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It is the invention of the printing press we discuss here, nothing more and nothing less. How did it come about, how did it work and why?
he music for the show is Flute Sonata in E-flat major, H.545 by Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach (or some claim it as BWV 1031 Johann Sebastian Bach) performed and arranged by Michel Rondeau under Common Creative Licence 3.0.
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To make it easier for you to share the podcast, I have created separate playlists for some of the seasons that are set up as individual podcasts. they have the exact same episodes as in the History of the Germans, but they may be a helpful device for those who want to concentrate on only one season.
So far I have:
Salian Emperors and Investiture Controversy
Fredrick Barbarossa and Early Hohenstaufen
This is the time when the empire reaches its most challenging phase. This is not the difficult second album, this is more Tina Turner in 1982 when her cover of shame, shame, shame reached #47 in the Netherlands charts. This is where we see the beginnings of actual states and state bureaucracies developing in Germany. But these states were extremely fragile, likely to be overrun by enemies, divided amongst multiple sons or incorporated into larger entties. War was almost constant, as were dramas of love and pride. Despite all this strife and feuding, this is also a time of great innovation. Gutenberg came up with the printing press, a technology that would undermine the authority of the Catholic church, fan the flames which led to the Reformation, create the communications infrastructure needed for the rise of modern science and even – if Neil Postman is to be believed – lead to the invention of childhood as an extended, protected phase in the lives of young people. Like the internet and social media, the printing press demanded new types of content: maps, encyclopedias, fiction, political pamphlets and engravings, opening the world up to the world.
This podcast is part of the broader History of the Germans podcast that aims to track the history of the German people from the Early Middle Ages to Reunification in 1991. If you enjoy this show, check out any of the other seasons or follow the main show.
So far I have the following seasons:
The Ottonians (919 AD-1024 AD)
Salian Emperors and Investiture Controversy (1024 AD-1125 AD)
Fredrick Barbarossa and Early Hohenstaufen (1125-1190)
Frederick II Stupor Mundi (1190-1268)
Saxony and Eastward Expansion
The Hanseatic League
The Teutonic Knights
The Holy Roman Empire (1250 AD -1356 AD)
The Reformation before the Reformation (1356AD -1439 AD)
The Empire in the 15th Century
The Fall and Rise of the Habsburgs (1439AD -1519 AD)
Hello and welcome to the
History of the Germans, episode 187,
Gutenberg's Pressing Matters,
which is also episode three of season
10, the Empire in the 15th Century.
This podcast is now well into
its fourth year and I've established
my process for research,
script writing and recording.
And as for research, they this
usually means going to the London
library and bending down to
the lowest shelf to dig up some age
old copy of a German language
book that happens to be the one and
only works that goes into the
kind of detail on the topic at hand
that you guys have gotten used to.
Imagine my confusion when I
started looking into Johannes Gutenberg
and I found not just a few
books, but whole shelves of books
in English, German, French,
Italian, English and dozens more
talking about even the most
intricate details of the life and
works of the inventor of the
printing press.
Drowning in this avalanche of
material, I realized that at a minimum,
this story requires two episodes.
One about how Gutenberg came
to achieve this breakthrough and
then the impact his invention
had on the world and on the Germans
in particular.
Hence, today's episode is
about the man and his invention,
though about the man we know
so very little.
But before we start, just
another reminder that the History
of the Germans is advertising
free and for good reason.
It does not take a genius to
notice that the way we communicate
as a society has changed.
We do spend a lot of time on
electronic media of all kinds.
Not just social media, but
podcasts, streaming, YouTube, etc.
Most of this content is paid
for by advertising advertisers.
In the absence of better
metrics, pay the platforms and creators
on the basis of eyeballs or
ear canals.
And since our crocodile brains
are still dominated by the cerebellum,
our eyeballs and ear canals
always turn to the loudest and the
most eye catching thing.
And that is not always the
information our frontal cortex wants
and should feed on.
We need stuff that may be less
exciting but more thoughtful, and
that is not what advertisers
can pay for.
So we need at least a part of
our information world that is funded
by us, by the users.
That is why I have
subscriptions to newspapers and libraries
and I am happy to pay for the
BBC and for Netflix, for all my sins,
and for podcasts and substacks too.
And if you want to do the same
and for some reason feel the history
of the Germans is deserving
your Support, go to historyofthegermans.comSupport
and sign up as a patron.
And thanks a lot to Marco P.
