did not have the same reach as Carolingian minuscule (Petrarch found Gothic script to be “as though it had been designed … for something other than reading” 3), and in the fifteenth century a new script—clearer, and simpler, and more legible to many—was developed (or, according to some, invented by one man, Poggio Bracciolini).4 This script was humanist, a fairly faithful reinvention of Carolingian minuscule, itself a reinvention of capitalis.

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk
Published 15 Feb 2018

In generation after generation, so the charge goes, some leading thinkers have fallen prey to “chronocentricism,” or the erroneous belief that their own moment in time is somehow central to the history of mankind.5 Might the widespread belief that a recent invention like Twitter or Facebook represents a fundamental shift in human history not suffer from the same cognitive bias? It’s important to be on guard against chronocentrism. But it’s also difficult to deny that there are some real parallels between the invention of digital technology and the invention of the printing press: like the press, the advent of the internet and of social media fundamentally transformed the structural conditions of communication. In the five hundred years since the invention of the printing press, the cost and the speed of one-to-many communication fell significantly, even as its content and geographical reach expanded radically. By 1992, it was possible to beam the sound and the sight of an event to billions of television viewers around the world in an instant.

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Technological limits on the spread of the written word thus helped to enforce political and religious orthodoxy: with the dissemination of ideas firmly in the hands of priests and potentates, it was comparatively easy to quell political dissent and religious heresy. This helps to explain what made the invention of the printing press so momentous. When Johannes Gutenberg first found a way to create a master plate for each page that could be copied many times over at vastly lower cost and incomprehensibly greater speed, he radically changed the structural conditions of communication. Soon, “one-to-many” communication would be within the reach of a significant number of people for the first time in human history: somebody with access to the relevant technology and the requisite capital could now impart their ideas to thousands of people, all at the same time.1 Gutenberg’s contemporaries were quick to grasp the revolutionary implications of the printing press—and many of them were full of hope for the marvels it would bring forth.

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And as dissenting voices gained the ability to communicate with would-be followers, so did their ability to instigate violent political revolts. In a word, the printing press spread death as well as literacy, instability, and chaos alongside emancipation. Over the last years, a slew of writers have compared the invention of digital technology—and especially of social media—to the invention of the printing press. In Clay Shirky’s words, “you used to have to own a radio tower or television tower or printing press. Now all you have to have is access to an Internet café or a public library, and you can put your thoughts out in public.”3 Heather Brooke makes much the same point even more concisely: “Our printing press,” she wrote, “is the Internet.

Free Speech And Why It Matters
by Andrew Doyle
Published 24 Feb 2021

Later, during the Roman Empire, the right to free speech in matters of politics was rarely extended beyond the Senate, although anyone familiar with Shakespeare will know that the plebeians could find ways to make their voices heard. The Catholic Church of the Middle Ages put an end to such privileges, ensuring that speech rights were the singular prerogative of men in authority. It wasn’t until the invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century and the subsequent spread of a new humanistic culture that freedom of expression was able to enjoy a resurgence in Europe. With the rediscovery of the literature of antiquity, and its sudden promulgation through the new printing technology, came the rebirth of parrhesia.

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Debates surrounding these issues are complicated, and perspectives vary depending on whether these monuments are deemed to be celebratory in nature or remnants of a history that we would be unwise to forget. But wherever one stands on the issue, it is important to note that the totalitarian mindset has always been revisionist in nature, so we are right to be cautious about where such actions might eventually lead. The Internet is a revolution of the written word to rival the invention of the printing press, enabling our ideas to reach a far wider audience than ever before. But as this new means of expression has proliferated, we face unprecedented threats that would see our liberties rescinded. A combination of state censorship, hostility to press freedom, cancel culture, big tech interference, media complacency, and a substantial proportion of the public that has lost trust in its fellow citizens, has created the conditions within which authoritarian alternatives can germinate.

Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929
by Markus Krajewski and Peter Krapp
Published 18 Aug 2011

And finally, it is even possible to cut books up to save oneself the trouble of copying.27 Behind this order of paper slips that guarantees mobility and rearrangement, one can recognize the same economy of signs that a century earlier contributes to a major paradigmatic shift. Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press not only forges most obviously associations of typesetting, steel models, pouring mechanisms for individual letter types, special alloys, and composing sticks for setting lines of type.28 As a marginal yet indispensable aid, a new tool for filing and storing of the individual pieces of type is introduced: the type case.

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By 1897, the universal register already contains about 1 million entries; by July 1, 1903, there are 6,269,750, and by 1914, more than 11 million slips of paper.40 With an annual increase of approximately 500,000 entries, estimates see the project covering the “entire book production since the invention of the printing press,” anticipating the end of this gigantic enterprise after another ten years.41 It is no coincidence that the development of the Bibliographia Universalis is reminiscent of Konrad Gessner’s efforts. As a method for the production of index cards “by cutting and pasting bibliographical aids,” it undoubtedly harks back to this origin and bears a striking resemblance to its parameters even 350 years later—despite the improved copying procedures and printing methods, paper quality, and cutting devices that were developed in the meantime.42 Following emphatic recommendations by the bibliographical institute in Brussels, the doctrine of basing data collections on semantic arrangements sorted with decimal figures is slowly adopted in business applications and, with some delay, also by the Prussian administration.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 28 Sep 2014

But the general population—the vast majority of them illiterate—had almost no occasion to discern tiny shapes like letterforms as part of their daily routine. People were farsighted; they just didn’t have any real reason to notice that they were farsighted. And so spectacles remained rare and expensive objects. The earliest image of a monk with glasses, 1342 What changed all of that, of course, was Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the 1440s. You could fill a small library with the amount of historical scholarship that has been published documenting the impact of the printing press, the creation of what Marshall McLuhan famously called “the Gutenberg galaxy.” Literacy rates rose dramatically; subversive scientific and religious theories routed around the official channels of orthodox belief; popular amusements like the novel and printed pornography became commonplace.

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What those events happen to be is a murkier but fascinating question. I have tried to sketch a few answers here. Lenses, for instance, emerged out of several distinct developments: glassmaking expertise, particularly as cultivated on Murano; the adoption of glass “orbs” that helped monks read their scrolls later in life; the invention of the printing press, which created a surge in demand for spectacles. (And, of course, the basic physical properties of silicon dioxide itself.) We can’t know for certain the full extent of these influences, and no doubt some influences are too subtle for us to detect after so many years, like starlight from remote suns.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection
by Michael Harris
Published 6 Aug 2014

But it may be worth noting here that most Coursera students are not from developing countries. At present, Africa makes up 3.6 percent of the students, while more than a third come from North America and a further third hail from Europe. Neil Postman, the pioneering technology critic, argues in Technopoly that “school was an invention of the printing press and must stand or fall on the issue of how much importance the printed word has.” By this measure, Coursera and its ilk are a kind of necessity, a rearrangement of education that’s inevitable as our means of communication changes. “For four hundred years schoolteachers have been part of the knowledge monopoly created by printing,” continues Postman, “and they are now witnessing the breakup of that monopoly.”

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Latest numbers show Coursera hosts: “A Triple Milestone,” Coursera Blog for October 23, 2013, accessed January 17, 2014, http://blog.coursera.org/post/64907189712/a-triple-milestone-107-partners-532-courses-5-2. “We don’t educate people as others wished”: Max Chafkin, “Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather of Free Online Education, Changes Course,” Fast Company, accessed December 2, 2013, http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb. “school was an invention of the printing press”: Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993), 10. Marshall McLuhan argues that whenever we amplify: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (Berkeley, Calif.: Ginkgo Press, 2003), 63–70. “Welcome to a world through glass”: “What It Does—Google Glass,” accessed September 5, 2013, http://www.google.com/glass/start/what-it-does/.

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets
by Peter Oppenheimer
Published 3 May 2020

That said, many of the characteristics of the current digital technology revolution share similarities with historical examples of other periods of rapid technological innovation, which help to contextualise the trends that we are seeing in the current cycle. The Printing Press and the First Great Data Revolution One of the earliest and most important waves of technology that revolutionised the way in which the world's economies operated, and how people worked and communicated, was triggered by the invention of the printing press in 1454. This technology fuelled an explosion of information (analogous to the data explosion of recent years), sowing the seeds for the Age of Enlightenment and many other life-changing technologies (or ‘killer applications’ as they are often referred to in a contemporary setting). Before the printing press, information was handwritten (manuscripts) and its production, and access to it, was tightly controlled by the Church.

