"Rather, key innovations in what would become revolutionary printing technology began in east Asia ... The printing press is often said to have been created by Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany, around 1440 AD ... At least, this is how the story is rendered in most books ..."
I didn't realize that most books still render it this way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type , for example, has "The world's first movable type printing technology for paper books was made of porcelain materials and was invented around 1040 AD in China during the Northern Song dynasty by the inventor Bi Sheng"
As I understand it, Joseph Needham did a lot of work to make Europeans aware of the long history of Chinese science and technology, predating European use.
To be extremely pedantic, Gutenberg did most likely invent the printing press, as in the use of a screw press to push the paper against the ink-covered letters during the printing process. But few people care about that part, even fewer than people who care about his process for mass-manufacturing matrices for letter casting that let him produce large numbers of identical letters in parallel.
"Eventually, early capitalists in Europe invested in Johannes Gutenberg’s business venture—the one that combined technology quite like the movable type innovated by Choe Yun-ui with a screw-threaded spiral mechanism from a wine or olive press to ratchet up printing to commercial speeds."
where
"Choe came up with an alternative. Building on earlier Chinese attempts to create movable type, he adapted a method that had been used for minting bronze coins to cast 3-dimensional characters in metal. Then he arranged these pieces in a frame, coated them with ink, and used them to press sheets of paper. When he was done, he could reorganize the metal characters, eliminating the need to persistently chisel blocks."
When viewed through a pedant's lens, where do you set the line which says something is the first printing press?
As the article points out, Jikji ("Anthology of Great Buddhist Priests' Zen Teachings") was printed on metal movable type long before Gutenberg, and yes, using a method different than Gutenberg. How does the lack of a screw make it not a printing press?
(I tried looking for more details about how that press worked, but failed, with most people referring to the Wikipedia page, and the academic publications behind paywalls.)
But really, my comment is centered on "The printing press is often said to have been created by Gutenberg ... this is how the story is rendered in most books".
I, perhaps naively, though that most books mention that printing presses existed before Gutenberg, but Gutenberg greatly transformed it capabilities. Indeed, the author specially says that "The Lost Gutenberg" does not claim that Gutenberg created the printing press and mentions the earlier efforts, albeit in passing.
I really do not like the comment "The fantastical idea that Gutenberg alone invented the printing press ignores an entire continent and several centuries of relevant efforts and makes no effort to understand how or why technology might have spread". It sounds like a a diffusionist argument to say there must be a connection when we know many examples of multiple independent inventions - as I recall from a history podcast, Needham started his studies when he learned that grafting plants in China was done differently than he learned it in England.
Oh, and "the scholar Tsien Tsuen-Hsien wrote in Science and Civilization in China in 1985" is the author of the book from the Needham series I linked to.
AFAIK Choe was manually pushing his paper down on the inked frame, so no press was involved. The advantage of the screw press was that it mechanized this to let the operator quickly and accurately apply a consistent amount of pressure across the entire page so that only inking and feeding the paper were left as manual steps while creating lots of exemplars of the same page.
To be extremely pedantic, manual pressing is still pressing.
Similar to how "The earliest wine press was probably the human foot or hand, crushing and squeezing grapes into a bag or container where the contents would ferment" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_wine_press .
To be clear, people use "printing press" as metonymy for the set of methods Gutenberg developed, which includes not just the screw-powered printing press, but also type cases, appropriate oil-based ink, the composing stick, and other inventions that various internet sources tell me were created.
Which highlights another aspect of my irritation with the linked-to piece:
'''During a study of Gutenberg’s lettering techniques, computer programmer Blaise Agṻera y Arcas pointed out how strange this is: “The idea that a technology emerges fully formed at the beginning is nuts. Anyone who does technology knows that’s not how it works.”'''
That links to something in the Financial Times, which I assume is an editorial. Its inclusion is very odd since Gutenberg's printing isn't "a technology" but many different technologies, each with its own history. Oil-based inks were already used in the art worlds. Creating alloys appropriate for casting and subsequent use were already known. And of course the screw press was already known.
So when the author writes "Nonetheless, it is possible that printing technology spread from East to West", we must ask which printing technology? There is no evidence of a culture of printing advancements along the way from Korea to the Free City of Mainz, so the idea is supposed to be that Gutenberg (and I assume his workers) somehow came up with all these other inventions, but wasn't clever enough to come up with moveable type?
Twain seems to have thought that "the world" was "made" by people who could read. Sorry, Sam; it wasn't. And it isn't, and it won't be.
