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Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

Author mentions the printing press as an example of European machinery, but doesn't seem to go into why printing never really caught on in China, despite there having been movable type printing presses there before the west: ideogrammic writing.

This whole revolution that you just needed to have a few dozen dies of each latin alphabet character and you could print any page was completely not operative in a language where you needed thousands of individuals character dies.

Ideograms are not really any harder to learn or to handwrite than alphabets in the pre-printing press era, and they aren't a disadvantage in the modern computer age, but they were a huge disadvantage in the like 1400-1950 era.

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Author there, that is something, I thought about covering but it is a larger topic that probably needs its own article. It is not merely about the advantage of the latin alphabet, but also about the screw press which was not known in China, which feeds into a much larger and quite interesting story. Another aspect is metallurgy. Gutenberg was a goldsmith. There is also an interesting story about gold smiths and metal working in general was not as prevalent in China despite the fact that China actually had large scale steel production before Europeans.

Metal working is an important part of the story of the printing press, because metal types was an important invention. Metal types existed in China to some degree but they did not get made in the revolutionary way Gutenberg made them.

Some fairly large works were printed using movable type, famously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujin_Tushu_Jicheng

So I'm not sure the idea that printing never caught on is really correct. You'd need to do an exhaustive survey of every written work ever produced to check.

Also, the Gutenberg bible https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gutenberg_bible_Old_... seems to have had about 60×40 characters, amounting to thousands of individual dies to print a page. (And IIRC Gutenberg used a trick where he had multiple versions of the same character in different widths to create perfectly justified lines without any gaps.) The amount of metal dies required doesn't seem to be hugely different.

Also also, the Manchu ruling class had their own alphabetic script, as did various other ethnic minorities.

> The amount of metal dies required doesn't seem to be hugely different.

The number of dies you need for each page is different than the number of types of dies you need to print any arbitrary page.

If there's a character for 'war', how many copies do you need? It'll change greatly depending on the subject matter, of course. But how many 'w's, 'a's and 'r's per page won't change to nearly the same extent.

I've thought about this a fair bit and despite my initial conclusions I am no longer certain that the two alphabet styles are similar. It seems to me that ideagraphic systems have a tendency to evolve in a highly stratified society where it is useful to have knowledge of the symbols serve as ingroup signalling.

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