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The Railway Revolution and Connected Infrastructure Other parallels with the current wave of innovations can be found in the Industrial Revolution, when technology was again at the heart of growth. Many of these technologies developed from each other and even relied on each other, just as smartphones today rely on the internet, and vice versa. The network effect of innovation proved pivotal both following the invention of the printing press and during the railway revolution. During the Industrial Revolution, much of the opportunity was spurred by the extraordinary success and growth of railways. In 1830, England had 98 miles of railway track; by 1840 this had grown to about 1,500 miles, and by 1849 about 6,000 miles of track linked all of its major cities.3 Cheap money and a new (revolutionary) technology attracted a surge in investment, which, in turn, had knock-on effects for the growth in the number of factories, urbanisation and the emergence of new retail markets, all of which was not an obvious consequence at the time.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together
by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin
Published 21 Jun 2023

The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans undoubtedly played a role, triggering a great migration of Greek scholars to university cities such as Bologna and Padua, bringing with them the canon of ancient philosophy and science that had been lost with the fall of Rome.47 Also important was the invention of the printing press, which revolutionized access to ideas. Before, knowledge had been locked away in handwritten manuscripts, many of which were kept in monasteries, out of reach of ordinary citizens. With the printing press, books and pamphlets in local languages suddenly became widely available. But while the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and the invention of the printing press helped propel the Renaissance, Europe’s intellectual revival was already gaining momentum by the time these things happened.

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World
by Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt
Published 20 Apr 2015

Capital has followed trade, and in the past few decades the correlation between countries’ stock markets has more than doubled, while banks’ exposure to debt beyond their home markets has nearly tripled. And of course the Internet has revolutionized interconnectedness in a way comparable only to the invention of the printing press or perhaps even the development of writing itself. It is easy to forget that Google is still a teenager, and Facebook is in elementary school. Weaver argued that simple and uncertain problems have largely been solved, and that the greatest challenges of the future would be problems of complexity.

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Beginning in the late 1400s, Europeans began to explore and colonize the Americas, the Pacific Islands, and Asia. Within a few decades, the economies, societies, and politics of European states were densely interwoven with those of exotic lands unknown just a few decades earlier. The invention of the printing press—the Internet of the Middle Ages—increased the speed and volume of information linking formerly isolated corners of the world. Fewer than 5 million manuscripts were produced in the 1400s—all of them written by hand. Over 217 million were printed in the following century, during which time the price of a book fell by two-thirds.

Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 15 Nov 2004

So we're at a turning point in our history. Universal access is the goal. And the opportunity of leading a different life, based on this, is … thrilling. It could be one of the things humankind would be most proud of. Up there with the Library of Alexandria, putting a man on the moon, and the invention of the printing press. Kahle is not the only librarian. The Internet Archive is not the only archive. But Kahle and the Internet Archive suggest what the future of libraries or archives could be. When the commercial life of creative property ends, I don't know. But it does. And whenever it does, Kahle and his archive hint at a world where this knowledge, and culture, remains perpetually available.

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As one author describes Howard Armstrong's struggle to enable FM radio, An almost unlimited number of FM stations was possible in the shortwaves, thus ending the unnatural restrictions imposed on radio in the crowded longwaves. If FM were freely developed, the number of stations would be limited only by economics and competition rather than by technical restrictions… . Armstrong likened the situation that had grown up in radio to that following the invention of the printing press, when governments and ruling interests attempted to control this new instrument of mass communications by imposing restrictive licenses on it. This tyranny was broken only when it became possible for men freely to acquire printing presses and freely to run them. FM in this sense was as great an invention as the printing presses, for it gave radio the opportunity to strike off its shackles.[168] This potential for FM radio was never realized—not because Armstrong was wrong about the technology, but because he underestimated the power of "vested interests, habits, customs and legislation"[169] to retard the growth of this competing technology.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World
by Jevin D. West and Carl T. Bergstrom
Published 3 Aug 2020

We will consider these issues in turn. THE BROTHEL OF THE PRINTING PRESS Pity the soul who hopes to hold back a revolution in information technology. Priest and scribe Filippo de Strata lived through one such revolution. In 1474, he railed against the damage wrought by the invention of the printing press. Printers, de Strata argued, “shamelessly print, at a negligible price, material which may, alas, inflame impressionable youths, while a true writer dies of hunger….” By massively lowering the cost of manufacturing books, the printing press was bound to reduce the value and authority of text.

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All of this fluff and glitter does more than just dumb down the national conversation: It opens the door for bullshit. The unvarnished truth is no longer good enough. Straight-up information cannot compete in this new marketplace. PARTISANSHIP, PERSONALIZATION, AND POLARIZATION Much as the invention of the printing press allowed for a more diverse array of books, the advent of cable television allowed people to select specialized media outlets that closely reflected their views. Prior to 1987, the Fairness Doctrine of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) strived to ensure balanced coverage of controversial issues in news programming.

Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Nov 2010

The Axial Age invention of the twenty-two-letter alphabet did not lead to a society of literate Israelite readers, but a society of hearers, who would gather in the town square to listen to the Torah scroll read to them by a rabbi. Yes, it was better than being ignorant slaves, but it was a result far short of the medium’s real potential. Likewise, the invention of the printing press in the Renaissance led not to a society of writers but one of readers; except for a few cases, access to the presses was reserved, by force, for the use of those already in power. Broadcast radio and television were really just extensions of the printing press: expensive, one-to-many media that promote the mass distribution of the stories and ideas of a small elite at the center.

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
by Gretchen McCulloch
Published 22 Jul 2019

When grammarians decided that the scribal, pause-based punctuation needed to be reformed under the model of Latin grammar, they may have been able to change the practices of schoolteachers and editors, but they never wholly held dominion over private letters, handwritten signs, or notes left on the kitchen table. In the future, the era of writing between the invention of the printing press and the internet may come to be seen as an anomaly—an era when there arose a significant gap between how easy it was to be a writer versus a reader. An era when we collectively stopped paying attention to the informal, unedited side of writing and let typography become static and disembodied.

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Our modern, Western notion that authorship should be solo and original is comparatively young and culturally bound, dating back only to after we had the ability to make faithful and exact copies at a mass scale. Copyright started evolving into its modern form in the centuries after the invention of the printing press made copying easy. In other words, we’ve had the right to adapt longer than we’ve had the right to prevent copying. I’m grateful for copyright and solo authorship: it’s what allows me, and all the other authors I’ve loved, to make any kind of living. But let’s not pretend that professionalized creativity is the only kind of creativity.

Team Human
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 22 Jan 2019

The clock tower in medieval Europe supported the hourly wages and time-is-money ethos of the Industrial Age. It’s another way that our prevailing technologies serve as role models for human attitudes and behaviors. Particular media environments promote particular sorts of societies. The invention of the printing press changed our relationship to text and ideas by creating a sense of uniformity, while encouraging generic production and wide distribution. The television environment aided corporations in their effort to make America into a consumer culture, by helping people visualize the role of new products in their lives.

Where We Are: The State of Britain Now
by Roger Scruton
Published 16 Nov 2017

Yet more important than those factors has been the revolution in information technology. Information has always been an economic force, and attempts to own it and to exclude others from using it are as old as society. The grant of royal patents was the Tudor style of taxation, and copyright laws have, since the invention of the printing press, made texts the property of the one who first composes them. But the attempt to hang on to your intellectual property can achieve at most only a short-term success. Words, ideas and inventions can be used again and again without depreciation; they can be copied ad infinitum and they will leak from every vessel designed to contain them, to become part of the intellectual capital of mankind.

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers
by Nancy Jo Sales
Published 23 Feb 2016

April Alliston, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton who specializes in gender studies and has taught classes on the history of porn, points out that technological advances are often accompanied by a surge in the production and consumption of pornography. “Historically, a spike in interest in pornography is also associated with advancement in women’s rights,” Alliston says. “What happened at the time of the invention of the printing press was very similar to what’s happening now with the Internet. With the printing press you had porn suddenly made available through technology. At the same time you had women getting more rights; there was more literacy and freedom for women.” She goes on, “Historians talk about how pornography, as we understand it today, was invented in the era of the printing press in response to widespread cultural anxieties that women could gain more knowledge through reading.

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A logical first step in changing the culture of Silicon Valley would be hiring and promoting more women in their own industry. Finally, I think girls need to read. Which they already do; but they need to read more. Early in this book I reported on my conversation with April Alliston, the Princeton professor who talked about how it was with the invention of the printing press that we first saw porn in its modern form. Porn was a reaction to women reading, to becoming more educated and informed. It was meant to degrade women and distract them from becoming educated, in the view of some historians, as a way to keep them from becoming empowered. And so for girls now to model themselves in the image of pornography, one could argue, is for them to embrace their own disempowerment.

The Age of AI: And Our Human Future
by Henry A Kissinger , Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher
Published 2 Nov 2021

Every baffling phenomenon, big or small, was ascribed to the work of the Lord. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Western world underwent twin revolutions that introduced a new epoch—and, with it, a new concept of the role of the individual human mind and conscience in navigating reality. The invention of the printing press made it possible to circulate materials and ideas directly to large groups of people in languages they understood rather than in the Latin of the scholarly classes, nullifying people’s historic reliance on the church to interpret concepts and beliefs for them. Aided by the technology, the leaders of the Protestant Reformation declared individuals were capable of—indeed, responsible for—defining the divine for themselves.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by Neil Postman and Jeff Riggenbach Ph.
Published 1 Apr 2013

It giveth and taketh away, although not quite in equal measure. Media change does not necessarily result in equilibrium. It sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it is the other way around. We must be careful in praising or condemning because the future may hold surprises for us. The invention of the printing press itself is a paradigmatic example. Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration. Typography created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression. Typography made modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into mere superstition.