James zappf Kenneth H. Mark V. Mark
Young Swin, Purple and Jeff N,
who've already done that.
And with that, back to the show.
Johannes Gutenberg was born
sometime between 1393 and 1400 in
Mainz.
His family was comparatively
well off part of the hundred ancient
families of the city, what we
now call a patrician.
The family lived mainly off
annuities, financial instruments
issued by the city that
generated a solid and predictable
income.
We also know that his father
was a companion of the mint, meaning
he was on some sort of
supervisory board of the arch Episcopal
Mint that that struck the
Rhenish Gulden, the most common currency
in the Holy Roman Empire.
His name, Gutenberg, derived,
as was customary, from his family
home, the Hofzum Gutenberg.
In the city center, next to
St. Christopher's Church.
Gutenberg translates as Hill
of the Good People.
But that was not its true origin.
Where it stood had once been
the home of one of the largest Jewish
communities in Europe.
That community had been
subjected to pogroms ever since 1096,
as we discussed in episode 38.
But the great expulsion of the
Jews had come in 1349 when the Black
Death struck.
Allegedly 6,000 men, women and
children chose to commit suicide
by setting light to their
synagogue rather than convert where
they once lived.
The Judenburg, the hill of the
Jews, was given to the city council
and a patrician family built a
house on the side.
As memory of the atrocities
faded, that house turned from Judenburg
to Gutenberg, which in 1419
the family adopted as their family
name.
And that is all we know about
his first 30 plus years.
He may have gone to
university, he may have trained as
a goldsmith, or he may have
just hung out in bars and nightclubs.
In 1434, he moved to
Strasbourg, a city that at the time
was much larger and much
richer than Mainz.
Mainz had been going downhill
due to the mismanagement by the city
council, internal conflicts,
the endless fighting between the
archbishops and their
neighbours, and the regular schisms
between two contenders for the
arch episcopal throne.
Even a hundred years on, the
city had not recovered its population
from before the Black Death.
Strasbourg, on the other hand,
was thriving, reaching 25,000 inhabitants,
a major hub of the wine trade
that stretched all the way to Norway
and Scotland.
Its cathedral, one of the
greatest achievements of Gothic art,
was still rising up and the
streets were lined with impressive
stone houses of prosperous
merchants and artisans.
What Gutenberg did in
Strasbourg for the following 10 years
is shrouded in mystery.
Some argue he did already
begin printing there in 1440, but
no proof of such activity can
be found.
All we know about this time is
from the court records, according
to which he was engaged in the
production of mirrors and some adventure
and art that was kept secret.
He left Strasbourg in 1444,
then disappeared from the records
before he returned to Mainz in 1448.
Seemingly flush with cash, he
buys out his siblings and moves into
the old family home, Zum Gutenberg.
And that is where he starts
his printing business for real.
In 1454, he published his
masterpiece, the Gutenberg Bible.
That is it.
He never wrote down what
inspired him, how he developed the
technology, or what he wanted
to achieve with it.
All these books that have been
written about Gutenberg's life, and
there are at least three
available in English, are all conjecture,
well argued and meticulously
researched, but in the end, more
suitable for true crime than
for a history podcast.
But what we have is his
magnificent innovation.
According to Luther, God's
ultimate and greatest gift.
Johannes Gutenberg stands in a
line with the world's greatest inventors.
The James Watts, the, the
Thomas Alva Edisons, the Carl Benz
and Louis Pasteur's.
But as much as we would all
love to read the story of the lone
genius who had that one
brilliant idea that propelled the
world forward, we have to
acknowledge that boring academic
research papers have proven
again and again that there are very
few, if any, instances where
innovations happened that way.
All these great advances were
usually the culmination of multiple
strands of development that
came together at a particular time
and a particular place to be
picked up by some determined individual
who happened to be at the
right place and at the right time.
Let's see whether printing
with movable letters was similar.
First up, Gutenberg did not
invent printing.
People have been printing
things for hundreds, if not thousands
of years using wooden stamps.
And since the late 14th
century, the art of the woodcut was
spreading across Europe, a
technique that allowed to print images
or a page of text multiple times.
Gutenberg's technology
deviated from woodcut first by using
metal rather than wood.
Metal is much more durable,
allowing the production of a much
larger number of copies before
the stamps wear out.
The second downside of the
woodcut was that to create a whole
book would require to carve
every single page, first in wood
as a mirror image, and then
making an imprint.
