AS405 History Of Western Civilization

Running head: HISTORY OF WESTERN CIVIL
History of Western Civil
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HISTORY OF WESTERN CIVIL
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The paper intends to determine the impact of printing press or moveable type in 15th
century Europe through a discussion of the inventor’s life, Johannes Gutenberg. Johannes
Gensfleisch Gutenberg was born in Mainz, Germany in circa 1395. Although, there are very
little chronological information about his family life still from the limited local sources it can
be assumed that he was a member of goldsmith merchant family. The printing press was
invented by this German craftsman, who introduced new developed features unlike
contemporary Chinese and Korean techniques of printing papers and books. Using this
technology, one of the first notable printed books was published, which is Forty-Two-Line
Bible.
He started investigating with technology of printing from around 1436. Being
impatient of his time consuming experiments, his financer denied to provide resources after
11 long years. It took five more years to achieve establishment by the publication of
Gutenberg’s Bible without any financers’ support. Due to an after effect of craftsman revolt
their family was bound to move into France where experiments regarding printing flourished.
Although, moveable type was much familiar across Asia yet Gutenberg’s use of metal alloys
made the production faster.
According to Abel (2017), European history of printing started back in 1423, when
woodcut was used to be helpful for printing on clothes and printing on paper did not start
until 15th century. Woodcut was used to print playing cards and images related to religious
beliefs. Printed material used to be coloured manually as per wish. Books are mostly
handwritten at that point of time. His individual invention was to create a molding method, as
described in Moodie (2014, p.456), which help to write numerous lead characters as per
requirements. 15th century Europe experienced a remarkable incident and impact both in the
field of education and information.