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World
by Yancey Strickler
Published 29 Oct 2019

Medicine went from a “fantasy of a science,” as historian David Wootton puts it, into an actual science. How did it happen? There were three driving forces, ones that are often present in times of great progress. First is technology, and not just medical technology. The transformation of health began with the invention of the printing press, which allowed physicians to easily compare techniques and outcomes. The printing press was followed by a long line of technologies, including the microscope, the stethoscope, the data table (for sharing experiment results), anesthesia, the computer, and other tools to help us better observe and influence the body’s processes.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

These days there’s so much anxiety in so many industries that Shirky, using his bad cop/good cop routine, provides just the right mix of flagellation and counseling. But something else makes his style of rupture talk so appealing. Oddly enough, it’s his clever use of history—in a debate that is traditionally ahistorical—in order to establish some kind of equivalence between the invention of the printing press and the advent of “the Internet.” And it’s not just fake history of East Germany, which is actually just rational-choice theory in disguise. References to the printing press are also ubiquitous in Shirky’s writings. He dedicates several pages of his Cognitive Surplus to drawing an explicit analogy between Gutenberg’s invention and the proliferation of social media.

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Neither Jarvis nor Shirky is a historian, so in discussing the impact of the printing press—which they think is comparable to the impact of “the Internet”—both turn to the same source: Elizabeth Eisenstein’s landmark two-volume study The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, first published in 1979. Without understanding the limitations of Eisenstein’s highly disputed account of the “revolution” that followed the invention of the printing press, it’s impossible to make sense of contemporary claims for the significance of “the Internet,” not least because the stability that her account lends to “the Internet” makes her a favorite source of Internet optimists and pessimists alike (Nicholas Carr draws on Eisenstein’s work in The Shallows).

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy
by Pistono, Federico
Published 14 Oct 2012

What required dozens of hours of painful research, often through non-interactive and quite unattractive books, is now available in seconds, often in videos, lectures, and conferences held by the most amazing thinkers of our time. A poor kid in Uganda has access to more knowledge than the president of the United States did 30 years ago. Such a dramatic change has no precedent in human history. The invention of the printing press is a pallid, almost insignificant event in comparison. Today, it is possible to receive a world-class education, where the best teachers, coming from the most prestigious universities in the world, teach any subject, for free. This is such a mind blowing and revolutionary thought that I am surprised so few people are aware of it.

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition
by David Levinson and Kevin Krizek
Published 17 Aug 2015

In contrast with the home grown digitization of music, Amazon eventually took the next step and started to completely dematerialize books, by demanding eBooks from publishers, so that the entire product could be delivered over the Internet. In contrast, while there is copyright-violating sharing of ebooks, it is not the same order of magnitude as music.144 Consider the purchase of something as straightforward as a book—a product that has only recently endured considerable change since Gutenberg's 15th century invention of the printing press. I go to a physical store. I provide the clerk a $10 bill in exchange for a book. I return home. I go to the store and purchase a virtual good such as an a gift card. I return home, scan the gift card with a camera built into my computer. The virtual good (e.g., book) is available to me, via several formats.

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life
by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
Published 12 Sep 2016

This book will help you make that change, but not by sitting around trying to decide what that change is going to be. We’re going to help you think like a designer and build your future, prototype by prototype. We’re going to help you approach your own life design challenges with the same kind of curiosity and the same kind of creativity that resulted in the invention of the printing press, the lightbulb, and the Internet. Our focus is mainly on jobs and careers, because, let’s face it, we spend most of the hours of our days, and the days of our lives, at work. Work can be a daily source of enormous joy and meaning, or it can be an endless grind and waste of hours spent trying to white-knuckle our way through the misery of it all until the weekend comes.

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World
by Mark Miodownik
Published 5 Jun 2013

Other cultures achieved something similar with the concertina format—forming a stack by repeatedly folding one continuous sheet of paper in on itself—but the advantage of the codex, with its individual pages, is that many scribes could work on the same book at the same time, and after the invention of the printing press many copies of the same book could be created at the same time. As biology had already discovered, the speedy copying of information is the most effective way of preserving it. The Bible is said to be one of the first books created in this new format, one that suited preachers of Christianity because it allowed them to locate the text relevant to their purpose using page numbers instead of laboriously searching through a whole scroll.

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger
Published 1 Jan 2009

By the end of the sixteenth century, Europe had been flooded with printed books and pamphlets promising access to God, furthering religious and political propaganda, chronicling scientific discoveries, reviving Greek and Roman classics, and providing diversion and amusement. An important shift had taken place: external memory had become mass-produced. Yet, fundamentally remembering remained expensive. Of course, through the invention of the printing press labor costs had come down dramatically, and as the Catholic Church was losing its grip over the written word, demand for books increased substantially. But as printing moved from scribes fashioning individual copies to publishers printing hundreds or thousands of them, the cost of an individual book failed to decrease by much, because books were printed on paper, and the cost of this critical resource remained high—for centuries.

The Perfect House: A Journey With Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio
by Witold Rybczynski
Published 2 Sep 2002

A medieval copy of the Vitruvian manuscript had come to light in 1415, and had long been studied by scholars in hand-copied form, but it was not until 1521 that an Italian translation—with added illustrations—became widely available as a printed book. Palladio was born only about fifty years after the invention of the printing press, and he was fortunate to live near Venice, one of the great European centers of the new printing industry. (The first Italian translation of Leon Battista Alberti’s important architectural treatise Of Built Things, which had been written in Latin, would be published in Venice in 1546.)

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

The severe depopulation and shortage of labor would eventually lead to better wages for the poor, increased social mobility, and the breakdown of the manorial system. Although there were eruptions of increased religiosity, the plague, in the long run, wore down faith in the church, planting the seeds of what, in time, would lead to the Reformation and a growing secularization of the culture at large. Combined with other developments like the invention of the printing press and the growth of international trade, these dynamics would foster a new humanism and rationality and, after a long interregnum, eventually give way to what we now know as the Renaissance with its flowering of the arts. * * * — With Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump in 2020, and the defeat, in the 2022 midterms, of many prominent election deniers, there was a collective sigh of relief among supporters of democracy, who were further buoyed by the defeat that year of the right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

Branded Beauty
by Mark Tungate
Published 11 Feb 2012

Sheer headscarves or decorative headbands drew attention to this desirable feature. Remaining hair was worn long and occasionally braided, ornamented with strands of gold and pearls. Yet the demands of modesty meant that married women covered their hair with scarves or bonnets: medieval beauty was a mass of contradictions. As Dominique Paquet observes, the invention of the printing press in the 15th century enabled the wider diffusion of beauty remedies. One of the most influential documenters of such knowledge was Caterina Sforza, Countess of Forlì, a powerful Renaissance noblewoman who dabbled in alchemy. Between 1492 and 1509 she wrote Gli Experimenti, a veritable beauty manual for Renaissance women.

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives)
by David Birch
Published 14 Jun 2017

The distributed ledger technology of the tally had been used to convert a means for deferred payment into a store of value and then into a means of exchange, and the sticks remained in widespread use for hundreds of years. The Bank of England, being a sensible and conservative institution naturally suspicious of new technologies, continued to use wooden tally sticks until 1826: some 500 years after the invention of double-entry bookkeeping and 400 years after Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. At this time, the Bank came up with a wonderful British compromise: they would switch to paper but they would keep the tallies as a backup (who knew whether the whole ‘printing’ thing would work out, after all) until the last person who knew how to use them had died. Medieval tally sticks.

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms
by David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee
Published 23 May 2016

Merchants, meanwhile, often developed sufficient trust in each other, through repeated dealing, that they were willing to extend credit. One merchant, for example, sold four pieces of cloth to two other merchants who agreed to pay their debt, on demand, at any one of sixteen fairs held during a particular month in the next year.9 Now let’s move forward another several centuries. The invention of the printing press with movable type by Gutenberg around 1440 led to the explosive growth of the media business, including newspapers. Before 1800, print newspapers had begun to publish classified ads. These ran the gamut from ads for people looking for marriage, to ads for people looking to rent a room, to ads for medical wares or even haberdashery or drapery.10 According to a history of advertising by the industry publication Advertising Age, “[b]y 1800 most English and American newspapers were not only supported by advertising but were the primary medium carrying it.”11 At first, newspapers didn’t impose any structure on the classifieds, so it was hard to find things.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier
Published 5 Mar 2013

We can compare writing styles and gain insights into authorship disputes. Datafication also makes plagiarism in academic works much easier to discover; as a result, a number of European politicians, including a German defense minister, have been forced to resign. An estimated 130 million unique books have been published since the invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century. By 2012, seven years after Google began its book project, it had scanned over 20 million titles, more than 15 percent of the world’s written heritage—a substantial chunk. This has sparked a new academic discipline called “Culturomics”: computational lexicology that tries to understand human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of texts.