That was not only time
consuming, but also left no room
for error.
If, say, only one letter was
wrong, the whole woodcut had to be
made from scratch again, which
is why nobody printed books with
woodcuts.
Gutenberg's press used movable
type, so there would be a stamp for
each letter and then would be
assembled to form the respective
words and sentences.
If there was an error, all you
need to do was replace the letter
and restart the printing.
That's it.
That's all genius, isn't that?
That's the invention.
So let's just go and start printing.
Hold on, let's think about that.
If you want to print a book,
you will need a lot of these individual
letter stamps called punches.
And I mean a lot.
For example, in my scripts, I
use about 3,500 characters per page.
The Gutenberg Bible was a bit
more generous with space and used
only 2400 characters.
But then he printed at least
two pages on the same sheet of paper,
so that means he needed at
least 4800 punches.
So per print run.
So let's take a look at how
these punches could be made.
Punches were originally
created in coin making.
Up until the modern days,
coins were made by creating a metal
disc, usually containing some
gold, silver, or copper.
This disc is then struck with
a punch to imprint the desired image,
say, heads or tails, onto that
disc, which is why we call it striking
a coin.
The punch consists of a handle
like that of a chisel, a steel shank
of a few centimeters length
into which the punchmaker had engraved
an image.
The coinmaker would then
carefully place this punch over the
metal disc and strike it with
a hammer.
In a sophisticated mint, such
as the mint in mines, there would
be another die underneath the
disk, called an anvil, so that both
sides of the coin would be
struck at the same time.
Now, here's the rub.
The anvil lasted about 36,000
strikes and the punch only about
20,000 strikes.
A very large mint like Venice
would produce about 20,000 coins
a day, meaning the punch
needed to be replaced every day.
Mines were certainly smaller,
but still the punches only functioned
for a limited period of time.
So every day or every couple
of days, a punchmaker needed to engrave
a new punch.
This punch had to look exactly
the same as the previous punch to
make sure the coins looked identical.
Then the coins were quite
small and the images, however, quite
intricate.
These minute images had to be
engraved into a steel punch that
had to be heated and cooled
several times to harden it, but without
making it brittle.
Then the engraving had to be
done into the steel with steel.
There was no way you could get
hold of a diamond cutter, so steel
was used on steel to scrape
off miniscule curls of steel.
I have no way of checking
this, but according to John Mann's
book, the Gutenberg
Revolution, a good punchmaker could
create a letter on a scale of
0.01 mm, which is six times the resolution
of a laser printer.
And a punchmaker needs about a
day to make one punch.
So to make our 4,800 punches
needed to print the two pages would
take, well, 4,800 days, which,
given feast days and holidays, meant
it would take one punchmaker
20 years to make all the punches
needed just for these two
pages, or 20 punchmakers a year.
Gutenberg did neither have 20
years nor the funds to employ 20
punchmakers.
Plus, each letter would end up
being just a tiny bit different.
So he needed a more efficient
solution to make metal punches.
And that solution was the hand mold.
Now, I've been warned to try
to describe the hand mould someone
called Joseph Moxton tried 200
years ago.
And when his 13 page
description was reprinted, the editors
wrote in the comments that
nobody should try to understand the
hand mold by reference to this description.
But the idea is roughly the.
You create one punch for each
letter, then you use the punch to
create an imprint called the matrix.
The matrix is then inserted
and fixed at the bottom of the hand
mold.
And then you pour metal into
the mold, which then creates a little
rectangular stick with a
letter at the top.
Repeat again and again, and
hey presto, one punch is turned into
lots and lots and lots of
cloned punches.
But there was still a problem.
If you were to make these
from, say, steel, it would take a
few hours to cool naturally.
Or you could cool it down
rapidly using water or oil, which
would add another step in the
process and also change the chemistry
of the metal, which gets us to
the next bit of alchemy.
The metal he used for these
cloned punches, it was an amalgam
of lead, tin and antimony.
This alloy has a habit of
cooling extremely quickly.
So you can pour in the molten
metal that was heated to 327 degrees
Celsius and take out the new
punch almost immediately, already
cool enough to be handled, and bang.
You take out the letter punch,
and then you can use the hand mold
again and make the next and
the next and the next and the next.
Ok, great.
Now you can make lots and lots
of the 24 or 26 letters of the Alphabet.
But there's another problem.
Gutenberg wanted to create a
print that looked like a handwritten
manuscript, just better.
