The Story of Printing

A World Without Printing

Imagine a world with no printed books, no newspapers, no magazines, no posters and no printed letters at all. Every single book you wanted to read would have to be copied out by hand, word by word, page by page, by someone sitting for months at a desk with a pen. For almost all of human history, that is exactly how things were.

In such a world, books were treasures. They were so slow and costly to make that only the very wealthy, powerful institutions or religious centres owned them, and most people could not read at all. Knowledge moved slowly and could easily be lost. Then, over the centuries, people invented ways to make copies of writing quickly and cheaply — and the world was transformed forever.

This is the story of printing: of how human beings learned to put words and pictures onto paper again and again, and how that simple-sounding idea became one of the most powerful inventions in all of history.

Writing by Hand

Before printing, making a book was a huge labour. People who copied books by hand were called scribes. In Europe, much of this work was done by monks in quiet rooms called scriptoria, who spent their days carefully copying texts onto parchment (made from animal skin) using ink and quill pens.

A single large book could take a scribe months or even years to complete. Some were beautifully decorated with gold and bright colours, true works of art. But because every copy had to be made by hand, books were extremely rare and expensive. If a scribe made a mistake, the error might be copied again and again into future versions.

Other parts of the world had their own writing materials and methods. The ancient Egyptians wrote on papyrus, made from a reed plant. The Chinese, very importantly, invented paper around 2,000 years ago — a cheap, smooth material perfect for writing and, later, for printing. The invention of paper was a vital step on the road to printing, because printing needs lots of affordable material to print on.

Printing Begins in China

The first great breakthroughs in printing happened in China, centuries before printing reached Europe. The earliest method was woodblock printing. A craftworker would carve the words and pictures of a whole page, backwards, onto a flat block of wood. The raised parts were inked, then pressed onto paper, printing the whole page at once. The same block could be used over and over to make many identical copies. Using this method, the Chinese printed some of the world's oldest surviving printed books well over a thousand years ago.

Carving a new block for every page was still a lot of work, so an even cleverer idea followed: movable type. Instead of carving a whole page, a craftsman named Bi Sheng made individual characters out of clay, which could be arranged to form a page, inked and printed, then taken apart and reused to make a different page. Later, movable type was also made from metal, and this technology developed further in places such as Korea, where some of the earliest metal-type printed books were produced. The idea of reusable type was about to change the world.

Gutenberg's Great Machine

In Europe, the big moment came around the year 1450, in the German city of Mainz. There, a craftsman named Johannes Gutenberg brought several clever ideas together into one powerful invention: the printing press.

Gutenberg made small pieces of movable metal type, one for each letter, that were tough, neat and reusable. He worked out a good recipe for oil-based ink that stuck well to the metal and to paper. And he adapted a screw press, rather like those used for squeezing grapes, to press the inked type firmly and evenly onto the paper. To print a page, a worker would arrange the metal letters into words and lines, ink them, lay paper on top and pull the press down. Then the same letters could be rearranged to print the next page.

The result was astonishing. A press could produce hundreds of copies of a page in the time it once took a scribe to copy a few lines. Gutenberg's most famous work was a beautiful printed Bible. Within a few decades, printing presses had spread to cities all across Europe, and millions of books were being printed. For the first time in Europe, books could be made quickly, in large numbers, and at a price many more people could afford.

How Printing Changed the World

It is hard to exaggerate how much the printing press changed history. Before it, knowledge was scarce and tightly controlled. After it, ideas could spread faster and further than ever before — and that changed everything.

As books became cheaper and more common, far more people learned to read. Schools and universities flourished, and ordinary people could own books for the first time. New discoveries in science could be printed and shared, so scientists across different countries could read one another's work and build on it. This helped fuel the great burst of learning and discovery of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution that followed.

Printing also shook up religion and politics. When people could read and print ideas for themselves, they began to question the powerful in ways that had not been possible before. Printed pamphlets and books spread bold new arguments across whole countries, sometimes sparking dramatic change. Rulers and authorities, who could no longer easily control what people read, found that the printing press was a force almost impossible to stop. Knowledge, once locked away, had been set free.

The Age of Newspapers and Beyond

As printing technology improved, it reached into everyday life. People began printing newspapers, so that ordinary readers could learn the news of their town, country and the world. They printed magazines, posters, maps, stories and schoolbooks. By the 1800s, powerful new machines driven by steam could print thousands of pages an hour, making newspapers and books cheaper than ever and putting reading material into millions of hands.

Printing kept advancing. New methods made it possible to print photographs and bright, colourful pictures. Faster presses churned out vast quantities of printed material, helping to spread education, news and entertainment around the globe. For centuries, printing remained the main way that human beings shared written information widely.

Printing in the Digital Age

In our own time, a new revolution has arrived: the digital age. Much of what we once printed on paper now appears on screens — on phones, tablets and computers. We read news, books and messages online, send emails instead of letters, and store libraries' worth of information on tiny devices. In some ways, the internet does for the modern world what the printing press did centuries ago: it lets information spread to almost everyone, instantly.

Yet printing has not disappeared. We still print books, packaging, posters and labels every day. Amazing new machines called 3D printers can even "print" solid objects, building them up layer by layer, from toys to spare parts. And the deeper idea behind printing — that knowledge should be copied, shared and spread to as many people as possible — is more alive than ever.

What We Learned

We have followed the story of printing across the centuries.

We began in a world where every book had to be copied by hand by scribes, making books rare and precious. We saw how China developed paper, woodblock printing and the first movable type, and how, around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg built a printing press with movable metal type that spread across Europe. We learned how cheap, plentiful books helped more people learn to read, spread science and new ideas, and changed religion and politics forever. Finally, we followed printing through the age of newspapers and into today's digital world.

Printing took the ideas trapped in a few precious books and set them free for everyone. Few inventions have done more to shape the modern world.

Want to keep exploring how we share ideas? Discover the origins of letters and words in The Story of Writing and the Alphabet, or see how this fits into the bigger picture in Great Inventions That Changed the World.