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines
by William Davidow and Michael Malone
Published 18 Feb 2020

Saugat Adhikari, “Top 10 Ancient Roman Inventions,” Ancient History Lists, April 29, 2019, https://www.ancienthistorylists.com/rome-history/top-10-ancient-roman-inventions/ (accessed June 26, 2019). 19. “Printing Press,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press (accessed June 26, 2019). 20. “FC74: The Invention of the Printing Press and Its Effects,” The Flow of History, http://www.flowofhistory.com/units/west/11/FC74 (accessed June 26, 2019). 21. Jeremy M. Norman, ed., From Gutenberg to the Internet (Novato, Calif.: historyofscience.com, 2005), 29. 22. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 19. 23.

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism
by Ashton Applewhite
Published 10 Feb 2016

It wasn’t always like this In most prehistoric and agrarian societies, the few people who lived to old age were esteemed as teachers and custodians of culture. Religion gave older men power. History was a living thing passed down across generations. This oral tradition took a serious hit with the invention of the printing press, when books became alternative repositories of knowledge. As long as old age remained relatively rare, though, olders retained social standing as possessors of valuable skills and information. The young United States was a gerontocracy, which served the older men who held the reins; younger citizens had to age into positions of authority.

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality
by Oded Galor
Published 22 Mar 2022

Abrupt institutional and cultural changes that cannot be traced to deeper origins have undoubtedly played a role in the development of societies, as exemplified by the divergence of North and South Korea in recent decades. Indeed, random or accidental developments could have produced a delay centuries long in the invention of the printing press, prompted the Chinese imperial navy to explore the Americas, sparked the Industrial Revolution in Holland rather than Britain, or thwarted the Meiji Restoration in nineteenth-century Japan. But while sudden institutional and cultural shifts have affected the growth process over the course of decades or centuries, they are very unlikely to have been at the core of the progression of the journey of humanity as a whole, or the ultimate factors that governed the divergence in the wealth of nations.

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed
by Carl Honore
Published 29 Jan 2013

In one of his notebooks, da Vinci wrote: “Like a kingdom divided, which rushes to its doom, the mind that engages in subjects of too great variety becomes confused and weakened.” Today there is simply too much for one person to know. According to a Google survey, the number of book titles published since the invention of the printing press now stands at 130 million. Yet the Renaissance ideal is far from a busted flush. It just has to move with the times. In a hyper-specialized, highly complex world, the best way to recreate the mishmash of expertise once found in a single person is to bring various people together. And that is why collaboration is often a key ingredient of the Slow Fix.

The Virtue of Nationalism
by Yoram Hazony
Published 3 Sep 2018

It was the presence of the Hebrew Bible in the Christian canon that shaped the peculiar history of French Catholicism, which took on a national character modeled on the biblical Davidic kingdom and stubbornly resisted the control of popes and emperors. It shaped, as well, the unique national-religious traditions of the English, Poles, and Czechs well before the Reformation.21 Thus when Protestantism emerged in the sixteenth century, along with the invention of the printing press and the widespread circulation of the Bible translated into the languages of the nations, the new call for freedom to interpret Scripture without the authority of the Catholic Church did not affect religious doctrine alone. Especially under the influence of Old Testament–oriented thinkers such as Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin, Protestantism embraced and quickly became tied to the unique national traditions of peoples chafing against ideas and institutions that they regarded as foreign to them.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

Sheryl Gay Stolberg, ‘Bernie Sanders, now a millionaire, pledges to release tax returns by Monday’, The New York Times, 9 April 2019. 5. William D. Nordhaus, ‘Schumpeterian profits in the American economy: Theory and measurement’, NBER Working Paper no.10433, 2004. 6. Compare with Frédéric Bastiat’s reasoning on the invention of the printing press, Bastiat 1964, pp.37f. 7. Donald Boudreaux, Globalization, Greenwood Press, 2008, p.32f. 8. Not Gates any more. Jeff Bezos beat him a few years back, then it was Elon Musk and now it is Bernard Arnault. It changes very fast depending on the temporary stock prices of the companies the super-rich founded, so I’ll continue to use Gates as an example for a while. 9.

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks
by Keith Houston
Published 23 Sep 2013

Notable here are (1) Pompeian graffiti; (8) an insular majuscule ampersand from the seventh-century Book of Kells, and (13) an eighth-century Merovingian ampersand, already recognizable as the modern ampersand form. In its serried ranks of ampersands, Tschichold’s paper traces the dozens of forms in which the sign appeared until the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century led to the fittest among them being embossed permanently in metal. Each of the main families of type that have arisen since then—roman, italic, and blackletter—now boasts its own unique version. So-called roman type—the familiar upright letterforms used almost universally to set long-form texts such as books, newspapers, and websites—brings with it the most regular and recognizable ampersand (&).

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 11 Apr 2011

But economic life in Han Dynasty China resembled the world described by Thomas Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population much more than the world that has existed since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution of the last two hundred years.6 Today, we expect increases in labor productivity (output per person) as the result of technological innovation and change. But before 1800, productivity gains were much more episodic. The invention of agriculture, the use of irrigation, the invention of the printing press, gunpowder, and long-distance sailing ships all led to productivity gains,7 but between them there were prolonged periods when population growth increased and per capita income fell. Many agrarian societies were operating at the frontier of their technological production possibilities, where further investment would not yield higher output.

…

There were many roots to this revolution in ideas. The notion that all human beings are equal in dignity or worth despite their evident natural and social differences is a Christian one, but it was not regarded by the medieval church as something to be implemented in the here and now. The Protestant Reformation, combined with the invention of the printing press, empowered individuals to read the Bible and find their way to faith without the interposition of intermediaries like the church. This reinforced the growing willingness of Europeans to question established authority that had started with recovery of the classics during the late medieval period and the Renaissance.

Monte Carlo Simulation and Finance
by Don L. McLeish
Published 1 Apr 2005

This requires hedges against a whole litany of disadvantageous moves of the market such as increases in the cost of borrowing, decreases in the value of assets held, changes in a foreign currency exchange rates, etc. The advanced theory of finance, like many areas where advanced mathematics plays an important part, is undergoing a revolution aided and abetted by the computer and the proliferation of powerful simulation and symbolic mathematical tools. This is the mathematical equivalent of the invention of the printing press. The numerical and computational power once reserved for the most highly trained mathematicians, scientists or engineers is now available to any competent programmer. One of the first hurdles faced before adopting stochastic or random models in finance is the recognition that for all practical purposes, the prices of equities in an efficient market are random variables, that is while they may show some dependence on fiscal and economic processes and policies, they have a component of randomness that makes them unpredictable.

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 15 Nov 2016

All those defining experiences exist, in part, because natural selection didn’t find it necessary to perceive still images accurately at rates above twelve frames a second—and because hundreds of inventors, tinkering with the prototypes of cinema over the centuries, were smart enough to take that imperfection and turn it into art. — Art is the aftershock of technological plates shifting. Sometimes the aftershock is slow in arriving. It took the novel about three hundred years to evolve into its modern form after the invention of the printing press. The television equivalent of the novel—the complex serialized drama of The Wire or Breaking Bad—took as long as seventy years to develop, depending on where you date its origins. Sometimes the aftershocks roll in quickly: rock ’n’ roll emerged almost instantaneously after the invention of the electric guitar.

Writing on the Wall: Social Media - the First 2,000 Years
by Tom Standage
Published 14 Oct 2013

The Times had established a reputation for being first with the news from war-ravaged Europe, often learning of developments before the British government itself. So it was not unusual for Walter to delay the printing of the paper to allow the latest reports from Europe to be included at the last minute. Four centuries had passed since the invention of the printing press, but the Times, like other newspapers, was printed using hand presses that had changed very little since Gutenberg’s time. The frame that secured the press and the screw mechanism that pressed the type onto the paper were, by the early nineteenth century, both made of metal rather than wood, but otherwise the design would have looked familiar to a printer from the fifteenth century.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky
Published 28 Feb 2008

The fundamental tension in the pro-freedom argument is in understanding when freedom can be acceptably limited, within a framework that assumes that the bias should be toward increasing freedom. The basic tenet here is that the unforeseeable effects of freer communication will benefit society, as with the unanticipated rise of an international community of scientists and mathematicians after the invention of the printing press. Even the pro-freedom argument, though, risks overstating the degree of control we have over the change in group capabilities. To ask the question “Should we allow the spread of these social tools?” presumes that there is something we could do about it were the answer “No.” This hypothesis is suspect, precisely because of the kind of changes involved.