And that meant he needed a lot
more than the 26 types.
There were various special
signs that were used in abbreviations
in the handwritten manuscripts
at the time, so he needed these.
And he wanted the flow from
one letter to the next.
Again, like in a handwritten
manuscript, which meant having to
create multiple versions of
each letter with different attachment
points.
In the end, his Typeface had
between 220 and 290 different characters,
all of which had to be cut
into a punch and then molded dozens,
if not hundreds of times.
Great.
Now you have a pile of letter punches.
But how do you turn this into
a page of text?
You need to fix them into something.
Gutenberg's solution was to
create a frame into which the typesetter
would place the individual letters.
That sounds straightforward,
but let's think again.
First up, not all sentences
are the same length whilst the frame
is rectangular.
Well, you can fill the gaps
with punches that have no letters
on them, effectively creating
a void.
Or you could create various
versions of the same letter with
just marginally larger or
smaller width to end up with a perfectly
justified edge to the text.
And finally, you could play
around with little fillers to widen
the gap between the different letters.
And, and all that has to be
done in a way that does not make
the text jerky, but flowing
naturally, easy to read.
And then you have to make sure
that all the letters are absolutely
100% the same height.
If not, you end up with one
letter being bold and the next one
faint.
And we're talking about
precision in the sub millimeter level.
So now you've got your frame
with all the letters firmly held
in place, something called a form.
The next question is what
materials you want to print on.
A traditional material to
write on in the Middle Ages was vellum,
made from calfskin.
One calfskin produced about
three pages of the highest quality,
or six pages if stretched out.
It was fairly easy to print on.
But if printing was to become
as widespread as it did, it needed
another, a cheaper material.
Paper had been around in
Western Europe since the 11th century
as it spread from China via
the Islamic world.
But in Europe, large scale
production only began in the 14th
century.
One reason was that Chinese
paper was fairly soft and absorbent,
perfectly suited for Chinese
calligraphy, but not ideal for illuminated
manuscripts.
The Europeans added enamel
glue to the mix, which hardened it
so that it could take ink and paint.
The first German paper mill
opened in 1390 in Nuremberg.
But the most desirable paper
came from Italy.
The next question was what ink
to use.
Handwritten manuscripts were
written using iron gal ink, a black
or brown mixture made from
iron sulphate, tannic acid and gum
arabicum.
This ink was far too watery.
It ran off the types and
smeared all over the pages.
It was also acidic, so often
faded through the paper to the opposite
side.
Gutenberg therefore had to
develop a new kind of ink that, since
he wanted his books to look
like manuscripts, had to have a similar
colour to iron gal ink, but
was more viscous and sticky.
Printer's ink was was based on
oil paint, a material only recently
made popular by the early
Netherlandish painters, the Jan van
Eycks, the Roger van der
Weydens and Robert campins.
During the 1440s and 1450s,
this technique was gradually coming
up the Rhine river, finding an
important center in Alsace.
In all likelihood, it was
there, in the workshops of one of
these pioneers of oil
painting, that Gutenberg first encountered
oil based paint, without which
printing with movable type was simply
impossible, which then reverts
back to another problem.
The paper that had been used
for illuminated manuscripts was a
bit too hard for this new ink.
So in order to make the
printing ink stick, the paper had
to be softened, made a little
bit moist, which again, you need
to play around with moisture
and ink in order to make it match.
At which point we now get to
the last major technological the
actual printing press.
Woodcuts and other prints had
been made by rubbing paper over the
carved piece.
That did work to a degree, but
often left smudges of paint on the
page.
And Gutenberg needed to print
both sides of the page, which meant
he needed to fix the paper in
exactly the same place twice, which
means he needed a way to fix
both the frames with all the letters
and the paper into place, and
then apply exactly the accurate level
of force onto it.
The solution for that, the
wine press Mainz is in the midst
of a wine growing region.
The Gutenberg family owned a
farm near Eltville, right in the
center of the Rheingau, source
of some of Germany's finest white
wines.
Wine presses work with
horizontal screws and are calibrated
to exert exactly the right
amount of pressure to squeeze the
liquid out of the grapes, but
not to smash them into pulp.
Ideal for printing, where
again, precision was key, that is
the hardware.
The latter types moulded in
the hand mould, the frame they are
fixed in, called the form, the
ink, the moisted paper and the printing
press.
But that still does not make a book.
We need a process.
