The Printing Press The most important invention in history

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The Printing Press

• The most important invention in history

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We take for granted newspapers, magazines, CD
covers, books, television, greeting cards,
posters, and other printed material.
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None of the printed items we enjoy today would be
around without one man.
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Johann GutenbergThe inventor of the Printing
Pressin 1450
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The ways in which the printing press has affected
the world are too numerous to count.
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• Before the printing press in 1450, books were
  written out by hand, mainly by monks in
  monasteries.
• It could take one person six months or longer to
  write out a book, word for word and page by page.

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Text was scarce in medieval Europe. Books were
expensive to produce. If a book was to survive,
it had to be copied over and over, every
generation.
This is a page from Canterbury Tales by
Geoffrey Chaucer. It was handwritten about 1400.
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In about 1450, a man from a small German town
came up with a printing press. This press had
pieces of metal type that could be used over and
over again to print pages of text.
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• Johann Gutenberg took a wine press, transformed
  it into a printing press, and mixed oil and soap
  together to make ink.
• In 1456, he made 180 copies of the first printed
  book a Bible.

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• Only 49 copies of these Bibles survive today. The
  last time a Gutenberg Bible sold, it went for
  2.4 million.

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Moveable text meant that books could be quickly
printed and passed out to the average person to
read.Most people at the time were illiterate.
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Before the Printing Press, woodblock printing was
common. A sheet of paper was laid over an inked
piece of wood and an impression was taken by
rubbing. Gutenberg broke up the text into lower
and upper case letters and punctuation marks.
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Imagine what this knowledge meant to the common
people. Instead of having to take the churchs or
the kings word on something, they could learn to
read and form their own opinion.
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Communication changedthe world.

• Knowledge from the printed word meant that people
  could decide for themselves what should happen in
  their lives. The Printing Press helped begin the
  Renaissance all over Europe.

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The importance of Gutenbergs invention caused
him to be named the most influential person in
the past 1,000 years by the Biography Channel.