Gutenberg’s moving type propelled Europe towards the scientific revolution
blogs.lse.ac.uk
blogs.lse.ac.uk
About 1350 the price of paper began to fall exponentially in England and Holland. This made movable type economic almost 100 years later.
See Figure 5 on page 10 of "Prices and the Growth of the European Knowledge Economy, 1200-2007" https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:384596/FULLTEXT0...
The Moore's Law of paper prices was to printing as the Moore's Law of silicon integrated circuits is to the internet.
Using the internet analogy, movable type printing would be more like the LCD flat screen, which contributes mightily to the internet (especially mobile) but well after the Moore's Laws of integrated circuits, magnetic storage, and optical communications technologies have provided the basic infrastructure.
The trajectory of history was so carelessly determined by a tiny factor, different choices in writing system. Manufacturing a printing machine for dozens of alphabets was much cheaper than making one for tens of thousands of characters.
And while the West used movable type, it often seems not to have bothered to exploit the movability of the type. From the introduction to my reprint of Smyth's 1920 A Greek Grammar for Colleges:
> When the Department of Classics of Harvard University acquired the plates to A Greek Grammar for Colleges by Herbert Weir Smyth (1920), the decision was promptly reached that this excellent and detailed treatise should again appear in print.
> There is in fact scarcely any sector of Greek Grammar which has not marked progress as a result of extensive research or else based upon ingenious combinations of existing data.
> If a revision of Smyth was therefore from many points of view a desideratum, it was clear that a complete revision would be an extremely complex task, and also, because of the difficulty and expense of making alterations in the plates, a very costly one. Many of the texts cited by Smyth have since been re-edited; some of his citations would undoubtedly prove to be in conflict with the readings of our best current texts. Yet it would be a vast and perhaps profitless undertaking to verify all the citations, make alterations where necessary, and change the commentary to the extent required.
> As it turned out, even the much less ambitious revision of Smyth as originally conceived has not been possible, largely because of financial considerations. Accordingly, it is necessary to list here exactly in what respects the present revision of Smyth -- which might more modestly be termed a corrected reprint -- differs from its predecessor.
> Some changes have been made in the historical comparative part of the work, particularly in Smyth's original introduction and here and there in his original Part I (Letters, Sounds, Syllables, Accent). A very few changes, again bearing on historical linguistics, have been introduced in Part II (Inflection). Prof. Sterling Dow has contributed a valuable revision of paragraphs 348 on the Greek system of notation and 350 d on dating.
> In addition, lists of corrigenda have been supplied by several scholars, and these have been silently inserted wherever appropriate.
> Perhaps one caveat is in order. The student unfamiliar with the reconstruction of assumed intermediary forms may sometimes be puzzled by Smyth's use of such forms with no indication that the actually occurred or else are purely hypothetical. It would have been tempting to mark all the non-existent reconstructions with the now traditional asterisk as is customary in works on historical linguistics.
> One important lacuna in Smyth must be pointed out since it has not been filled: there is no section on prosody.
So Harvard came into possession of the undestroyed plates for printing a classic work, and wanted to update it with the last 40 years of research in the field. But that was cost-prohibitive. They couldn't even adjust the notation, since that would have required re-setting much of the book. They could insert whole pages, and they could make changes to a small number of individual pages -- and both of those things would have been true if the book had been block-printed originally instead of being set with movable type.
It is not obvious to me that Western printing with movable type offered all that much advantage over Chinese block printing, leaving the logistics of the writing system aside. Movable type made it easier to destroy works that didn't sell well, because their materials could be cannibalized for new works. But it didn't make it easier to reprint works that were in demand, and it didn't make it much easier to produce works originally -- most of the work is in the arranging, not the materials cost.
Edit:
And an example in 1920 doesn't really apply to the early days of movable type. There's a big difference between pre and post industrial revolution.
BTW in early 20th century, China entered its own Enlightenment because of shattered state control and those efficient printing machines Western colonials brought in.
> For this thesis, you need to show that movable type in specific, rather than printing in general, was necessary and sufficient for the scientific revolution.
My whole point is that movable type doesn't offer much in the way of civilizational advantages compared to block printing, so it's very odd to attribute Europe's success to its writing system. I agree that it makes sense to attribute the choice of movable type over block printing to the writing system. But saying that this choice "determined the trajectory of history" seems like a stretch. Movable type vs. block printing is a choice of no great consequence.
The link between the Renaissance and moving type is quite uncontroversial. The impact of democratization of the press is hard to underestimate.
No, you didn't.
> The link between the Renaissance and moving type is quite uncontroversial. The impact of democratization of the press is hard to underestimate.
You seem to be vacillating between "printing" and "movable type". The link between the Renaissance and printing is uncontroversial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_learning was... earlier than "the early 20th century". What are you referring to? What exactly are you arguing happened?
I would say that movable type was necessary but not sufficient. Are you saying that if all the other conditions had been in place, we could have had the scientific revolution (which China most definitely did not have) with block printing?
This is why we need many different cultures and forms of government etc. to flourish.
How many discoveries must have been ignored by humans because their implications were not compatible with any of our societies, but have inspired some other species out there to great progress? (I love thinking about things like that.)
One memorable example: thanks to moving type, women could publish views that were, at the time, at odds with views in a male-dominated society. Previously such manuscripts, being few in number, would have been easily destroyed or restricted, whereas distribution of printed books became harder to control.
Books also reduced the stranglehold of education held by the clergy, with women and common folk learning how to read and educating themselves with the help of the printed book. The Bible was the best-seller at the time -- Mortimer quips that it was one of the world's first "self help" books.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20493659-centuries-of-ch...
Scotland had eight printers by 1700, Russia had two and there were heavy controls for what could be printed. Within 100 years Scotland became a center for engineering, and many famous self taught inventors came from Scotland.
[1] https://marcinciura.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/earnings-in-pol...
1. speaking
2. writing
3. printing press
4. telecommunications
5. internet
Wonder what the next one will be!
Writing has only been independently invented a few times in history, as far as we know. Some historians reckon that map-making came before written language and it was that which had the largest impact.
2. spoken words as symbols
3. symbols as data
4. data as packets
I personally like the theory that it was constant war and conflict which propelled the scientific revolution. The need to compete and outdo others which went hand in hand with the industrial revolution and the politics and economics of the time that led to the french revolution.