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.