Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, a Mainz goldsmith with a debt problem, spent the 1440s and early 1450s working out the technology of European mass print: a hand-mould for casting reusable type from a lead-tin-antimony alloy precise enough to align as text; an oil-based ink dense enough to coat metal; and a heavy-screw press adapted from local wine-making. By 1455 he had printed his 42-line Bible — about 180 copies, of which 49 still survive. He was promptly sued by his investor Johann Fust, lost the case, lost his press, and printed little of consequence afterwards; he died in 1468 having seen his invention spread to Cologne, Strasbourg, Venice and Rome but having profited from it almost not at all. Within fifty years of his death Europe's presses had produced more printed pages than its scribes had copied in the previous thousand years. The , the , the Scientific Revolution and the modern public sphere all run through that workshop in Mainz.
All Figures
Goldsmith · Printer · Inventor of Movable-Type Printing in Europe
Johannes Gutenberg
c. 1,400 CE – 1,468 CE
The Mainz goldsmith who combined cast-metal movable type, oil-based ink and the wine-press into a printing system that within fifty years carried more pages out of Europe than the previous thousand.
Lifetime
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