Johannes Gutenberg

Johannes Gutenberg was a German craftsman from Mainz who, around the middle of the fifteenth century, developed a system of printing with movable metal type and a press. His workshop produced the Gutenberg Bible, the first major book printed in Europe, and within fifty years his method had spread across the continent, making books cheap and plentiful and changing how knowledge, religion and politics worked in Europe and later the world.

Very little is known for certain about Gutenberg's life, and most of it comes from legal and financial records. He was born in Mainz, a prosperous city on the Rhine in the Holy Roman Empire, some time between about 1393 and 1406; 1400 is the conventional date. His father, Friele Gensfleisch zur Laden, belonged to the city's patrician class, and the family took the name Gutenberg from a house they owned. He probably trained in metalwork, possibly in connection with the archbishop's mint, which would explain his later skill in casting and engraving, though this is not documented.

Conflicts between the patricians and the craft guilds drove the family out of Mainz for periods, and by 1434 Gutenberg was living in Strasbourg. A lawsuit of 1439, brought by the heirs of one of his partners, reveals that he had a business making polished metal mirrors for pilgrims to the relic exhibition at Aachen, and that he was also teaching his partners a secret technique that involved a press, metal forms and lead. Most historians believe this was early work on printing, but the documents do not say so plainly.

Gutenberg was back in Mainz by 1448, and around 1450 he borrowed 800 guilders from the wealthy citizen Johann Fust to set up a printing workshop, followed by a second loan of the same size. Printing from carved wooden blocks was already known in Europe, and movable type had been invented centuries earlier in China, where Bi Sheng made type from baked clay during the Song dynasty, and in Korea, where books were printed from metal type under the Goryeo kings, including a Buddhist text of 1377. There is no evidence that Gutenberg knew of these.

What Gutenberg did was to combine several techniques into a practical system for producing books in quantity. He devised a hand mould that allowed individual letters, called sorts, to be cast quickly and accurately in identical sizes, so that they could be set in lines and reused. He used a metal alloy of lead, tin and antimony, which melted at a low temperature, cast cleanly and was hard enough to last. He developed an oil-based ink that stuck to metal type better than the water-based inks used for wood blocks, and he adapted the screw presses used for making wine and paper to press paper evenly onto the inked type. Recent studies of the shapes of his letters have suggested that his casting methods were less uniform than traditionally thought, and historians still debate the details.

Before the Bible, the workshop printed smaller items such as Latin grammars and letters of indulgence, which the Church sold to raise money for war against the Ottoman Empire after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The Bible itself, in Latin, was finished by about 1455. It is called the 42-line Bible because most pages have two columns of 42 lines, and its type imitated the Gothic script of manuscripts. About 180 copies were printed, most on paper and some on vellum, and the initials and decoration were added by hand, so each copy looked like a fine manuscript. Some 48 substantially complete copies survive, and they are among the most valuable books in the world.

In 1455 Fust sued Gutenberg for the return of his loans with interest, accusing him of using the money for other purposes. The court in Mainz ruled for Fust, who took over much of the workshop and its equipment. With Peter Schöffer, a skilled former scribe who had worked with Gutenberg and later married Fust's daughter, he went on to print the Mainz Psalter of 1457, the first book to name its printers and give its date, without mentioning Gutenberg. Gutenberg seems to have continued printing on a smaller scale, but no surviving book can be firmly attributed to him after the Bible.

In 1462 Mainz was sacked during a conflict between rival archbishops, and many printers left the city, carrying the new craft elsewhere. In January 1465 the victorious archbishop, Adolf of Nassau, made Gutenberg a member of his court, granting him a yearly allowance of clothing, grain and wine free of tax. He died in Mainz on 3 February 1468 and was buried in the Franciscan church there, which was later demolished, so his grave is lost. No portrait made during his lifetime survives; the bearded figure on statues and stamps is an invention of later artists.

Printing spread with remarkable speed, to Cologne, Rome, Venice, Paris and dozens of other cities by the 1470s. By 1500 presses were working in more than two hundred towns, and they had produced many millions of copies of books, known to collectors as incunabula. Printed texts were cheaper, more uniform and more widely available than manuscripts, which helped standardise languages and spelling, made scholarly errors easier to correct, and spread the classical learning of the Renaissance. Printing was essential to the Protestant Reformation: the pamphlets and translated Bibles of Martin Luther were printed in hundreds of thousands of copies, and later to the Scientific Revolution, whose findings were shared in print across Europe.

Gutenberg's invention is often ranked among the most important in history. Mainz has a museum devoted to him, and the university there bears his name. He holds a central place in the history of Germany and in the history of communication generally.