TRANSFORMING POWER OF TECHNOLOGY
GUNPOWDER
THE INTERNET
THE PERSONAL COMPUTER
THE PRINTING PRESS
THE REPEATING RIFLE
THE STEAM ENGINE
TRANSFORMING POWER OF TECHNOLOGY
THE
PRINTING PRESS
Samuel Willard Crompton
Philadelphia
Frontis: Two women set movable type for the printing press during World War I.
The development of movable type revolutionized the process of printing.
CHELSEA HOUSE PUBLISHERS
VP, NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT Sally Cheney
DIRECTOR OF PRODUCTION Kim Shinners
CREATIVE MANAGER Takeshi Takahashi
MANUFACTURING MANAGER Diann Grasse
Staff for THE PRINTING PRESS
UTIVE EDITOR Lee Marcott
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Kate Sullivan
PRODUCTION EDITOR Megan Emery
PICTURE RESEARCHER Amy Dunleavy
SERIES AND COVER DESIGNER Keith Trego
LAYOUT 21st Century Publishing and Communications Inc.
©2004 by Chelsea House Publishers,
a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications.
All rights reserved. Printed and bound in the United States of America.
http://www.chelseahouse.com
First Printing
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crompton, Samuel Willard.
The printing press/by Samuel Willard Crompton.
p. cm.—(Transforming power of technology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: Scribes, scrolls, and parchment — Early printing — Printing and
language — Printing and the religious revolution—Printing and the scientific
revolution—Early American printing—The Enlightenment—Printing and human
freedom—Printing and the financial revolution—Every man his own printer.
ISBN 0-7910-7451-X
1. Printing—History—Juvenile literature. 2. Printing—History—Origin and
antecedents—Juvenile literature. 3. Printing presses—History—Juvenile literature.
[1. Printing—History. 2. Printing presses—History.] I. Title. II. Series.
Z124.C76 2003
686.209—dc21
2003014059
6
2 Early Printing: China, Japan, Korea,
and Germany
12
3 Printing and Language: The Use
of the Vernacular
22
4 Printing and the Religious Revolution
34
5 Printing and the Scientific Revolution
44
6 Early American Printing
52
7 The Enlightenment: Edinburgh,
London, and Paris
64
8 The Press and Human Freedom
76
9 Printing and the Financial Revolution
86
10 Every Man His Own Printer:
The Personal Computer
94
Chronology of Events
104
107
109
111
1 12
Notes
Bibliography
Further Reading
Index
CONTENTS
1 Scribes, Scrolls, and Parchment
AT ISSUE
1
Scribes, Scrolls,
and Parchment
Where did writing begin?
This chapter describes the early development of writing.
After beginning in the Middle East and China, writing
spread to most of Europe and much of Asia by the heyday
of the Roman Empire. We will discuss different types of
writing and the people who performed them.
Of making many books there is no end and much study is
a weariness of the flesh.
— Ecclesiastes 12:12
Writing came first, long before printing. Writing was the major
break between the Stone Age and the beginning of human
civilization. The person who could write, or the tribe that had a
scribe, enjoyed a great advantage over competitors.
Writing appeared in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and Egypt
around 3000 B.C. It appeared in the Indus River valley (Pakistan
and western India) around 2500 B.C., and in China a little later.
This early writing was performed by scribes who labored over thick
tablets they carved the symbols of their language into clay or
stone, which made the writing last a very long time. We know little
about human civilizations that existed prior to those in Egypt,
Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China because they left no
written sources. Writing and the preservation of documents are the
keys to history, just as bones and ruins are the keys to archeology.
6
Scribes, Scrolls, and Parchment
For more than 200 years, Mediterranean scholars traveled to
Alexandria, Egypt, to study at the Great Library there. When it
burned to the ground in 48 B.C., thousands and thousands of
parchment manus, which recorded much of the world’s
knowledge, were destroyed.
Writing continued in the same vein for more than 2,000
years. What variations there were involved the use of different
types of styluses (pens) and different types of preservation material (clay, bronze, and so forth). No major change came until
about 800 B.C., when the first phonetic alphabet appeared
7
8
THE PRINTING PRESS
in the Western world. This alphabet came from the Phoenicians
who lived in what is now Lebanon the word “phonics” or
“phonetic” comes from the Greek word “to sound.”