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere
by Kevin Carey
Published 3 Mar 2015

The medieval university worked in this way for the next few centuries, expanding to more locations in Europe and beyond. It was not always the center of intellectual life—the great artists and scholars of the Renaissance did not work at universities—but it continued to grow, adapting to the last great information technology revolution in higher education before the current one: Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century. This was not the first time that teachers had been confronted with new learning technology. Millennia before, another invention had upset those wedded to traditional teaching methods: the written word. In the Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story of a conversation between two gods, Theuth and Thamus.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
by Byron Reese
Published 23 Apr 2018

As I’ve already pointed out, we had to have, among other things, imagination, a sense of time, and writing. In addition, we needed much more; to that list we might well add a low-cost way to distribute knowledge, widespread literacy, the rule of law, nonconfiscatory taxation, individual liberty, and a culture that promoted risk taking. The invention of the printing press, and its widespread use, increased literacy and the free flow of information. This was the main catalyst that launched our modern world way back in the seventeenth century. And, perhaps, modernity got an unexpected boost from something else that happened in Europe at the same time: the replacement of beer by the newly introduced coffee as the beverage one sipped on all day.

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do
by Erik J. Larson
Published 5 Apr 2021

We do not put it in place like theory. Instead, we accrete technological developments one on top of the other, seemingly endlessly. The acceleration of the evolution of technology means simply that the time between major technological innovations keeps shrinking, historically, so that the gap between, say, the invention of the printing press and the arrival of the computer is very large compared to, say, the gap between the computer and the internet. The merger of science and technology is thus complicated, and the very word technoscience suggests that, as things progress, science will settle and technology will continue to evolve—and to evolve, as Kurzweil puts it, exponentially.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
by Gaia Vince
Published 22 Aug 2022

To measure the options a person’s income represents we have to compare their income with the prices of the goods and services that they want. We have to look at the ratio between income and prices. This is something the data service Our World in Data does exceptionally well. Over time, for instance, the price of a book fell in Europe relative to income, particularly in the decades immediately following the invention of the printing press in the sixteenth century, which massively increased the pace and scale of publishing productivity from the labour of individual scribes to an industrialized process. That made a book more affordable, from the price equivalent of months of wages to mere hours. And this productivity then drove further economic growth, in paper production, literacy and learning, for example. 11.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer
by Duncan J. Watts
Published 28 Mar 2011

Once again, we care about things that matter, yet it is precisely these larger, more significant predictions about the future that pose the greatest difficulties. BLACK SWANS AND OTHER “EVENTS” Nowhere is this problem of predicting the things that matter more acute than for what former derivatives trader and gadfly of the financial industry Nassim Taleb calls black swans, meaning events that—like the invention of the printing press, the storming of the Bastille, and the attacks on the World Trade Center—happen rarely but carry great import when they do.15 But what makes an event a black swan? This is where matters get confusing. We tend to speak about events as if they are separate and distinct, and can be assigned a level of importance in the way that we describe natural events such as earthquakes, avalanches, and storms by their magnitude or size.

Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization
by Stephen Cave
Published 2 Apr 2012

Today opportunities for symbolic reproduction are no longer available only to pharaohs and emperors. We are each reproduced in hundreds of baby photos, holiday snaps and home videos. Indeed, with the digital revolution, we are now living through the greatest opening of the cultural sphere since the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. It has never been easier to leave an impression in the shared space of symbols: with the minimum of computing power and know-how, it can be achieved in minutes. At the start of 2011, there were 158 million blogs (personal Web pages that are—in theory at least—updated regularly with the views of the blogger), with tens of thousands more being added every day.

The Road Ahead
by Bill Gates , Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson
Published 15 Nov 1995

The information highway will be largely friction free, a theme I will explore further in chapter 8. This lack of friction in information distribution is incredibly important. It will empower more authors, because very little of the customer's dollar will be used to pay for distribution. Gutenberg's invention of the printing press brought about the first real shift in distribution friction—it allowed information on any subject to be distributed quickly and relatively cheaply. The printing press created a mass medium because it offered low-friction duplication. The proliferation of books motivated the general public to read and write, but once people had the skills there were many other things that could be done with the written word.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

Meanwhile, the upbeat content of messages and programs marking the opening or expansion of those transportation and communications systems was viewed as reinforcing the technology–democracy ties.7 Equally significantly, as historian Ann Blair has detailed in her pathbreaking Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (2010), the assumption that “information overload” is a purely late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century challenge is historical nonsense. Once Gutenberg’s fifteenth-century invention of the printing press became a fact of European life, at least for the educated elite, thousands of books became available for reading and possible purchase, and the initial rejoicing at such abundant intellectual riches eventually turned to despair. Blair quotes Erasmus, the eminent humanist of the early sixteenth century, asking whether there is “anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books”?

The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World
by Sarah Stewart Johnson
Published 6 Jul 2020

She tended to the slides for decades after his death, carrying those small slips of glass with her wherever she moved, from lab to lab, until she entered assisted living a couple of years ago. And, of course, there is a copy of Elements, that crowning achievement, that bygone idea. The edition I couldn’t resist buying—one of the thousand editions printed since the invention of the printing press—happened to have one of the great paintings of the Romantic Era silkscreened on its cover. All the mathematics is bound by the portrait of a person standing on a precipice, caught in the wind, at once towering over the clouds and at the same time swallowed by nothingness. This box contains the “traces of human events” that Herodotus spoke of.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age
by Alex Wright
Published 6 Jun 2014

“Cut out everything you have copied with a pair of scissors,” he wrote, then “arrange the slips as you desire.”1 Using this technique, Gessner culled material from a wide range of sources—personal notes and observations, passages from books (cutting them out rather than copying them by hand, as a time-saving technique), recipes, printers’ catalogs, letters from friends, and so on—then collected the contents into a series of works that he published as new books.2 The most famous of these was his Bibliotheca Universalis, a prodigious volume encompassing some 10,000 titles by 3,000 different authors and purporting to catalog every known book.3 Gessner’s collection may seem modest by contemporary standards—the Library of Congress now adds about 10,000 items to its collection every day4—but in 1545 that number constituted an appreciable chunk of the available supply of recorded knowledge. At the time, the Vatican Library—then the largest library in all of Europe—housed fewer than 5,000 volumes. Gessner was scarcely alone in his urge to tackle the problem of information overload. In the years following Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, the volume of printed material grew at 20 Conrad Gessner’s Bibliotheca Universalis (1545). C ATA L O G I N G T H E WO R L D an astonishing clip. By 1500, just fifty years after the introduction of movable type, European printers had turned out an estimated 20 million copies of between 15,000 and 20,000 individual titles.

Why the Dutch Are Different: A Journey Into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to Zwarte Piet, the Acclaimed Guide to Travel in Holland
by Ben Coates
Published 23 Sep 2015

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, these old certainties began to crumble. In 1517, the German priest Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of a church in the German city of Wittenberg, rejecting the corruption of the Catholic religious authorities. Aided by the invention of the printing press, Luther’s ‘protest’ against the Roman Catholic Church spread quickly across Europe, leading to the creation of a new ‘Protestant’ church. In the Low Countries, Luther’s ideas gained a wide following. Groups supporting the Protestant movement were bolstered by the arrival of refugees from other countries.

Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs
by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu
Published 23 Jan 2024

Alternatively, they would sometimes sell works to each other, or sell shares in works, and there was a lively secondary market in what we would now call literary rights. However, Tonson and his colleagues did not think of these assets as rights, but as properties – properties like houses and fields and horses, or like stakes in collective enterprises such as merchant vessels and coal mines. This is why the invention of the printing press did not lower the cost of reading matter as much as you might expect. In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English and French books remained beyond the reach of common folk. They were luxury items not because they had to be, but because the nature of the trade and the form of regulation adopted allowed printer-publishers to charge high prices without challenge.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane
by Brett King
Published 5 May 2016

In recent years as new technologies like the smartphone, Facebook, Angry Birds, Snapchat and WeChat emerged, they became mass-market propositions 30 to 50 times faster than technologies such as the aeroplane or telephone. We live in extraordinary, accelerated times. Technology adoption and innovation has a compounding effect on the way we live when viewed over the long term. As we invent new technologies, they accelerate our ability to invent or create yet newer technologies. The invention of the printing press allowed more people to become educated and allowed knowledge to be distributed as never before. The invention of the integrated circuit (IC) not only allowed us to mass-produce consumer electronics and microchips, but also allowed us to rapidly improve design and fabrication methods for subsequent generations of computers and devices.

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
by Derek Thompson
Published 7 Feb 2017

Literacy rates in European countries like France did not cross 50 percent until the 1800s, and half of the world could not read and write as late as 1960. The true democratization of written language required a technology to cheaply distribute written words. But another 4,500 years passed between the first sign of hieroglyphics and the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg. The printing press, too, caused a scandal. Monk scribes were aghast about the thing, owing at least partly to the fact that it competed with their monopoly of producing books. In the pamphlet In Praise of Scribes, the fifteenth-century abbot Johannes Trithemius wrote, “He who ceases from zeal for writing because of printing is no true lover of the Scriptures.”

