Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

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We like to think of Johannes Gutenberg as inventor of the printing press and movable type in 1450. Yet, the first movable type got invented in China around 1040 by Bi Sheng. The types were made from porcelain material. Later wooden movable types were developed...

on wikipedia if you look up "movable type" you see a big discussion of the earlier work in China and Korea before moving on to Gutenberg.

if you look up "printing press" you get the Gutenberg story only, including that Gutenberg discovered an alloy for his type that was so good it remained unchanged for hundreds of years.

conflating movable type with printing press is a big mistake for this type of analysis, and that's before getting to the out of the box simplicity of movable type for alphabets a few dozen characters long vs the vocabulary required for Chinese writing.

(I happened to look this up the other day just to get the date that mass printing started in Europe, and I started with movable type so I had already recently discovered all the above points)

I think Gutenberg was simply in the right place and the right time. His bible was still Catholic but he was living in a part of the world where Protestantism would soon kick off; powered by his re-discovered printing press and movable type.

His part of the world was a patch work of city states, small provinces, and kingdoms. Germany as a country simply did not exist at the time. Many of those states were fiercely independent and interdependent (trade).

And some of them were prospering and featured a growing middle class, trade, and relative freedom. So, he was in a place that was relatively literate (for the time) and entrepreneurial. The combination of people capable and free to express themselves and a new technology to do that at scale created a perfect storm of information and soon revolution.

Aside from the complexities of their written language and its many characters; China and Korea were basically very old empires at the time they invented movable type. Their societies were managed in a very hierarchical way. They had the means to spread information but only used it to spread officially sanctioned information. So, it did not really catch on to the same level that Gutenberg's press revolutionized (quite literally) Europe.

> They had the means to spread information but only used it to spread officially sanctioned information.

You're making this up. There was a robust tradition of scholar-bureaucrats printing whatever the hell they wanted (usually red-blooded tracts against the Emperor when he didn't toe the Confucian line). Travel literature was incredibly popular in late Ming China.

I doubt your average peasant was reading though.

Silly but genuine question: how to you use movable type without a printing press?

I mean, once you've arranged all your type onto a plate representing a page, what are you going to do with it except slap some ink on it and put paper against it? Is the difference that the Chinese just lay the paper manually over it rather than use a machine (the press) to do it?

Probably. Much like woodblock printing, which can be done with or without press.

Also a printing press would not lay the paper, it was "just" used to press said paper onto the type (which had been inked by hand).

You'd lay the type, then ink the type, lay paper on top (usually using a frame to ensure it's correctly positioned), move the assembly under the press then press it down.

Release the press, open the assembly, get the printed sheet out, repeat (minus laying the type).

That Gutenberg also invented movable metal type in europe, as well as a production process for reproducible quality metal type, are probably bigger factors than the press itself (though the separation of labor and mechanical efficiency of the press should not be discounted). But since he basically released the entire thing as a "movable-type printing system", the printing press is often used as a stand-in for the entire production process.

I think the answer is that you mostly didn't, because it was cheaper/better to just carve the whole page in wood, which then acts as it's own press, and was the widespread technique used in Europe for images and short text before people tried moveable type.

So it's kind of like, why didn't we use electric cars in the 1900s, the answer is we did, but since something else was cheaper/better at that moment given the context all the decades of industrial innovation happened around that model, until there was a reason to revisit it much later. I think the Chinese inventors were like those early electric car makers. Really smart inventors, but just missing some key supporting infrastructure or need. Just like printing in Europe was held back by lack of paper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodblock_printing#Impact_of_m...

> Is the difference that the Chinese just lay the paper manually over it rather than use a machine (the press) to do it?

Seems so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press

> European printing presses of around 1600 were capable of producing between 1,500[47] and 3,600 impressions per workday.[3] By comparison, Far Eastern printing, where the back of the paper was manually rubbed to the page,[48] did not exceed an output of forty pages per day.[4]

Wikipedia has some contrasting info in their woodblock printing article though:

> only Europeans who had never seen Chinese woodblock printing in action tended to dismiss it, perhaps due to the almost instantaneous arrival of both xylography and movable type in Europe. The early Jesuit missionaries of late 16th century China, for instance, had a similar distaste for wood based printing for very different reasons. These Jesuits found that "the cheapness and omnipresence of printing in China made the prevailing wood-based technology extremely disturbing, even dangerous."[42] Matteo Ricci made note of "the exceedingly large numbers of books in circulation here and the ridiculously low prices at which they are sold."[43] Two hundred years later the Englishman John Barrow, by way of the Macartney mission to Qing China, also remarked with some amazement that the printing industry was "as free as in England, and the profession of printing open to everyone."[42] The commercial success and profitability of woodblock printing was attested to by one British observer at the end of the nineteenth century, who noted that even before the arrival of western printing methods, the price of books and printed materials in China had already reached an astoundingly low price compared to what could be found in his home country

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodblock_printing#Impact_of_m...

Also interesting that the Korean moveable type was highly restricted, as mentioned elsewhere, so it's partly industrial technology and commerce but partly lack of censorship the Westerners are surprised by.

It's described in the article at least three times.

The actual Gutenberg museum, which I went to earlier this year, has a good selection of exhibits on Chinese and Korean movable type.

> conflating movable type with printing press is a big mistake for this type of analysis,

Innovation on the movable types was a key part of Gutenbergs system and creating the movable metal types was an inseparable part of the Gutenberg innovation. The article mentions a bit more than my short summary too.

I think the mistake actually is to separate them in your analysis of the analysis. To get a working product Gutenberg created an integrated package with both.

It specifically mentions the innovations in creating the movable metal types themselves under "Advantages of Gutenberg's Printing Technique". A much better metal alloy and a hand mold, allowing for much faster creation of new metal types than the Chinese alloy and technique.

but note that you can try printing without printing press. It is just order of magnitude (or two) worse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press

> European printing presses of around 1600 were capable of producing between 1,500[47] and 3,600 impressions per workday.[3] By comparison, Far Eastern printing, where the back of the paper was manually rubbed to the page,[48] did not exceed an output of forty pages per day.[4]

The point of the article is to describe the printing press as an advancement of the technology of movable type. It is also important to point out that the press was really just one of many components that made the Gutenberg approach superior to the techniques that existed in Asia at the time.

The press was not that big of a novelty. Described more in detail here: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/why-was-the-printing-pre...

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