The first step is to carve the
type, a job usually done by a gold
or silversmith, ideally one
with experience working in making
coin punches.
Then we have someone making
the types by punching the matrix,
fixing it inside the hand mold
first, creating the special alloy
and then pouring it into the mould.
Once we have the typefaces.
They go to the setter, who
puts together the actual text by
placing the respective letters
inside the frame.
He or she would usually have
arranged the punches in two cases,
one for the larger and one for
the smaller letters.
Where we get our terms
uppercase and lowercase from.
This is a truly sophisticated job.
For one.
All the letters the setter
sees are a mirror image.
And then he or she has to work
out all the gaps and widths to fit
the text onto the frame.
The frame is then taken to
make a first sample imprint which
is given to the corrector.
That person will read through
the first imprint and check for errors.
This is again hugely important
because the advantage of printing
over handwritten manuscripts
was not only cost, but but even more
accuracy.
Copyists had made mistakes and
these mistakes had then compounded
through the line of
distribution from one writer to the
next.
A printed copy was exactly the
same as the next one, making sure
that only the accurate
information is transmitted.
But for that, the information
had to be accurate to start with.
Hence the corrector.
Once approved, the form then
goes to the actual printer.
Each printing press is
operated by two people.
One handles the forms and
applies the ink.
Application was done with two
large leather balls which are covered
with a film of oil paint and
then banked vertically onto the form.
You do not want to rub it side
to side because it would seep in
between the letters and smear
across the page.
Doing that meant the banger
often got sticky oil panned onto
his fingers that was difficult
to wash off.
Hence he needed another person
to handle the clean sheets of paper.
The paper needed to be a bit
moist to better absorb the paint,
which was one part of the job.
Then he had to fix it in place
on the paper holder, then lower it
over the form.
And finally he slid the form
and paper under the press, turned
the screw, released it and
slid everything back out.
I put a link in the show notes
for a video where you can see how
that worked.
Then the paper and paint
needed to dry, which meant it was
brought up to the loft where
it was hung up like washing.
And then the whole process was
repeated to print the back of the
page and to make sure that the
back and the front aligned perfectly.
The paper frame had two little
pins that pricked the paper.
When it came back down, having
dried in the loft, you put the paper
through the same pricks when
fixing it and hey, presto.
Perfection.
I hope you get what I'm
telling you here.
The invention of printing was
not some eureka moment when Gutenberg
jumped up in his bathtub and ha.
That is how it works.
This was likely a decades long
process of trial and error, developing
each one of these specific instruments.
The hand mold, the form, the
ink, the paper, the printing press.
And then going through
hundreds or thousands of iterations
to figure out which
combination of materials and pressure
worked best.
Since Gutenberg left no record
of his life apart from the legal
documents, we do not know how
many iterations he went through.
But to give you an idea, James
Dyson went through 5,127 prototypes
of his bagless vacuum cleaner
before he finally released DC01,
the product that would make
him a billionaire.
Elon Musk, as you know, not my
favorite person, took six years before
his rockets first reached
orbit, after several exploded.
And that was based on a
technology that had already existed
since the 1940s.
The first reusable rocket, his
true innovation took another seven
years to develop.
In other words, innovation is
10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.
That was the case in the 15th
century and that is still the case
today.
It is also most unlikely
Gutenberg did develop each of these
tools and processes all by himself.
Even if he had some goldsmith
skills, for which there is no evidence,
it is unlikely he could
operate at the level of position
required to make the punches.
We know he hired a goldsmith,
Hans Dunne, in Strasbourg and kept
him on when he moved to Mainz.
As for all the other tools,
let's remember that from his days
in Strasbourg onwards, he had
a team of six to eight people working
with him, many great artisans
in their own right, and staying with
him throughout.
And then we have the time and place.
Mainz and Strasbourg in the
first half of the 15th century.
Both cities lay on the Rhine
river at the time, the trading superhighway
connecting north and south.
There was a mint in mines and
with it the specialist skills to
make high precision punches.
And Gutenberg knew about
those, given his father had been
one of the board members of
the mint.
It was right around that time
that oil paintings spread southwards
along the Rhine from Flanders
to Alsace and then Italy.
Paper had gained popularity
and was making the same journey in
the opposite direction.
And Mainz lay in the
winemaking region with wine presses
galore.
Now, it's unlikely that Mainz
in 1450 was the only place in the
world where printing with
movable type could have been invented,
in large part because it was
actually invented a few decades earlier
in Korea.