50 Psychology Classics
by Tom Butler-Bowdon
Published 14 Oct 2007

Things came to a head when, in October 1517, he nailed a document—the famous “95 Theses”—to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg (a usual place for posting public notices), outlining the areas where the Church had to reform. The document was a bombshell, but might never have had the impact it did were it not for the recent invention of the printing press, which enabled this and Luther’s later writings to be spread far and wide. Anyone, from peasant to prince, who had a gripe with the status quo now had a focus. Luther became a celebrity, and his rebellion sparked off the Protestant Reformation. Erikson’s interpretation Rebellion is usually manifested in one’s younger years, but Luther was 34 by the time he properly spoke out against the Church.

The Industries of the Future
by Alec Ross
Published 2 Feb 2016

The explosion in data creation is a very recent occurrence, and from its inception, data storage has grown exponentially. For millennia, record keeping meant clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, or parchment and vellum made from animal skin. The first modern paper, made from wood or grass pulp, was a big advance; but the first major milestone in the mass production of data came with the invention of the printing press. In the first 50 years after the first printing press appeared, 8 million books were printed—more than all the books produced by European scribes in the prior millennium. With the successive inventions of telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and computers, the amount of data in the world grew rapidly during the 20th century.

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
by John Markoff
Published 1 Jan 2005

Coupled with an early and profound understanding of the implication of the scaling principle, he also took an important step beyond Engelbart’s notion of personal-computer-as-vehicle. He conceived of personal computing as an entirely new medium. In thinking about the computer in this way, he remembered reading about the insight of Aldus Manutius, who some forty years after the invention of the printing press established the dimensions of the modern book by understanding that it must be small enough to fit into a saddlebag. The obvious twentieth-century analogy was that a modern computer should be no larger than a notebook. It was a powerful notion, one that was originally apprehended only by a handful of people, people like Kay and Sid Fernbach, the Livermore labs’ supercomputing guru.

Enigma
by Robert Harris
Published 15 Feb 2011

The beams of torches glistened on the wet tarmac. Atwood conducted them past the mansion and the arboretum and through the main gate. Discussing work outside the hut was forbidden and Atwood, purely to annoy Pinker, was declaiming on the suicide of Virginia Woolf, which he held to be the greatest day for English letters since the invention of the printing press. 'I c-c-can't believe you mmm-mmm-mmm . . .' When Pinker snagged himself on a word, his whole body seemed to shake with the effort of trying to get himself free. Above his bow-tie, his face bloomed scarlet in the torchlight. They stopped and waited patiently for him. 'Mmm-mmm . . .' 'Mean that?'

Life Is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe
by Johnjoe McFadden
Published 27 Sep 2021

There is no reason to believe that Leonardo had any special access to the ideas and philosophy of the via moderna in the fifteenth century so it is likely that thousands of other scholars were familiar with Occam’s razor and the science that it inspired. Yet it remains a puzzle how the advances of the via moderna had been transmitted through the centuries before the invention of the printing press. Subsequent research has uncovered two main routes, one for each of the two great cultural revolutions of the late Middle Ages. The southern route to the Renaissance Seventy-two years before Leonardo was born, on a night sometime around 1380, one of Florence’s greatest musicians and composers, Francesco Landini (c.1325–97), was having a dream.

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 2014

.—1889 Unless the present progress of change [is] arrested … there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman.—1833 Our language (I mean the English) is degenerating very fast. … I begin to fear that it will be impossible to check it.—1785 Complaints about the decline of language go at least as far back as the invention of the printing press. Soon after William Caxton set up the first one in England in 1478, he lamented, “And certaynly our langage now vsed veryeth ferre from what whiche was vsed and spoken when I was borne.” Indeed, moral panic about the decline of writing may be as old as writing itself: Non Sequitur © 2011 Wiley Ink, Inc.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna
Published 23 May 2016

The artists who crafted these feats of genius five hundred years ago did not inhabit some magical age of universal beauty, but rather a tumultuous moment—marked by historic milestones and discoveries, yes, but also wrenching upheaval. Their world was tangling together in a way it had never done before, thanks to Gutenberg’s recent invention of the printing press (1450s), Columbus’s discovery of the New World (1492) and Vasco da Gama’s discovery of a sea route to Asia’s riches (1497). And humanity’s fortunes were changing, in some ways radically. The Black Death had tapered off, Europe’s population was recovering, and public health, wealth and education were all rising.

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science
by Jim Al-Khalili
Published 28 Sep 2010

This revolutionary new way of learning about the world, as exemplified by the work of Copernicus and Galileo, focusing on empirical evidence rather than on the Aristotelian ‘final cause’, was, we now know, already well established in the tenth and eleventh centuries by al-Rāzi, Ibn al-Haytham and al-Bīrūni. There were many factors in the European Renaissance that undoubtedly influenced the rate of scientific progress, such as the invention of the printing press, which allowed the transmission of new ideas far more rapidly than before, just as the paper mill had done for the Abbāsids. Other, later, inventions such as the telescope and microscope revolutionized astronomy, biology and medicine. Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries we do indeed see a marked drop in the sheer volume of original scientific output across the Islamic world.

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
by Howard Rheingold
Published 14 May 2000

Chapter Nine: The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Thinker Harry Truman was President and Sputnik was a word that only Russian language experts knew when Doug Engelbart first thought about displaying words and images on radar screens, storing them in computers, and manipulating them with levers and buttons and keyboards. For over thirty years, Engelbart has been trying to hasten what he believes will be the biggest step in cultural evolution since the invention of the printing press. To hear him tell it today, both the computer establishment and the computer revolutionaries still fail to understand that the art and power of using a computer as a mind amplifier are not in how the amplifier works but in what the amplified minds are able to accomplish. At the end of the summer of 1945, just after the surrender of Japan, Engelbart was a twenty-year-old American naval radar technician, waiting for his ship home from the Philippines.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

This post-industrial, digital, information-rich era has been around for fifty or so years; I think of that as at most halfway through its probable life. This revolution cannot yet be judged in toto and stagnation has to be seen in that context.66 As with human rights in the early twentieth century, there will be setbacks, but also plenty more to come. Forty years after the invention of the printing press, books still resembled scribal manuscripts. Only when printers like the Venetian Aldus Manutius learned to redesign the codex, its fonts and layout and sizing, enabling large-scale print runs, did it become the great catalyst of the Renaissance, just as it took decades for manufacturers to reorientate around steam and then electricity.

The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began
by Stephen Greenblatt
Published 31 Aug 2011

The high price, at a time when life was cheap, suggests both how important and how difficult it was for monasteries to obtain the books that they needed in order to enforce the reading rule. Even the most celebrated monastic libraries of the Middle Ages were tiny in comparison with the libraries of antiquity or those that existed in Baghdad or Cairo. To assemble a modest number of books, in the long centuries before the invention of the printing press forever changed the equation, meant the eventual establishment of what were called scriptoria, workshops where monks would be trained to sit for long hours making copies. At first the copying was probably done in an improvised setting in the cloister, where, even if the cold sometimes stiffened the fingers, at least the light would be good.

Innovation and Its Enemies
by Calestous Juma
Published 20 Mar 2017

As pointed out by Neddermeyer, “Gutenberg’s invention was no real threat to the existence of scribes. More often than not, the social consequences of the mechanization of book-production were alleviated by the fact that the writers were supported by ecclesiastical institutions, offices or prebends.”29 At the time of the invention of the printing press, “The majority of the manuscripts had not been paid for, often the writer needed the book for himself, or it was meant to enlarge the library of the religious communities he was a member of.”30 The scribes also continued to be paid from writing minutes, letters, inventories, and other documents.

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives
by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
Published 22 Apr 2013

It is, as the military scholar Peter Singer notes in his masterly account of this trend, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, what scientists would call a “singularity”—a “state in which things become so radically different that the old rules break down and we know virtually nothing.” Much as with other paradigm shifts in history (germ theory, the invention of the printing press, Einstein’s theory of relativity), it is almost impossible to predict with any great accuracy how the eventual change to fully automated warfare will alter the course of human society. All we can do is consider the clues we see today, convey the thinking of people on the front lines, and make some educated guesses.

Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology
by Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili
Published 14 Oct 2014

Now consider one thousand similarly sized books in a library and imagine you had the job of faithfully copying every single character and space. How many errors do you think you would make? This was precisely the task performed by medieval scribes, who did their best to hand-copy texts before the invention of the printing press. Their efforts were, not surprisingly, riddled with errors, as shown by the variety of divergent copies of medieval texts. Of course, computers are able to copy information with a very high degree of fidelity, but they do so with the hard edges of modern electronic digital technology.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology
by Kentaro Toyama
Published 25 May 2015

Thanks to advances such as modern medicine, air conditioning, cheap transport, and real-time communication, middle-class people today enjoy a quality of life that kings and queens didn’t have a century ago. There’s a reason, utopians argue, why historical epochs are named after technologies – the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Age, the Information Age – and why human culture flourished after the invention of the printing press. But whatever they say and write, what most unites utopians is how they feel about technology. They love it, and they want more. Many believe that every kind of problem can be solved by some invention, often one that is right around the corner. Whether the issue is poverty, bad governance, or climate change, they say things like, “[There] is no limit to human ingenuity,” and “When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce.”7 Besotted with gadgets, technological utopians scoff at social institutions like governments, civil society, and traditional firms, which they pity as slow, costly, behind the times, or all of the above.