The Phoenicians developed an alphabet of 21 letters. All
were consonants there were no vowels. The Phoenicians traded
regularly with the Greeks, who were located several hundred
miles to the west, and by about 800 B.C., the Greeks had begun
using the Phoenician alphabet. The Greeks changed the
alphabet, however, by adding vowels, and by about 600 B.C. the
Greeks had developed the alphabet that is the ancestor of every
alphabet in the Western world today: the phonetic alphabet of
roughly 26 letters.
The alphabet is so much a part of our lives that we take it for
granted, and it is difficult to think how we might behave without
it. There is a case for arguing that all thinking and all production
The Diamond Sutra
Chin kang pan-jo po-lo-mi ching (the Diamond Sutra) is the oldest printed
book that has ever been found.The Diamond Sutra contains a printer’s statement: “Printed on May 11, 868, by Wang Chieh, for free general distribution, in
order in deep reverence to perpetuate the memory of his parents.”The book
was printed using the wood-block method. Although slow in process, the
method resulted in some beautiful productions.
Buddhism had flourished in China for several hundred years. During the
T’ang dynasty, around A.D. 750, however, Buddhist texts were banned, and
good Chinese were expected to read Confucian texts only. During the
repression that followed, scholars apparently hid thousands of handwritten
manus in a series of caves in northwestern China that is now called the
Cave of Ten Thousand Buddhas.
In 1907, an English archaeologist went to the caves and purchased a large
series of manus from the cave keeper. The manus were brought
to London among them was the Diamond Sutra.
That the Diamond Sutra is in the British Museum today is a source of
national anger for the Chinese people.
Scribes, Scrolls, and Parchment
9
in the Western world today is derived from 36 characters: the
letters A through Z and the numbers zero through nine. These
are the building blocks of our modern world, and they are so
important, so very fundamental to our civilization, that we make
them child’s play. But some human civilizations have not used
the phonetic alphabet or the strict numerical sequence, and it
has usually cost them in the long run.
No one has ever devised an instrument as clean, as purposeful, or as flexible as the 26-letter alphabet. Using sounds
that correspond to letters on a page, everyone in the Western
world can understand what the other person is saying, as long as
each person has a dictionary and is patient with the situation.
The sheer simplicity of the phonetic alphabet s its
immense power. It is indeed a transforming power, and it has
affected the lives of billions of people over the last 3,000 years.
This frontispiece and text is from the oldest known printed book, which was
printed in the year 868 as a tribute to the author’s parents. A Chinese translation
of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, the book was printed using the wood-block
method on a scroll more than 16 feet long. In 1907, it was discovered in a cave in
northwestern China, where Chinese scholars had hidden many of the Buddhist
texts banned during the Confucian T’ang Dynasty.
10 THE PRINTING PRESS
The Greeks used the alphabet as a vehicle for the discovery
and development of their sciences, philosophy, drama, and even
their politics. The Greeks did not improve on the system of writing
itself they used the same reed stylus and clay tablet that existed
in the rest of the ancient world. By the time the civilization of the
Greeks was giving way to that of the Romans, around 200 B.C.,
parchment from Egypt was beginning to replace the clay tablet.
This parchment was made from animal skin, usually from calves
and sheep. The use of parchment greatly increased the speed of
writing, but preservation of the documents was problematic.
Roll after roll of parchment scrolls piled up in the homes of
Roman and Greek citizens, and the public depositories of the
governments likewise overflowed. There was no remedy for the
situation the Greeks and Romans just kept on making piles
of parchment.
A noble effort to preserve knowledge began in Egypt. Early
in the reign of the Ptolemaic kings, around 250 B.C., a great
library was built at Alexandria, which is on the western edge of
the Nile Delta. Over the next two centuries, scholars from
around the Mediterranean world came to Alexandria, used the
great resources of the library, and added to its collections. But in
48 B.C., during Julius Caesar’s battle in Alexandria with the last
of the Ptolemaic kings, the great library burned. Thousands—
probably hundreds of thousands — of precious documents
perished that day, constituting a great loss to the ancient world.
Over the next 500 years, the book most frequently copied
on parchment was the Bible. Consisting of the Old Testament
and the New Testament, the Bible recorded both the story of
the Hebrew people before Christ and the story of Christ’s life.
The first Bibles appeared about a hundred years after Christ’s
death and were copied throughout the Mediterranean world.
At the time, many people seemed to feel that Greek and
Roman learning were less important because Rome was in
decline people wanted a vision of hope for a better life after
this one.
Scribes, Scrolls, and Parchment
The Roman Empire staggered and fell in the fifth century A.D.
For a time, writing suffered in the West. Barbarian trib