"Rather, key innovations in what would become revolutionary printing technology began in east Asia ... The printing press is often said to have been created by Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany, around 1440 AD ... At least, this is how the story is rendered in most books ..."
I didn't realize that most books still render it this way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type , for example, has "The world's first movable type printing technology for paper books was made of porcelain materials and was invented around 1040 AD in China during the Northern Song dynasty by the inventor Bi Sheng"
As I understand it, Joseph Needham did a lot of work to make Europeans aware of the long history of Chinese science and technology, predating European use.
Ahh, volume 5, part 1 ("Paper and Printing") of his magnum opus "Science and Civilisation in China", 1985 - https://archive.org/details/sciencecivilisat0005need_pt01/pa... .
To be extremely pedantic, Gutenberg did most likely invent the printing press, as in the use of a screw press to push the paper against the ink-covered letters during the printing process. But few people care about that part, even fewer than people who care about his process for mass-manufacturing matrices for letter casting that let him produce large numbers of identical letters in parallel.
As the article characterizes it:
"Eventually, early capitalists in Europe invested in Johannes Gutenberg’s business venture—the one that combined technology quite like the movable type innovated by Choe Yun-ui with a screw-threaded spiral mechanism from a wine or olive press to ratchet up printing to commercial speeds."
where
"Choe came up with an alternative. Building on earlier Chinese attempts to create movable type, he adapted a method that had been used for minting bronze coins to cast 3-dimensional characters in metal. Then he arranged these pieces in a frame, coated them with ink, and used them to press sheets of paper. When he was done, he could reorganize the metal characters, eliminating the need to persistently chisel blocks."
When viewed through a pedant's lens, where do you set the line which says something is the first printing press?
As the article points out, Jikji ("Anthology of Great Buddhist Priests' Zen Teachings") was printed on metal movable type long before Gutenberg, and yes, using a method different than Gutenberg. How does the lack of a screw make it not a printing press?
(I tried looking for more details about how that press worked, but failed, with most people referring to the Wikipedia page, and the academic publications behind paywalls.)
But really, my comment is centered on "The printing press is often said to have been created by Gutenberg ... this is how the story is rendered in most books".
I, perhaps naively, though that most books mention that printing presses existed before Gutenberg, but Gutenberg greatly transformed it capabilities. Indeed, the author specially says that "The Lost Gutenberg" does not claim that Gutenberg created the printing press and mentions the earlier efforts, albeit in passing.
I really do not like the comment "The fantastical idea that Gutenberg alone invented the printing press ignores an entire continent and several centuries of relevant efforts and makes no effort to understand how or why technology might have spread". It sounds like a a diffusionist argument to say there must be a connection when we know many examples of multiple independent inventions - as I recall from a history podcast, Needham started his studies when he learned that grafting plants in China was done differently than he learned it in England.
Oh, and "the scholar Tsien Tsuen-Hsien wrote in Science and Civilization in China in 1985" is the author of the book from the Needham series I linked to.
AFAIK Choe was manually pushing his paper down on the inked frame, so no press was involved. The advantage of the screw press was that it mechanized this to let the operator quickly and accurately apply a consistent amount of pressure across the entire page so that only inking and feeding the paper were left as manual steps while creating lots of exemplars of the same page.
To be extremely pedantic, manual pressing is still pressing.
Similar to how "The earliest wine press was probably the human foot or hand, crushing and squeezing grapes into a bag or container where the contents would ferment" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_wine_press .
To be clear, people use "printing press" as metonymy for the set of methods Gutenberg developed, which includes not just the screw-powered printing press, but also type cases, appropriate oil-based ink, the composing stick, and other inventions that various internet sources tell me were created.
Which highlights another aspect of my irritation with the linked-to piece:
'''During a study of Gutenberg’s lettering techniques, computer programmer Blaise Agṻera y Arcas pointed out how strange this is: “The idea that a technology emerges fully formed at the beginning is nuts. Anyone who does technology knows that’s not how it works.”'''
That links to something in the Financial Times, which I assume is an editorial. Its inclusion is very odd since Gutenberg's printing isn't "a technology" but many different technologies, each with its own history. Oil-based inks were already used in the art worlds. Creating alloys appropriate for casting and subsequent use were already known. And of course the screw press was already known.
So when the author writes "Nonetheless, it is possible that printing technology spread from East to West", we must ask which printing technology? There is no evidence of a culture of printing advancements along the way from Korea to the Free City of Mainz, so the idea is supposed to be that Gutenberg (and I assume his workers) somehow came up with all these other inventions, but wasn't clever enough to come up with moveable type?