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do
by Brett King
Published 26 Dec 2012

In this case you can expect to start to see media walls and in-built displays being deployed everywhere within the next four to five years. They will be commonplace by 2016–18. Electronic Paper Very closely related to soft-screen or OLED improvements is the area of electronic paper. This has been termed the most significant development in print technology since the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1440. It was actually in the 1970s that Nick Sheridon at the Xerox Palo-Alto Research Centre developed the first e-paper. This electronic paper, called Gyricon,13 consisted of polyethylene spheres embedded in a transparent silicon sheet. Depending on whether a negative or positive charge is applied, the spheres would translate into a pixel that emits either a black or white appearance, thus looking a lot like normal paper.

Text Analytics With Python: A Practical Real-World Approach to Gaining Actionable Insights From Your Data
by Dipanjan Sarkar
Published 1 Dec 2016

Since print and verbal media came into prominence, there has been an abundance of books, articles, audio, and video. This began all the way back in the 3rd or 4th century B.C., when people referred to a huge quantity of books, as there seemed to be no end to the production of books , and this overload of information was often met with disapproval. The Renaissance gave us the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg around 1440 A.D., which led to the mass production of books, manuscripts, articles, and pamphlets. This greatly increased information overload, with scholars complaining about an excess of information, which was becoming extremely difficult to consume, process, and manage.

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 16 Nov 2010

Is There History After Twitter? It’s tempting to see technology as some kind of a missing link that can help us make sense of otherwise unrelated events known as human history. Why search for more complex reasons if the establishment of democratic forms of government in Europe could be explained by the invention of the printing press? As the economic historian Robert Heilbroner observed in 1994, “history as contingency is a prospect that is more than the human spirit can bear.” Technological determinism—the belief that certain technologies are bound to produce certain social, cultural, and political effects—is attractive precisely because “it creates powerful scenarios, clear stories, and because it accords with the dominant experience in the West,” write Steve Graham and Simon Marvin, two scholars of urban geography.

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Jun 2009

But instead of resorting to animism, Descartes turned to the logic of science. His Cartesian coordinate system described space and movement within it purely in terms of an x, y, and z axis. This led to maps with latitude and longitude lines, as well as analytic geometry and calculus. The invention of the printing press turned reading, literature, and Bible study from a group activity into an individual one. Instead of listening to a priest read from a sacred manuscript, people (at least the rich ones) could now read from mass-produced texts. To read individually meant interpreting texts as an individual.

Against Intellectual Monopoly
by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine
Published 6 Jul 2008

For the economic and legal theories of “no innovation without monopolization,” this plain fact is as inexplicable a mystery as the Catholic dogma of virginitas ante partum is for most of us.26 To see the actual impact of copyright on creativity, let us start with some history. Copyright emerged in different European countries only after the invention of the printing press. Copyright originated not to protect the profits of authors from copyists or to encourage creation, but rather as an instrument of government censorship. Royal and religious powers arrogated to themselves the right to decide what could and could not be safely printed. Hence, the right to copy was a concession of the powerful to the citizenry to print and read what the powerful thought proper to print and read; Galileo’s trial was nothing more than an exercise in copyright enforcement by the pope of Rome.

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies
by Jeremy Siegel
Published 7 Jan 2014

I do not believe that even the developed world’s productivity is necessarily on a downward path. The digitization and instant availability of information will combine to spur faster productivity growth. When we study history, we find that inventions that hastened communication, such as Ts’ai Lun’s discovery of paper in the first century and Johannes Guttenberg’s invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, preceded periods of rapid discovery and innovation.18 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the telegraph and then the telephone spurred growth by enabling the first instant communication between distant individuals. But no recent discovery has as much potential to foster innovation as the Internet.

Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery
by Ira Rutkow
Published 8 Mar 2022

Copernicus reconnoitered our place in the universe by placing the sun, rather than the Earth, at the center of the solar system; Mercator drew his map of the world with its location of the continents. An eagerness to question and seek new knowledge had a vast impact on the development of surgery, fueled by the invention of the printing press and widespread use of gunpowder. Few substances had a greater effect on civilization than gunpowder, an explosive mixture of charcoal, potassium nitrate (saltpeter), and sulphur. It altered the art of warfare and affected the whole fabric of society. Gunpowder was introduced into Europe in the mid-thirteenth century and warfare turned deadlier and injuries more dreadful, conspicuous for their staggering amount of blood and tissue loss.

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them
by Philip Collins
Published 4 Oct 2017

A nation is an achievement before it is a place. In the case of the strange multinational state of Britain this is an especially precarious task. Nationhood is the expression of solidarity rather than the discovery of a common race of men. Anderson dates national consciousness to the invention of the printing press, the creation of the novel and the appearance of newspapers. For the first time, men and women could experience the stories of people like themselves, being lived out in their own day. Nationhood remains the most potent form of allegiance in modern politics. Affiliation to the nation has always trumped the claim of class and has always stood in the way of durable multinational institutions.

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 14 Oct 2018

Now it’s the other way round: they see the film and then, on the way out of the cinema, get out their smartphones and read your review. And then they start vehemently letting you know what they think. You get reviewed! It’s been a sobering experience for all critics to realise that the one-party state of media and publishing – which lasted from the invention of the printing press in the middle ages to about 2004 – is over.’13 ‘Open’ became something of a mantra within the office – doubtless to the irritation of some, and to the excitement of others. It was too general a word to be an ideal piece of motivational shorthand, but it was a big enough umbrella to include a number of ideas about what we could be experimenting with.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

Let the innovations that hackers and their venture capitalist supporters were generating travel to every corner of the media economy and let American consumers determine, through purchases, which of the new products and services delighted them the most.61 Excitement about the internet deepened the sense that America, indeed the world, was on the cusp of a market-powered transformation. Observers searching for a precedent for a communications revolution of this magnitude reached back to the invention of the printing press half a millennium before. The internet, some asserted, would do even more than the advent of printed books had once accomplished. Patricia Aufderheide, a hard-headed media critic, herself marveled in the 1990s at how the net “was equally good at sending and receiving in any direction, making every user a potential producer as much as a potential consumer.

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism
by Joyce Appleby
Published 22 Dec 2009

Deepal Lal goes back even farther in time to the eleventh century, where he finds the roots of the “Great Divergence” in papal decrees that established a common commercial law for all of Christendom.3 The Latin motto post hoc, ergo propter hoc reminds us that because something happened before something else, it is not necessarily a cause of the following event. The emergence of capitalism was not a general phenomenon, but one specific to time and place. People who take the long-run-up view of the emergence of capitalism note factors like the discovery of the New World, the invention of the printing press, the use of clocks, or papal property arrangements. These were present in countries that did not change their economic ways. Logically, widely shared developments can’t explain a response that was unique to one country. What the myriad theories about how the West broke with its past do have right is that there were many, many elements that went into capitalism’s breakout from its traditional origins.

Alcohol: A History
by Rod Phillips
Published 14 Oct 2014

The continuing special status attributed to brandy is highlighted by the 1614 warning that “brandy is not a drink to be taken immoderately, but only for strength or medicinal purposes.”25 Attempts to limit consumption to small therapeutic doses proved futile, however, and production of spirits spread rapidly throughout Europe. The distilling industry, like religion, was one of the first beneficiaries of the invention of the printing press. From Gutenberg’s marvel flowed a veritable stream of books that described the technique of distilling and lauded the value of aqua vitae. By 1525, books on distilling (and on brandy specifically) had been published in a variety of European languages, including French, German, Dutch, Italian, and English.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick
Published 1 Mar 2011

Yet they refuse to count evident misprints found by way of Internet searches. They do not recognize straight-laced, even though statistical evidence finds that bastardized form outnumbering strait-laced. For the crystallization of spelling, the OED offers a conventional explanation: “Since the invention of the printing press, spelling has become much less variable, partly because printers wanted uniformity and partly because of a growing interest in language study during the Renaissance.” This is true. But it omits the role of the dictionary itself, arbitrator and exemplar. For Cawdrey the dictionary was a snapshot; he could not see past his moment in time.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

John Calvin, the founder of a particularly austere version of Protestantism, went further, insisting that the spiritual hierarchy of the elect and the damned bore no necessary relationship with the hierarchy on Earth.21 The religious revolution was also an educational revolution. It was no longer enough to gape at the priest mumbling in Latin and performing miracles before the altar. You had to study the Good Book yourself (which had fortunately been made easily available by the new invention of the printing press). It was no longer enough to justify institutions by appealing to tradition. You had to test them in the light of faith. Protestant countries quickly created elite institutions for the spiritual elect. Philip I of Hesse founded the first specifically Protestant university, the University of Marburg, in 1527, a decade after Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses on the church door.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech
by Jamie Susskind
Published 3 Sep 2018

Fourth, digital information has almost no marginal cost of reproduction— it can be replicated millions of times very cheaply. Together, these factors explain why the transition from a print-based information system to a digital one has yielded such an explosion of data. Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier compare current developments with the last ‘information revolution’: the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg nearly 600 years ago. In the fifty years following Gutenberg’s innovation, more than 8 million books were printed.This change was described as ‘revolutionary’ by the scholar Elizabeth Eisenstein because it meant, in all likelihood, that more books had been printed in half a century than had been handwritten by ‘all the scribes in Europe’ in the previous 1,200 years.8 Yet if it took fifty or so years for the amount of data in existence to OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Increasingly Quantified Societ y 63 d­ ouble in Gutenberg’s day, consider that the same feat is now being achieved roughly every two years.9 Much of the data in the world originates with human beings.