And other forms of printing
had been used in China for centuries.
But what movable type printing
did in the 1450s in Mainz was to
catch on, which is something
it did not do in Korea.
And that had to do with two
crucial elements every innovation,
funding and willing customers.
If you look back at the
history of Silicon Valley, it's quite
obvious that this outburst of
innovation and creativity did not
come out of nothing.
It was a combination of
Pentagon, mainly Navy funded research
in Northern California,
Stanford University, and then starting
in 1972, venture capital firms
providing the funding for all that
makes up our modern world,
including that pinnacle of technological
and creative achievement, podcasts.
Gutenberg too was depended
upon financial backers.
He found the first group of
them when he moved to Strasbourg
in 1434.
He himself had about 350
gulden, enough to buy a substantial
house, but not enough to
create a business on the scale we
were talking about here.
So he invited three partners
to join him.
And at that point he did not
invite them to join into decades
long chase to develop the
printing press.
The idea he brought to them
was to make mirrors.
Not posh glass mirrors, but
small handheld mirrors.
How do you get rich with mirrors?
Well, that is something that
could only have worked in the madness
of the 15th century.
The black Death and the
recurring outbreaks of the plague,
the huge uncertainty caused by
endless feuds, the absence of a central
authority, the split of the
Church during the schism, the Hasite
revolt, the threat of the
Turkish invasion, all that left people
utterly unsettled.
They sought refuge in their
faith and in particular in the support
their hope saintly
interventions could bring.
That is a century of enormous pilgrimages.
And one of the most
significant ones was the pilgrimage
to Aachen.
Aachen Cathedral does not only
hold the bones of Charlemagne, a
saint, at least in the eyes of
many, but some of the most revered
of relics.
Relics that had touched Jesus
himself and members of his family.
These the robe of the Virgin
Mary, the swaddling clothes of the
infant Jesus, the cloth in
which the head of John the Baptist
was wrapped, and the loincloth
worn by Christ on the cross.
Touching these sacred relics
would transfer so much holiness.
Any illness, sadness and
affliction would instantly dissolve.
Every seven years, these these
saintly objects would be taken outside
the cathedral and shown to the people.
Each of these 10 days, when
these displays were done, would see
10,000 pilgrims descending on
Aachen trying to catch a glimpse
of Jesus.
Loincloth.
No way the canons would allow
anyone to touch those precious objects.
But they were so imbued with
sanctity, they radiated goodness.
So simply being in the
presence and catching some of those
rays of would bring salvation
from any troubles.
But even though Aachen may See
a hundred thousand visitors over
these 10 days of the festival.
This is not enough to satisfy
the demand.
All those who stayed home, be
it due to lack of funds or illness,
were in dire need of deliverance.
There was a way to collect
these rays of holiness and bring
them back home to your loved ones.
All you needed was a hand
mirror that would capture the rays
and emanating from the sacred
relic and then contain them.
And these were the kinds of
mirrors that Johannes Gutenberg intended
to produce.
And now take a breath.
Guess how many mirrors he
intended to make?
500?
1,000?
10,000?
No, 32,000 was the intended
production run.
Selling those at half a
guilder each would bring in revenues
of 16,000 guilders.
Production costs were, hold
on, 600 guilders, a gross profit
margin of 96%, or a profit of
26 times.
That is more than, say,
Facebook or Google Search, albeit
not by that much.
Just to put all this into
perspective, Gutenberg's income was
about 30 guilders, and his net
worth was about 300 guilders.
Now, we do not know how
Gutenberg intended to make these
magic mirrors.
In particular, we do not know
how he would produce them in such
quantities.
What we did find, though, was
investors were willing to support
this venture with what turned
out to be a lot more than 600 guilders.
At which point we hit on one
of the greatest Gutenberg mysteries.
What was it he actually did
during his years in Strasbourg?
Sure, there were the mirrors,
but his partners, and he himself
poured a lot more than the
initially intended 600 guilders into
this mantra.
And then there is the court
case, because, surprise, surprise,
the scheme did not work out
quite as planned.
There was a court case at the
end of it where the son of one of
the partners demanded his
father's money back.
And what is weird about this
court case is that no one, not the
claimant, not the witnesses,
and certainly not the defendant,
Gutenberg, was prepared to
explain what exactly the venture
was.
They talk about an Aventur und
Kunst, best translated as a venture
and an art.
