How Invention Begins ch. 9
Thomas Edison said he wasn't going to invent anything unless he had established first there was a need for it. But many new technologies come out of wants, and only later become needs. Now we feel we need cell phones, but when they were first introduced they were luxuries.
Leinhard's discussion of the steam
engine started with the ancient Greeks, but his story of the printing
press starts in
medieval times, after the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 AD. The
dark ages
after that fall were so chaotic that literacy was nearly lost in
Europe, and many ancient Greek and Roman writings survived only because
Muslim scholars translated them into Arabic.
scriptorium
Education:
- Education was rare until Charlemagne (768-814--a king who united a big chunk of Europe) required that all priests (that is, all ministers) learn to read and write and even decreed (without much hope of achieving it) that all male children should get some schooling
- the (Catholic) church was the uniting institution
for society and provided almost all education
- in 1179 the Pope required that all cathedrals
maintain schools--these trained lawyers and state officials as well as
priests
- the first universities developed in the 11th and
12th century as schools for specialized study in the liberal arts
(Latin grammar, rhetoric, and logic), law, medicine, and theology
- since books were rare there was a big emphasis on memorization
- books from ancient Greece and Rome were rediscovered, and people tended to put very high value in these ancient authories
- most philosophy was based on ancient Greek
ideas--St. Thomas Aquinas played a key role in laying out how this
integrated with Christianity
- scholastic method: collect authority and apply
logic (though the church started to get nervous when people like Peter
Abelard did this to the Bible)
- medieval books were hand copied and cost $2000-10,000 in today's money
- as the middle ages became wealthier the demand for books was so high that some workshops had a kind of mass production with one person reading and a number writing (called a scriptorium)
- scribes at Cistercian monasteries even invented
alphabetical order, indexes, and standardized page numbers before the
printing press (think about it--if a book is hand copied different
copies wouldn't necessarily have the same words on the same page)
- eyeglasses had been introducted about 1286 AD and became a profitable business
- paper was slow to replace parchment but by the 14th century it was mass produced and had replaced animal skins for all but the most expensive books
- the screw press and oil-based inks were in use for wooden block prints, but carving all the words of a page onto a single block of wood was not an efficient way to produce books
- the Chinese even printed with moveable type, but
with so large a set of characters that didn't get them very far
Johann Gutenberg--(more history )
- he recognized that he could make money by mass producing documents
- Gutenberg's key innovation was
moveable type--he used standardized
small pieces of metal with one letter on each, which could be lined up
in rows to make the words of a page
- his first big effort, in 1455, was a bible
- he wanted it to look like a handcopied manuscript and as elegant as possible
- after printing the pages were hand decorated
- others saw the possibility of radically lowering the cost of
books
- by 1483 the same amount of money would produce 3 hand copies or 1025 printed copies
- the cost of a book dropped to a few hundred dollars in todays money
- Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read, tracks down the movement of one book--by Copernicus
- by 1500 8 million or more books (ndividual copies, not different titles) had been printed--equal to total previous world output