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 25 Jun 2024

For example, domestic appliances in the twentieth century not only saved people a lot of time and sweat but also facilitated the liberating and transformative shifts that brought millions of talented women into the workforce, where they made essential contributions in countless fields. In general, we can say that technological innovation promotes conditions that help more people in a society fulfill their potential, which in turn enables even more innovation. As another example, the invention of the printing press improved and greatly broadened access to education, providing a more capable and sophisticated workforce that drove economic growth. More literacy enabled better coordination of production and trading, which also resulted in greater prosperity. The increased wealth in turn allowed for greater investment in infrastructure and education, which accelerated the beneficial cycle.

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy
by Joel Mokyr
Published 8 Jan 2016

More than a century later, François Rozier (1734–1793), publisher of the Observations sur la Physique, sur l’Histoire Naturelle, et sur les Arts (widely regarded as the first independent periodical to be concerned wholly with advances in cutting-edge science), assured the American Philosophical Society that “all of Europe will be informed in less than three months” if they sent the new information first to him and that such correspondence would be “indispensable for the progress of science” (quoted in McClellan, 1979, p. 444). Eisenstein and others have stressed the importance of the invention of the printing press to the evolution of the Republic of Letters, although Fumaroli (2015, pp. 24, 37) points out that the first use of the term, by the Venetian politician and humanist intellectual Francesco Barbaro, predates the first press by at least three decades. Much less discussed than printing but of great importance in the operation of the Republic of Letters was the improvement in the continent-wide flow of mail.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by Nate Silver
Published 31 Aug 2012

It seemed obvious to him that a more thorough understanding of probability was essential to scientific progress.32 The intimate connection between probability, prediction, and scientific progress was thus well understood by Bayes and Laplace in the eighteenth century—the period when human societies were beginning to take the explosion of information that had become available with the invention of the printing press several centuries earlier, and finally translate it into sustained scientific, technological, and economic progress. The connection is essential—equally to predicting the orbits of the planets and the winner of the Lakers’ game. As we will see, science may have stumbled later when a different statistical paradigm, which deemphasized the role of prediction and tried to recast uncertainty as resulting from the errors of our measurements rather than the imperfections in our judgments, came to dominate in the twentieth century.

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
by Adrian Johns
Published 5 Jan 2010

Far from being timeless, that concept is in fact not even ancient. It arose in the context of Western Europe in the early modern period – the years of religious and political upheaval surrounding the Reformation and the scientific revolution. In particular, it owed its origin to the cultural transformations set in train by Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. At the origin of the history of piracy thus lies one of the defining events of Western civilization. Printing posed serious problems of politics and authority for the generations following Gutenberg. It was in the process of grappling with those problems that they came up with the notion of piracy.

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang
Published 10 Sep 2018

As to the availability of ready-made lenses, Van Helden marshals extensive evidence that by the middle of the sixteenth century, the shops of spectacle sellers across Europe commonly offered a selection of both concave and convex lenses of varying strengths. The explosion of book publication in mid-fifteenth-century Europe, spurred by Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press with movable metal type, had led to rapid increases in myopia. The solution—concave spectacle lenses—was for sale in Florence by 1451 (Van Helden, “Invention of the Telescope,” 10–11). 3.See Watson, Stargazer, 71–73, re observations prior to Galileo’s. As with the rest of his scientific discoveries, Harriot did not publish his results, note J.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 29 Sep 2014

In agrarian societies, a person’s important life choices—where to live, what to do for a living, what religion to practice, whom to marry—were mostly determined by the surrounding tribe, village, or caste. Individuals consequently did not spend a lot of time sitting around asking themselves, “Who am I, really?” According to Anderson, all this begins to change with the emergence of commercial capitalism in sixteenth-century Europe, powered by the invention of the printing press and the growth of a market for books. The printing press sharply reduced the price of written communication and thus made possible publication of books in vernacular languages. Martin Luther, writing in German rather than Latin, became a bestselling author early in the sixteenth century and as a result played a key role in creating a sense of common German culture.

The Age of Wonder
by Richard Holmes
Published 15 Jan 2008

Davy is told a sort of scientific creation myth, a Promethean version of man’s growing material dominion over the earth. From his primitive tribal beginnings, art and technology lifts man above the wild animals, until such global developments as chemistry, engineering, medicine and the ‘Faustian’ invention of the printing press bring an advanced Western civilisation.120 This account by Genius includes some racial theory about the ‘superiority of the Caucasian stock’ of a type familiar to students of Blumenbach. But Genius also makes an uneasy prophecy of colonial persecutions, of the kind that Banks would have recognised.

A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book
by John Barton
Published 3 Jun 2019

REFORMATION TRANSLATIONS The great age of biblical translation, after the achievements of Jerome, is the period of the Reformation and its immediate precursors, when the Bible came to occupy a more prominent place in the Christian system, and to be regarded as all-important. In the eight decades before Luther, the Bible had been translated into various kinds of German between 1466 and 1522; into Italian in 1471; Dutch in 1477; Spanish and Czech in 1478; and Catalan in 1492. The great impetus was the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439, which made quick dissemination possible for the first time. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s argument, which suggests that the rise in translations of the Bible helped to cause, rather than was created by, the Reformation, is supported by the sheer number of fifteenth-century versions, well before the Reformation is generally reckoned to have begun in earnest.15 A medieval translation of the Vulgate into Middle German had been produced in 1350 and printed as early as 1466, but the translators had had no knowledge of Greek or Hebrew.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

Frazier asks.45 Skinner advocated, via Frazier, that the virtue of a “planned society” is “to keep intelligence on the right track, for the good of society rather than of the intelligent individual.… It does this by making sure that the individual will not forget his personal stake in the welfare of society.”46 Pentland understands instrumentarian society as an historical turning point comparable to the invention of the printing press or the internet. It means that for the first time in human history, “We will have the data required to really know ourselves and understand how society evolves.”47 Pentland says that “continuous streams of data about human behavior” mean that everything from traffic, to energy use, to disease, to street crime will be accurately forecast, enabling a “world without war or financial crashes, in which infectious disease is quickly detected and stopped, in which energy, water, and other resources are no longer wasted, and in which governments are part of the solution rather than part of the problem.”48 This new “collective intelligence” operates to serve the greater good as we learn to act “in a coordinated manner” based on “social universals.”

Greece
by Korina Miller
Published 1 Mar 2010

The island became a way-station for intellectuals and ideas – at precisely the moment when a hunger for learning ancient Greek and Latin texts in the original was growing in Italy and other Western European countries. Indeed, wealthy Italian noblemen such as that great Florentine, Cosimo de’ Medici, were funding whole Platonic ‘academies’, where aspiring scholars sat enraptured at the feet of learned Greek émigrés. Further, the simultaneous invention of the printing press meant that ancient texts suddenly could be made widely available. And a Cretan typesetter and calligrapher, Markos Mousouros (1470–1517), designed the typeface in which Europeans would read many of the first printed Ancient Greek texts. His employer, Aldus Manutius, a Venetian publisher who revolutionised and popularised the study of Ancient Greek philosophy and literature, used the typeface based on Mousouros’ own handwriting to print his editions of the Greek classics.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker
Published 24 Sep 2012

I will return to the life-was-cheap hypothesis in the final chapter, but for now we must seek other candidates for an exogenous change that made people more compassionate. One technology that did show a precocious increase in productivity before the Industrial Revolution was book production. Before Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1452, every copy of a book had to be written out by hand. Not only was the process time-consuming—it took thirty-seven persondays to produce the equivalent of a 250-page book—but it was inefficient in materials and energy. Handwriting is harder to read than type is, and so handwritten books had to be larger, using up more paper and making the book more expensive to bind, store, and ship.