And then they go on about
presses and forms and secret arts.
Something else beyond the
making of mirrors had been going
on.
Given all we heard about the
complexity of printing and all the
different technologies and
processes that had to be developed,
it's fair to assume that much
of the money intended to make mirrors
went into the R and D of printing.
And then there's the fact that
when he arrived in Mainz in 1348,
he immediately set out to
print things using his printing press.
Having left Strasbourg and his
old Business partners behind what
he now needed was financing to
scale up his business.
And he found this financing
from a man called Johann Fust.
Fust was an important citizen
of Mainz and a very wealthy man.
He lent Gutenberg 800 gulden
in 1449 to set up a printing workshop
and would provide funding over
the next five years to the tune of
4,500 gulden, the same as 12
substantial houses in the city.
So everything is now in place.
Gutenberg has a technology and
a process.
He had brought along some
members of his old team from Strasbourg
and he had hired more and he
had financing.
All he now needed was
customers who would want to own a
printed book or any printed material.
What he had going for him was
a veritable explosion in literacy.
During the previous hundred
years, knowledge was no longer confined
to within the walls of monasteries.
By 1440, the German lands
boasted nine universities, up from
none in 1370.
Running a trading business had
become more and more reliant on writing,
on the exchange of letters and
the drafting of contracts.
Hence the sons and sometimes
the daughters of the city merchants
went to the newly opened
schools and even artisans and labourers,
keen to expand their horizons,
learned to read.
And what did they read?
Manuscripts.
Along with the growth and
literacy, a whole industry of scribes
had developed.
Paper had been the killer
application, costing a tenth of vellum
and parchment.
The material itself had become accessible.
Entrepreneurs set up writing
businesses where scribes would copy
books, pamphlets, missals and
brevias by the dozen.
In other words, books were accessible.
But these handwritten books
and documents had a serious weakness.
They were written in haste and
hence prone to errors.
And for some books, errors
were unacceptable.
A copy of a major theological
treatise must not carry mistakes.
Imagine what happened if you
misinterpret St. Augustine.
Same goes even more for
missals, the books that lay down
in detail how each Mass
throughout the year is supposed to
be celebrated.
Any error there and the whole
of the congregation may find itself
falsely in structured.
But even more practical things
needed to be accurate, like schoolbooks.
The most widely used
schoolbook in the 15th century was
the so called Donatus, a 4th
century Latin grammar, a concise
book aimed at young students.
Again, it is self evident that
a student buying this book would
be very badly served.
Did he pick up a version with
lots of errors?
So this is how the history of
printing begins, with a schoolbook.
The Donatus by Gutenberg
probably came out in 1450 and remained
a mainstay of his workshop throughout.
Another line of business came
out of the political situation.
The Ottomans kept progressing
up the Balkans, whilst at the same
time threatening Cyprus and Constantinople.
Pope Nicholas V called for a
crusade and to fund the endeavour,
offered full indulgences
against generous pay.
Now, indulgences were not only
spiritual offers, but they were also
physical objects.
About one page of dense text
recording the exact wording of the
papal bull granting the
indulgence, its conditions and application.
It also featured, of course,
the name of the sinner, the name
of the priest granting the
indulgence and his signature on the
receipt.
These pieces of paper could be
presented at the next confession
and led to automatic
absolution of sins and reduction
of time in purgatory.
Again, this was not a document
where spelling mistakes or worse,
the omission of whole lines of
text was acceptable.
Coming to the rescue, Johannes
Gutenberg and his printing press.
Hence, the second key output
of the printing press were forms
for indulgences, faithfully
recording the papal bull, leaving
space to add the names of the
sinner and the priest and the signature.
Other products were more for
daily use.
One was the so called Turk
calendar, a calendar for the year
with woodcuts and statements
encouraging the reader to take up
arms against the Turks or even
better, give money to those who wanted
to fight.
I will not go into one other
product, the so called sibylline
prophecies that he may or may
not have printed and and what they
meant.
That is the kind of rabbit
hole that has swallowed many a Gutenberg
scholar so far, so seriously
underwhelming schoolbooks, calendars,
indulgences.
Clearly not the kind of output
that propels Mann to the European
pantheon of greats.
What Gutenberg needed was a
bestseller, a book that would display
the absolute superiority of
his innovative production process
and that would hopefully make
him a rich man.
Talking about rich.
The print runs were going well.
Cash flow was still a bit tight.
The problem was the same that
had failed so many innovative payment
terms.
