THE INVENTION OF
PRINTING
The elements
essential to the printing process collected slowly in western Europe, where a
favorable cultural and economic climate had formed.
Xylography.
Xylography, the art of printing from wood carving appeared in
Europe no earlier than the last quarter of the 14th century. This appears to
have been at the same time and presumably as a result of the use of paper. Paper
it was noticed, was better suited for making the impressions from wood reliefs
that manuscript copyists used to reproduce the outline of ornamental initial
capital letters than was rough-surfaced parchment .
The printing process
was soon extended to the making of religious pictures. These images at first
appeared alone and later were accompanied by some text. As engravers became more
skillful, the text became more important than the illustration. In the first
half of the 15th century small, genuine books of several pages appeared.
Religious works or compendiums of Latin grammar by Aelius Donatus called
donats, were published by a method identical to that of the Chinese.
It is possible that experiments were in fact made to carve blocks of
writing that, instead of texts, would simply contain a large number of letters
of the alphabet; such blocks could then be cut up into type, usable and
reusable. This was probably accomplished in 1423 or 1437 by a Dutchman from
Haarlem, Laurens Janszoon, known as Coster. The encouraging
results obtained with large type demonstrated the validity of the idea of
typographic composition.
But the early results were disappointing
particularly with regard to smaller type destined for use for text. The letters
of the roman alphabet were smaller than Chinese ideograms, and cutting
them from wood was a delicate operation. Moreover, type made in this way was
fragile, and wore out at least as quickly as the whole text carved blocks. This
process, demonstrated no advance in ease of production, durability, or quality.
Since each letter was carved individually, no two of the same letter were
identical any more than when the text was engraved directly into a wood block.
Metallographic
printing (1430?)
Metallographic impression is assumed
to be the direct ancestor of typography, however the record is far from clear.
Medieval craft guilds, notably the metal founders, the die-cutters, the
goldsmiths and silversmiths, knew the technique of using dies. Some masters of
this technique apparently realized that it could be applied to a process that
would enable texts to be set in relief more efficiently than by carving wood
blocks. This probably occurred in three steps: (1) a set of dies, each bearing a
letter of the alphabet, was engraved in brass or bronze; (2) using these dies,
the text was struck letter by letter to form a mold on the surface of a matrix
of clay or of a soft metal such as lead; (3) lead was then poured over the
surface to form a small plate that, once hardened, would bear the text in
relief.
Theoretically the advantages of this process were: only one
engraving per letter, that of the die, was required to replicate the letter as
often as desired, and any two examples of the same letter would be identical,
since they came from the same single die. Sinking the matrix and casting the
lead were fast operations; since lead had better durability than wood; and by
casting several plates from the same matrix the number of copies printed could
be quickly increased.
Metallographic printing appears to have been
practiced in Holland around 1430 and next in the Rhineland . Gutenberg
used it in Strassburg (now Strasbourg, France) between 1434 and 1439.
These early experiments were not readily followed up because of problems
created by the cast plates. It was technologically difficult to strike each
letter die with the same force and to keep a regular alignment, and worse, each
strike tended to deform the adjacent letter. It may well be that the major value
of metallographic printing was that it associated the idea of the die, the
matrix, and cast lead.
The
invention of typography--Gutenberg (1450?)
The
combination of die, matrix, and lead in the manufacture of multiples of
identical durable typefaces was one of the two necessary elements in the
invention of typographic printing in Europe. The second necessary element
was the concept of the printing press itself, an idea never conceived of
in the Far East.
Johannes Gutenberg is generally credited with
the simultaneous discovery of both these elements.
It is true that his
signature does not appear on any printed work. The basic assumption is that,
since Gutenberg was a silversmith, he would probably have retained the role of
designer in an association set up with the businessman Johann Fust and
Fust's future son-in-law the calligrapher Peter Schöffer in Mainz,
Germany. This assumption of affiliation is based solely on the interpretation of
obscure aspects of a lawsuit that Gutenberg lost against his associates in
1455.
The most convincing argument in favour of Gutenberg having invented
printing comes from his chief detractor, Johann Schöffer, the son of
Peter Schöffer and grandson of Johann Fust. Though Schöffer claimed from 1509 on
that the invention of printing was solely his father's and grandfather's, the
fact is that in 1505 he wrote in a preface to an edition of Livy that "the
admirable art of typography was invented by the ingenious Johan Gutenberg at
Mainz in 1450." The assumption is that he inherited this certainty from his
father, and it is hard to see what persuaded him to the contrary after 1505,
since Johann Fust died in 1466 and Peter Schöffer in 1502.
The first
pieces of type appear to have been made as follows: a letter die was carved in a
soft metal such as brass or bronze; lead was poured around the die to form a
matrix and a mold into which an alloy, which was to form the type itself, was
poured.
Spectroscopic analyses of early type pieces reveal that the
alloy used was a mix of lead, tin, and antimony--the same components used today:
tin, because lead alone would have oxidized rapidly and would have deteriorated
the lead mold matricesd in casting; antimony, because lead and tin alone would
have lacked durability.
Around 1475, it was probably Peter Schöffer who,
thought of replacing the soft-metal dies with steel dies, in order to produce
copper letter matrices that would be identical. This method of type production
continued to be made by craftsmen into the middle of the 19th century.
The typographer's work was from the beginning characterized by four
operations: (1) taking the type pieces letter by letter from a typecase; (2)
arranging the type pieces side by side on a composing "stick," a strip of
wood with corners, held in the hand; (3) justifying the line; the spacing
of the letters in each line out to a uniform length by using little blank pieces
of lead between words; and (4), after printing, replacing the type, letter by
letter, back in the compartments of the typecase.
The Gutenberg press.
Documents of the period, including those relating to a 1439 lawsuit in
connection with Gutenberg's activities at Strassburg, leave scarcely any doubt
that the press has been used since the beginning of printing.
The
printing press was probably at first a simple adaptation of the binding
press, with a fixed bed (level lower surface) and a movable platen
(level upper surface), moved vertically by means of a small bar on a worm screw.
The composed type, after being locked by ligatures or screwed tight into a
form (right metal frame), was inked, covered with a sheet of paper to be
printed, and then the whole pressed in the vise formed by the two surfaces of
the fixed bed and the movable platen.
This platen press process
was superior to the already in use brushing technique used in wood-block
printing in both Europe and China because it was now possible to obtain a sharp
impression and to print both sides of the sheet. There were deficiencies
however, it was difficult to pass the leather pad used for inking between the
platen and the form; and, since several turns of the screw were necessary to
exert the required pressure, the bar had to be removed and replaced several
times to raise the platen sufficiently to insert the sheet of paper.
It
is generally thought that the printing press acquired its principal functional
characteristics very early, probably before 1470. The first functional
characteristic of the printing press was probably the mobile bed, either on
runners or on a sliding mechanism, that permitted the form to be withdrawn and
inked after each sheet was printed.
Next, the single thread of the worm screw was replaced with three
or four parallel threads with a sharply inclined pitch so that the platen could
be raised by a slight movement of the bar. This caused less pressure to be
exerted by the platen, which was corrected by breaking up the printing operation
so that the movable bed pushed the form under the press so that first one half
and then the other half of the form was printed. This was the principle of
printing "in two turns," which continued for three centuries.