You see, by the time the first
little scholar handed over his two
shillings for the Donatos,
Gutenberg had already paid all his
supplies of paper, metal and
ink, his employees, his rent and
the interest on his loans.
As demand for his print runs
went up, so did his upfront expenditure,
meaning he had a thriving business.
But every penny that came in
went straight out the door to pay
for more materials and for the
next print run.
And that meant he did not have
the money to make that one killer
app, that kind of book that
would divide the world history into
before and after.
So he went back Johann Fust
and asked for another loan.
A loan needed to set up
another, a second print workshop
where he could produce that
one killer app.
But what was it?
Initially, e wanted to
piggyback on an initiative to issue
a new a revised missal for the
whole of the enormous archdiocese
of Mainz and all its suffrage
and bishoprics.
If that had gone through, it
would have been a gold mine.
Gutenberg's printing press was
the only device that could guarantee
that every single copy of the
missal, which contains all the rules
about how a mass should be
done, was identical.
And every one of the thousands
of parishes in the diocese would
have needed to buy one.
But it did not come off.
Both the Archbishop and the
Roman Curia had sponsored the development
of missiles and neither could
force the other to sanction their
product.
So no missile was agreed
between the authorities.
And betting on one of the
drafts winning out in the end would
have been utter madness.
Exhausted with waiting for the
missile, in 1452, Gutenberg decided
to go for the big one, for the
whole Bible, to get an idea of the
scale of the undertaking.
The Gutenberg Bible comprised
1275 pages of text, mostly in 422
lines.
It was produced in an edition
of 180 copies, some of them on vellum,
but mostly on paper.
Not any odd paper, but special
expensive Italian paper.
It was not just an accurate
copy of the, at the time most accurate
copy of the Vulgata, the Latin Bible.
It was also, and still
remains, one of the most beautiful
books and ever printed.
Each letter comes out as sharp
and as accurate as humanely possible.
The entire text in two columns
is justified on the end, requiring
an incredibly fiddly
adjustment of individual letters
until they match.
In 1455, Probliff fust not
Gutenberg brought the Bible to the
Frankfurt fair, then and now,
the greatest trade fair in the German
lands.
And already at the time it had
a section dedicated to books.
And who would come to poke
around the latest issues than our
friend, legendary composer of
best selling erotica and future pope
Pius ii, Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini.
And he got very excited.
So excited he immediately
wrote back to his then boss, the
Spanish cardinal de Cavall.
I did not see complete bibles,
but quinternions, those five sheet
20 page sections of different
books written in extremely elegant
and correct letter without
error, which your eminence could
read with no difficulty and
without glasses.
Piccolomi tried to buy a copy,
but was told that all the copies
had already been pre ordered.
Gutenberg had his bestseller.
He had produced a book that
was not cheaper than a manuscript,
but infinitely better, its
letter sharper Its layout more beautiful
and most importantly, error free.
Gutenberg stood on the verge
of becoming immensely rich and celebrated
as the man who invented the
world's most important new technology
for a thousand years.
But as he stood there, Johann
Vust pulled the rug from under his
feet.
Gutenberg had never paid any
of the interest he owed on all these
various loans he had taken out.
And right now, in 1455, when
the Bibles were almost completed
but not sold for cash, he had
no money, not a penny to rub between
his fingers, just debt.
Sure, he knew that as soon as
he dispatched the books, the funds,
maybe as much as 9,000 gulden,
would be flooding in.
But right now he did not have
a penny.
And Johann Voost knew that too.
He sued Gutenberg.
Gutenberg was forced to hand
over both his workshops with all
the presses, the nearly
finished Bibles, the materials and
everything else he had worked
on for nearly two decades.
Johann Fust and his son in
law, Gutenberg's former assistant
Peter Schaefer, sold the
Bibles, made a fortune, continued
the workshop and rapidly
became the largest printing business
in the Rhineland, publishing
books almost as magnificent as the
Gutenberg Bible.
Gutenberg himself kept going
on a smaller scale.
But I would never have the
resources to ever produce anything
on the level of the Gutenberg
Bible again.
And that is where we will stop
for today.
Next week I will try to assess
the impact of Gutenberg's invention,
a task that has defeated many
a better man.
But like Gutenberg, I have
embarked on this path and I cannot
stop.
And as usual, my closing plea
to support the show at historyofthegermans.com
support all your help is very
much appreciated, Sam.